Your Argument is Invalid

[nightdog_barks]

You know, I really think the correct response to someone shouting "UR MOM'S A WHORE" is not "Are you a homosexual?"*

Errands to run today, blah blah blah. Also started reading The Fry Chronicles last night, the second volume of Stephen Fry's autobiography. So far it is good, although for some reason the font size in the book is LARGE. And it's not even one of those "larger print for geezers like me" editions. Odd.


*I think my response would be a curt "Fuck you," but maybe that's just me.**
**Also, just to be clear, it is never okay to shout "UR MOM'S A WHORE." Not ever.

Comments

[armchair_elvis]

I haven't read the second volume yet, although I gave it to a friend when it first came out. There are some parts of Moab Is My Washpot that are really personal, almost poignant, and on a quick skim I think this one's more... showbiz-y?

I think it was reading Moab that made me a Fry fan, actually.

[nightdog_barks]

I remembered there was one passage from Moab that I absolutely loved, and Dreamwidth has such a lovely search function I was able to find it in a flash:

What I believed I was looking for I cannot say. I can only assert that, as in a novel, the locations with which this story climaxes are the same as the locations with which it begins. Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

So far Chronicles is not too show-biz-y, although he has talked about Tom Stoppard and some other people whose names I simply didn't recognize. He's sort of ... easing into the story of his life at Cambridge by recapping a bit of the end of Moab (i.e., the credit card thievery and the spell in prison).

I think I began to be a Fry fan after I saw him as the wonderfully, horrifically obnoxious Professor Mybug in Cold Comfort Farm. :-D

[armchair_elvis]

I knew I'd quoted from it on literaryquotes, so I went back to have a look. I love this one:

When August the twenty-fourth came round however, when it was my birthday, my eighteenth birthday, so Jo tells me, my mother was inconsolable all say, weeping and sobbing like a lost child, which is, I am afraid, how I am weeping as I type this. I am weeping for the shame, for the loss, the cruelty, the madness and again the shame and the shame and the shame. Weeping too for mothers everywhere, yesterday, today and tomorrow, who sit alone on the day of their child's birth not knowing where their beloved boy or their darling girl might be, who might be with them or what they might be doing. I am weeping too for grown-up children so lost to themselves and to hope that they squat in doorways, lie on beds, stare in stupors high or wired, or sit alone all eaten up with self-hate on their eighteenth birthday. I am weeping too for the death of adolescence, the death of childhood and the death of hope: there are never enough tears to mourn their passing.