I like good food, good books, and rubber ducks

[Patito de Hule]

I just joined to offer a silly answer to a good question I happened to see. After eating, I like to read and float my rubber ducky. Professionally, I used to be an econometrist and statistician, but never a writer. My dad tried his hand at that, but really he was just a reader too.

I'm not very adroit at writing about literature--heck, I can barely read some of the big words I see. You know, words like sesquipedalian. I do get fascinated with usage of words like I ran into yesterday--Virginia abolitionist! Never had seen it before, but I ran into it twice meaning a slaveholder who says (said?) he's opposed to slavery. Shades of Thomas Jefferson.

My greatest love is reading books of a bygone era, and then ruminating on the biography of the author and the historical surroundings of his work. Of course that means reading a lot of non-fiction, especially history. Lately I've been reading books about Reconstruction. Thomas Dixon, The Clansman (1906), for example, and Albion Tourgee's A Fool's Errand: by one of the Fools. If I can find a sub-forum here where that kind of post is apropos, maybe I'll hang around beyond my first two posts here.

I also like books like Chinhua Achebe's Things Fall Apart or Ben Okri's The Famished Road for their cultural insights to obscure (to an American) cultures. Likewise Bapsi Siddhwa's Crow Eaters with its insights to the Parsis and their religion. I also loved the word play with character's names like Jungalwala (Gujarati for lumberman), Chaiwala (tea merchant), Toddiwala (liquor merchant), and Bankiwala (banker). Of course they all had each other's occupation. (Have you ever considered the number of Patels who run motels in the United States? I wonder if they were related to the Patels in the Harry Potter novel.)

I tend to love controversy and debate without rancor. I have a tendency to argue a point, then abruptly switch sides because there seems to be more disagreement that way. Tends to keep people on their toes. I also tend to get fascinated by word play. For example, how many meanings can a word like "pass" have? "Pass out" has one meaning when transitive and another when intransitive.

Long intro, but now I've foreshadowed what kind of rambling ruminations I'm likely to post.

Love,
Rubber Ducky

[Patito de Hule]

Do I get to reply to myself too?