Word: griff
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Twitchedy, twatchedy, flippedy, flappedy, flong your own thong tong, snickety poo. Griff, graff, gobble, gobble, ghrrr, gar, gorrr, goo goo goo. Wap, wap, flaptrap, wonk wonk weee. Zap, zap, backtrack, zonk zonk zeee. Wish I may, wish I might have the wish I wish tonight...
...DESIRING, by Menno Gallie (192 pp.; Harper; $3.50) is a sort of border ballad about the frontier between England and Wales. Few Americans think of that line as much of a barrier, but to Griff Rowlands, a hymn-singing Welshman from a valley full of coal tips and chapels, it is booby-trapped with social snares and moral menace. At 24, he gets an appointment as assistant lecturer in mathematics at one of the new raw "red brick" universities in the English provinces. Starting writh this subject matter, Menna Gallie's brisk, garrulous and altogether charming novel serves...
...Hero Griff (Gryffydd) seems at first blink to be just another Lucky Jim type of intellectual spiv-on-the-make. He even makes faces at himself like his famous prototype and is obsessively concerned with the impression he produces in important people (it is usually unfortunate: he wears his first dinner jacket to a cocktail party). But this novel tells not of successful spivery but of a village innocence doggedly preserved amid fleshpots and sophistries-although the fleshpots are rather lean and the sophistries baffling only to Griff, the simple mathematician. Lydia Kilmartin, Eng. Lit., "smashing figure," is probably...
This common type of aggressive intellectual tease is new to Griff, but he is happily prepared to be teased-until she goes too far. In a lecture, "Religion or Eroticism," Lydia indulges in pseudo-Freudian persiflage on all Griff's favorite hymns. "Bloody blasphemous cow," he thinks, and tells her off in strong valley language. It is a compelling story so far-both gay and dismal. But Novelist Gallic will not let Griff welsh on his Welsh-ness : she wants him to win. In the end, the stage seems set for a true marriage of mathematics and letters...