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- #Which dire straits album is douglas adams talking about full#
- #Which dire straits album is douglas adams talking about series#
The suit into which the man’s body had been stuffed looked as if its only purpose in life was to demonstrate how difficult it was to get this sort of body into a suit. In fact he was built the way one builds leather sofas, shiny, lumpy and with lots of stuffing. The owner was not hard to spot, on account of his being something of the order of seven feet tall and not slightly built with it.
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He slid gracelessly off his seat and peered upwards to see if he could spot the owner of this discourteous hand. Is this Adams or Wodehouse, for instance?
#Which dire straits album is douglas adams talking about full#
With Douglas it was the other way around.* 116ĭouglas’s style-funny, fluid, conversational and full of amusing tropes and inventive images-is clearly influenced by Plum.
#Which dire straits album is douglas adams talking about series#
Unlike Douglas, however, he loved composition and regarded life as a regrettable series of interruptions to writing. Plum, as Wodehouse was known to his friends, only promoted his text to his eye-line when it was perfect. Wodehouse (to whom Douglas’s work often pays homage) had the same gift he would polish and polish his prose, pinning his pages of text to the wall of his study and editing them vertically so that gradually the pages moved higher as they improved. His ear was acute, and this is something particularly important in comic writing when a clumsy word can drain the humour from a sentence. He felt the rhythm of words, the lilt of a well-tuned phrase. When a sentence can only be read in a single breath if you happen to be a skin-diver or an orchestral flautist, it’s too long.ĭouglas Adams understood this deeply. One of the traditional correctives for this nasty literary complaint is to read aloud what you’ve written.
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It’s the kind of prose that is all too easy to write, but painful to read. Writers often worry that they are losing control of their prose, and are just letting it ramble on and on, with lots of proliferating subordinate clauses, like that one, which take on a momentum of their own, so by the time the readers have laboured to the end of a sentence, the main verb-a locomotive pulling a great train of carriages along the rails of grammar-has been quite forgotten. This chap, he observed, can construct a perfectly grammatical and efficient sentence, but he just doesn’t hear the music.ĭouglas heard the music. Instead he wrote something that has such profound relevance to publishing then as now that it should be carved on every editor’s desk in 72-point Arial Bold.
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Publishers were pretty shameless, even in the era of urbane gentlemen who thought it bad form to poach each other’s authors.Ĭhandler wrote back a wonderful letter about life in California, the perils of alcohol and the state of his marriage. He once wrote to Chandler asking for a pre-publication quote for a book that Hamish Hamilton was about to publish. Hamish Hamilton, the publisher, used to count Raymond Chandler among his friends and authors, two categories of humankind then more likely to overlap than in the current era of corporate media cartels. “When I hear Mozart, I understand what it is to be a human being when I hear Beethoven, I understand what it is to be Beethoven but when I listen to Bach, I understand what it is to be the universe.”ĭ OUGLAS A DAMS, on BBC’s R ADIO F OUR, Private Passions