Materfamilias: Due Credit

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Due Credit

As much as it pains me to give my ~~bother~~ * brother credit for anything, particularly anything clever, it seems that I must.
I recently told him that the girls will soon read The Old Man and The Sea and he groaned in sympathy with their plight. He has just finished reading War and Peace (yep, the whole behemoth), so excessively long novels are fresh on his mind. My brother proposed that Old Man and the Sea is possibly Hemingway's version of Moby Dick. As if Hemmingway were saying, "Here you go, Melville, here is the same man vs. fish/nature, epic struggle, without the superfluous 900 pages. Concision my dear, Melville, concision."
My brother may be on to something. I think there is a literary paper in there somewhere.

* "your bother", was how my brother actually signed a birthday card to me when he was but a wee lad

1 comment:

Hailey RenéeNovember 13, 2010 at 7:15 AM
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Pretty Good

There once was a pretty good student,

Who sat in a pretty good class;
Who was taught by a pretty good teacher,
Who always let pretty good pass-

He wasn’t terrific at reading,
He wasn’t a whizbang at math;
But for him education was leading,
Straight down a pretty good path.

He didn’t find school too exciting,
But he wanted to do pretty well;
And he did have some trouble with writing,
and no one had taught him to spell.

When doing arithmatic problems,
Pretty good was regarded as fine-
5 plus 5 needn’t always add up to be 10
A pretty good answer was 9.

The pretty good class that he sat in
Was part of a pretty good school;
And the student was not the exception,
On the contrary, he was the rule.

The pretty good student, in fact, was
Part of a pretty good mob;
And the first time he knew that he lacked was
When he looked for a pretty good job.

It was then, when he sought a position,
He discovered that life could be tough-
And he soon had a sneaking suspicion,
Pretty good might not be good enough.

The pretty good town in our story
Was part of a pretty good state,
Which had pretty good aspirations,
And prayed for a pretty good fate.

There once was a pretty good nation,
Pretty proud of the greatness it had,
Which learned much too late, it you want to be great,
Pretty good is, in fact, pretty bad.

~Charles Osgood