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Nothing on Friday...snow day in NY...the great blizzard Nemo of 2013!

“P.G. Wodehouse: The Honorable Schollboy”

Hitchens' review of Robert McCrum’s biography Wodehouse: A Life. Hitchens walks through the forces that influenced Wodehouse through his life: inattentive parents leading to his time spent “downstairs” with servants and at all male boarding schools, having the mumps as a child leading to his nearly complete asexuality as an adult, his time spent in Nazi occupied France and later deported to an asylum in Poland (in the same region as Auschwitz, although the camp was not up and running during Wodehouse’s stay). Most interesting is that Wodehouse spend most of his pre and post-war time in the US in Hollywood and New York. Hitchen’s summarizes his feelings about Wodehouse in his closing sentences, : His attention to language, his near faultless ability to come up with names that are at once ludicrous and credible, and the intricacy of his plotting are imperishable. Unlike Wilde, though, he put his genius into his work, not his life.”

Wodehouse was known as both a great satirist and as a “bloody fool” who was “duped into” some sort of Nazi collaboration. This quote from his time interred in Poland,”Tost is no beauty spot. It lies in the heart of sugar-beet country…. There is a flat dullness about the country side which has led many a visitor to say, ‘If this is Upper Silesia, what must Lower Silesia be like?’ ”

Of course, “Lower Silesia” turns out later to be a death camp.

New learning: One English group of Wodehouse admirers publishes a quarterly called Wooster Sauce, after the character Bertie Wooster from the Jeeves novels.

New word: Heliotrope = purple color similar to the heliotrope flower.

Cool blog from Heliotrope Architects of Seattle , WA:

http://heliotropearchitects.tumblr.com/