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Julianne Werlin's avatar

I love this! You would be amazing as an editor of a volume of literary anecdotes reproducing the original texts. Goldsmith's reputation among the Johnson circle is a running joke between me and my husband, because how cutthroat and brilliant does a coterie need to be to depict Goldsmith--GOLDSMITH--as its dunce? In any other circle he'd be a star--one of the most charming writers of the age.

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Henry Oliver's avatar

Ah thank you :) haha yes indeed. I think what I like most about this passage is that Boswell feels himself to be the dunce and by writing like this about Goldsmith, he is doing to Goldsmith what Goldsmith did to Johnson

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Allie's avatar

Wonderful stuff! The enforced brevity of the consumptive suits you... Or maybe the heat makes reading more than a handful of paragraphs difficult.

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Henry Oliver's avatar

new 500 word limit on all pieces!

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Allie's avatar

I hesitate to 'like' that reply because - please no! Get well soon and keep those paragraphs coming.

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David Roberts's avatar

You would appreciate this bit of literary trivia. The grocer in both Madame Bovary and in Swann's Way is called Camus. I assume Proust used the same name because he had read MB.

Feel better!

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Henry Oliver's avatar

oh yes I do enjoy that thanks :)

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Larisa Rimerman's avatar

...I am dying, perhaps... You frighten us, your admirers, to death! And I love Lydia Davis. beside her smart micro-fiction, she translated the long Madame Bovary...Get well soon!

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Henry Oliver's avatar

Haha my wife says I predict my death so often she stops noticing. Oh isn’t that Bovary translation superb?

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Larisa Rimerman's avatar

A woman is always right. Don't play with "death." (It's an old woman talking.) I haven't read D.'s translation yet, but I believe you, or why translate a famous author who has been translated so many times already?

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AbigailAmpersand's avatar

Man flu. Like a cross between Mimi from La Bohème and Keats in Rome.

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Henry Oliver's avatar

hey this is real flu, Mimi got nothing on this

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nanthonisen's avatar

That's hilarious! I read the first few sentences of your opening remarks ("I am ill, dying perhaps, with a violent cold, ... etc.), thinking it was a quote from Boswell. Indeed, if you excised the bit about the Shakespeare book club, it could've passed as such! Keep up the good work!

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Henry Oliver's avatar

haha thanks, one day I will simply become Johnson

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