A Philadelphia joke in "The Good Soldier" that I just got

October 8 2011, 9:38 AM  by Emily McManus

I've read The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford so many times, at least four, because it's on my phone and whenever I idly start reading it I can't stop, and yet I just saw this. The main character is a Philadelphian, and he writes this about his wife:

Florence was singularly expert as a guide to archaeological expeditions and there was nothing she liked so much as taking people round ruins and showing you the window from which some one looked down upon the murder of some one else. She only did it once; but she did it quite magnificently. She could find her way, with the sole help of Baedeker, as easily about any old monument as she could about any American city where the blocks are all square and the streets all numbered, so that you can go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to Thirtieth.

This is clearly about Philly because the blocks are all square and the streets are all numbered -- and because the narrator refers at another point to

the title deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks between Chestnut and Walnut Streets.

So the Philly he knows is Center City Philly. 

And you can't go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to Thirtieth there, because the Schuylkill River is in the way.

KA POW.

Cleaning my house today, I found three gorgeous old issues of the New Yorker from the summer of 1979. I bought them in San Francisco because Veronica Geng was reviewing film in these issues while Pauline Kael was on vacation. Honestly. Just flipping through them makes me feel adult. They're slightly larger than the modern NYer and the type is smaller and blotchier, and I found myself flipping through these elegant magazines the way people flip magazines in movies but never in real life, impatiently back to front. Flipping through, I found this astonishing casual item. Just imagine seeing this in 1979, in a summer issue of a magazine, unsigned as everything was.

Of course the New Yorker website has this bizarre capsule version of it (if you want to hurt yourself, btw, read the NYer capsule of "Love Trouble Is My Business") and I thought I ought to type it onto the internet in its entirety. Then I found that someone already had. (And that this person seems to be friends with someone I sort of know, which means I get to ask them next time I meet them about their reading of George W.S. Trow).

I re-paste the text here, rather than linking, only because there was one small typo in the other person's version.



Think about Country Time, a powdered lemonadelike product. The coming forward of Country Time has centered on a certain old man and hordes of eager children. Children starved for news of the past. For years, they ignored Grandpa. Tied him up in the barn. Laughed at his silly ways. But now, after reading Foxfire One through Five in their public elementary school, they crowd around, hoping he'll teach them how to make butter with a stick. There is a song, "Country Time, Country Time," etc. With this idea: Sometimes you're real thirsty, blah, blah, blah, and nothing seems to do what you need to have done with your thirst, blah, blah, blah, and what you want is something real that will satisfy your thirst like good old-fashioned lemonade. That's right -- the idea behind the Country Time powder-product commercial is that lemonade is a thing of the past. No one can get lemonade anymore. Only some rich people. Most people don't even remember lemonade anymore. Only Grandpa, who has been bound and gagged and dishonored all these years out in the desert, like the decrepit warrior in Star Wars, only Grandpa even remembers what it tastes like.

The rundown is like this: Lemonade died out when the Old Ones lost out to the Invaders. But some people with the knowledge of the Old Ones escaped to Mars, where they made a kind of synthetic lemonade, using materials available on Mars. It was a powder and became popular. In the meantime, life on Earth contracted. Now, in these recent days, adventurers from Mars, sensing our need, have travelled to earth with the powder. When the powder is given to certain of our remaining Old Ones, they are made happy and remember lemonade. The idea is persuasive. It cause you to forget that you can make lemonade any time you want by squeezing some lemons in some water and adding sugar. People don't know. They really don't know that you can make lemonade any time you want. That's right. Lemonade is still available. Right now. Any time you want. Lemons are everywhere. You can make lemonade right now if you want to. It's great. Lemonade is still totally within our capacities.

I'm trying to find an "obscure" book to recommend to a wide audience, but nothing I can think of is right. Either the book is already known among the kind of people who like that kind of book, so that I look dumb for thinking it's obscure to anyone, or it's so obscure that it actually wouldn't be liked by a wide audience, and I'd look either pretentious or utterly eccentric for recommending that people read, for instance, "Tales of a Rat-Hunting Man." It is a bit of a brainteaser. I could absolutely cop out by suggesting that this wide audience sit down and read "Moby-Dick," which is not obscure but which goes unread. I'll see if this particular cop-out is needed. Because part of the pressure on this assignment is that the assignment is not actually to recommend a book but to take part in a conversation about recommending a book, and fit into the conversation such that it will continue. This has never been my strong suit, keeping a conversation going.