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| The Professorial Suit |
Today I am wearing the professorial suit because I have been professorial all day - writing and writing and writing, which is as exhausting as it is exhilarating (well something like that). But I was thinking about probabilities and how language works for and against us. Richard Ellmann's biography of James Joyce tells several amusing anecdotes of life at the Tower; among them is this account of Joyce and Gogarty strolling the shore on their usual search for money and an opportunity for wit. One day they saw Yeats's father, John Butler Yeats, walking on the strand, and Gogarty, prodded by Joyce, said to him, "Good morning, Mr. Yeats, would you be so good as to lend us two shillings?" The old man looked from one to the other and retorted, "Certainly not. In the first place I have no money, and if I had it and lent it to you, you and your friend would spend it on drink." Joyce came forward and said gravely, as Gogarty afterwards recalled, "We cannot speak about that which is not." Exactly, why indeed should Joyce confirm the expectations of a man who was not going to indulge them in the first place? Sometimes writing about writing for children is like that - as adults we ask questions of children which we have no right to receive answers to and thus assume they don't have an answer to give, when perhaps they just don't care to give one unless we ask the question the right way. If I gave you a fiver i suspect you would just spend it on drink, hmm? Well give me one first and I'll tell you (maybe). But as you will have realised, all this is just pissing in a pond in trying to get it out of my head... for tonight there will be a full moon over Joyce's Tower and we also know who it brings - ah hooo - I'd like to meet his tailor!
