Maclagen and I would spend many afternoons in her bedroom after school. She, bundled in bed surrounded by pillows, under a slew of blankets, tutored me in English grammar, an exam subject of which I was afraid of failing. I would sit at the end of the bed with a notebook and an English grammar textbook that is lost to memory. Maclagen taught me that grammar was much greater than the complex rules governing how words must be specifically combined into larger units. She taught that like a locksmith mastering the specifics and rules of gears and levers, you could unpick the meaningful relations of language and open texts to interpretation and the beauty of linguistic expression. I didn’t realise it quite like that then. Earlier, you wrote about “anatomical ignorance” and how, for us hung up and over in the colonial hinterland of Natal, France was sex. This recalled for me a commentary by a fashion writer about 20th century “culture”, as reflected in the fashion magazines, most notably (and perhaps exclusively) in Vogue. This “culture” was almost exclusively rich, thin, and white. In England it was “Sloan blondes with big hair and big shoulder pads”; in the USA, it was famous socialites “with recognisable surnames” in sprawling clapboard houses on the Maine coast; and in Paris (never France – just Paris), it was most of the above, “just with nipples and cigarettes”. For some reason, France – always Paris – was the redlight district of our mentality. An illusion that, in real life, was as mundane and dull as the eponymous districts in Amsterdam and Frankfurt proved to be. And the reason Maclagen allowed me into her bedroom all those chaste years ago was because I had read Collete. How Maclagen knew this, I don’t know, but she quizzed me on it before inviting me.
Maclagen and I would spend many afternoons in her bedroom after school. She, bundled in bed surrounded by pillows, under a slew of blankets, tutored me in English grammar, an exam subject of which I was afraid of failing. I would sit at the end of the bed with a notebook and an English grammar textbook that is lost to memory. Maclagen taught me that grammar was much greater than the complex rules governing how words must be specifically combined into larger units. She taught that like a locksmith mastering the specifics and rules of gears and levers, you could unpick the meaningful relations of language and open texts to interpretation and the beauty of linguistic expression. I didn’t realise it quite like that then. Earlier, you wrote about “anatomical ignorance” and how, for us hung up and over in the colonial hinterland of Natal, France was sex. This recalled for me a commentary by a fashion writer about 20th century “culture”, as reflected in the fashion magazines, most notably (and perhaps exclusively) in Vogue. This “culture” was almost exclusively rich, thin, and white. In England it was “Sloan blondes with big hair and big shoulder pads”; in the USA, it was famous socialites “with recognisable surnames” in sprawling clapboard houses on the Maine coast; and in Paris (never France – just Paris), it was most of the above, “just with nipples and cigarettes”. For some reason, France – always Paris – was the redlight district of our mentality. An illusion that, in real life, was as mundane and dull as the eponymous districts in Amsterdam and Frankfurt proved to be. And the reason Maclagen allowed me into her bedroom all those chaste years ago was because I had read Collete. How Maclagen knew this, I don’t know, but she quizzed me on it before inviting me.