Wow, I was being quite dilligent about keeping up this diary back in the olden days.
Thoughts about “A little dignity”—How did Phillotson become the man he is? What trigger the bressedown, I think something here is a façade, but what? Is, the dignified Phillotson rool on is the comical)? Why not lead the reader to the unexpected? Why not lead the reader into believing that Phillotson’s dignity is a façade he threw up after some tragedy (his wife perhaps?) but then pull the rug out from under them by revealing that the voices and such are the façade. The question is—how?
This refers to a story idea I’d had percolating after one of my English professors, the late Richard Fadem of Scripps College, had at some point done a bit of a comical reading from one of the books we were reading, which was a dramatic break from his normal classroom persona (he was a professor who always wore a coat and tie to class and had an office that looked like a Hollywood set of an English professor’s office: furnished in antique dark oak with Victorian leatherbound editions of classic literature on the shelves. He may have even had a bust of Shakespeare or Dickens.
My ideas about what to do with the story are pretty incoherent. I had to use the Google to find out where I borrowed the name Phillotson from (Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure), but the promising thing here was that I was thinking more about character than theme or plot here.
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