July 7, 2005

Friendly fire

This is my family's idea of a Christmas celebration: everyone sitting in separate corners of the living room with their noses in books, the silence punctuated by the occasional, "Will you ever be done with that one?" or "What shall we drink next?" We love each other, and we love even more to express it with ridicule. Especial favorites include two-way gang-ups on our mother, who seems to enjoy a good-natured slagging so much she'll set herself up days in advance when we're still long distance.

It appears my Patrick O'Brian comments of yesterday didn't go over so well. Email reply from sister:

You keep harping on this thing about Patrick O'Brian being nautically inept, as though that detracted from rather than adding to his genius. Does that make Charlotte Bronte a fraud for never having tempestuous relations with a brooding foundling, or Nabokov less of a master for being totally innocent of pedophilia? Anyway, my crush is on Stephen Maturin, not Jack Aubrey, and there's nothing at all secret about it.

Email reply from mother:

Sure, Patrick O'Brian couldn't sail, and didn't know the sharp end of a boat from the blunt end, nor was he a particularly charming person; but he sure could write (OK, not your genre). So long as nobody tries to make him Pope, who cares? He was good at what he did. The trouble with celebrity these days is that everything about one's personal life is potentially discoverable; we hold the famous to a much higher standard of conduct than our own, and are constantly disappointed to discover their clay feet. So hard to type with one hand, the other holding the cat's feet out of the way so I can see the keyboard.

Then a voicemail message from my brother, who is entirely uninvolved in the O'Brian debacle: "Char, you suck. I'm going to Columbia."

posted by Charlotte at 11:23 AM | permalink | email it |

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