Topical Guide 187
Mark Dorset
Boredom versus Occupation or Busyness
LARRY WAS NEVER BORED. That is, he was never bored within the books. I knew from experience that everyone my age was bored for a significant amount of time every day. …
Not only was Larry never bored within the books, but he was always busy. He was always working on one project or another, and taking the trash out was never one of them.Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. It gives him perfect economic freedom; he’s free of fear and hunger; he has a roof over his head and nothing whatever to do except keep a few simple accounts and to go once every month and pay off the local police. The place is quiet during the morning hours, which is the best time of the day to work. There’s enough social life in the evening, if he wishes to participate, to keep him from being bored; it gives him a certain standing in his society; he has nothing to do because the madam keeps the books; all the inmates of the house are females and would defer to him and call him “sir.” All the bootleggers in the neighborhood would call him “sir.”
William Faulkner, in a Paris Review interview
The trawler, wallowing like a black hippo among swans, had an arrangement of rusted iron bedsprings attached to her bows. She looked as if she had sailed the China Seas. For all that, I liked her better than the prissy white boats moored about her. Some of them had net curtains, and one had a painting hanging in the wheelhouse of an elephant on the rampage. The trawler is owned by Jack Pallot and his son, Chris. They fish in her all the year round but in August they concentrate on clams. Jack and I had an interesting chat about clams, though they themselves spend uneventful lives in the mud at the bottom of the river. How they got here [in the Solent River] in the first place is curious. They were taken on board in New York, in the days of the ocean liners, to be served up in the restaurants. When the ships returned to Southampton and the kitchens were cleaned out ready for the next voyage, the left-over clams were dumped from the portholes. They were onIy discovered ten years ago. A new power-house was built further up the SoIent and Jack believes that the heating up of the water deluded the clams into thinking this was Florida. The clam’s shell is kept shut by adductor muscles. You have to use a knife to prise one open. In season the muscles relax to allow ova and sperm to shoot into the water. The bits of jelly float to the surface and in fourteen days the shell has formed. Then it sinks to the bottom, buries itself in mud for five years, and dies, possibly from boredom.
Beryl Bainbridge, English Journey, or the Road to Milton Keynes
Adventures of Larry Peters, The
If Larry never sang or danced or played the clarinet or baked a soufflé or cast sculpture in bronze or flew an airplane, it wasn’t because he couldn’t, it was simply because he didn’t feel like it or because the occasion for doing so hadn’t yet arisen in one of his adventures. In fact, I now recall that he did bake a soufflé and fly an airplane in The Aerobatic Sous-Chef.
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
I’m currently listening to Craig Taylor’s New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time during my morning workout, and I’m enjoying it very much, particularly the exploits, activities, pursuits, and pastimes of individual New Yorkers, narrated in their own words (though read by actors, I think). I recommend that you save Taylor’s introductory matter for later and jump right into Chapter 1, where the personal accounts begin. Later, you can turn to the introductory stuff as an afterword and learn how the book came to be.
[more to come on Thursday, February 3, 2022]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.