Sinistral

[damoge]

David, surely that was Tom not Huck that was the con man, no?

[Philip Hudson]

Don't confuse Tom with Huck. Huck bids fair to be the great American novel while Tom was just a feckless hobbledehoy. My dear Granny Hudson felt that the sobriquet hobbledehoy was the appropriate appellation for many a young whippersnapper.

[David Myer]

Of course it was! Silly me. Can I plead old age? They were best mates, after all. It is 60 years since I read either of them. Are they worth re-visiting?

Philip, I thought a whippersnapper was one of those noisy tools for cutting the grass round the base of trees and on the edges that the mower can't reach. We call exuberant youngsters ankle-biters.

[Philip Hudson]

We call that tool a weed-eater here in the hinterlands. Huck needs a reread. I think you might see how it bids fair to be the great
American novel. No novel has yet won that title. I started to write it but got bogged down in trivia. Raintree County almost made it and if he had quit when he was ahead it would have. It falls apart toward the end. In contrast it is only at the end of Huck when his maturity is contrasted with Tom who never grew up, that the novel proves itself.

Ankle-biters is a good sobriquet for the little boogers. We call the very young ones rug rats.

[Dr. Goodword]

The right hand has traditionally been thought the, well, “right” hand and therefore the left hand must be the “wrong” hand.

[David Myer]

In Australia, well, the State of Victoria anyway, the Police until very recently drove round with their emblem emblazoned on their vehicles - including the motto: Tenez le droit. It always made me laugh because whilst it may mean "Uphold what is right", it may also be a reminder to drive on the right hand side of the road. We drive on the left here. I have laughed about it for years. Perhaps that's why they have dropped the emblem entirely from the vehicles.

[Dr. Goodword]

In my youth I dreamed of becoming the great American novelist (a position I consider John Grisham to hold now). I was an English major at the University of North Carolina and took the one creative writing course offered by the department. I also served on the editorial staff of the Carolina Quarterly.

I made my way through Ulysses and all the novels of Thomas Wolfe, written in what was essentially poetry ("stream of consciousness.") My freshman year was spent in Battle dorm down the hall from the room that Wolfe had lived in when he was there.

My friend, Graham Snyder and I, discovered Raintree County just before the 1957 movie came out (one star on Rotten Tomatoes), ourfreshmen year at UNC, yet we made our way through it, discussing our paths along the way. It was Ross Lockridge's only novel, a best-seller at the time, but thought "stream of consciousness" was a coming thing.

Back in those days we had no Internet, so it took us several months to find out that Lockeridge was no more: Raintree County was his one and only novel.

[David Myer]

Marvellous stuff, Dr Goodword. Do you have any of your own stream-of-consciousness work? Anything published? Ideally something shortish! (I always struggled with Ulysses.)

[Philip Hudson]

I agree that John Grisham is the best current American Novelist. Perhaps he has not written the great American novel yet. He is not uniformly good. To me "Camino Island" showed weakness and "Camino Winds" has the same weakness. I think "Playing for Pizza" is ridiculous and also out of his genre. I loved "A Painted House". "The Last Juror" is a favorite of mine. I have read almost all his books.