http://www.pubarticles.com/art.....36591.html

You could always try Google Book Search.

Here's an example query searching for everything they've scanned between 1900 and 1930 with the word "ardith" in it:

http://www.google.com/search?q.....:6/22/1930

You could customise that and see how it goes.

Let us know if you find what you're looking for.

Clive James, man of many talents, roles and names to fame, admitted in an interview with Andrew Denton on 30 November 2009 that sometimes when he speaks he does not know what he is talking about.  Goodness, you can’t know the immense detail that is now available about all those things you’ve been taling about over your seven decades of living, can you, Clive?  Clive James has tried to absorb anything and everything that's new and has caught his fancy. He says that he can't abide hip-hop.  The motivation behind his huge body of work: essays, poems, books, inter alia--is partly, he says, his sense of responsibility that began in childhood.   He also has had a desire to: (a) use his time well and (b) experience the pleasures and fruits of solitude.  

James's literary and verbal artistry lies in his ability to seem both casual and careful on the one hand and erudite and more than just well-informed on the other.  He observes an imperfect world with acerbic off-handedness and humour.  He displays not only a formidable erudition but a giddy love of pop culture. So much of our culture, its history and its present, infuses James's prose and his wit blossoms when he is interviewed.

Writers, James emphasizes, often speak with a special pontificating voice. It’s integrated, judicious even in its doubts and purports to contain the distilled wisdom of a lifetime's experience.  Almost always though, he says, this voice of the writer is at odds with the personality from which it emerges.  “In my case the discrepancy is so glaring that even I can spot it,” he says engagingly with a proverbial twinkle in his eye.   He introduces one of his columns about the mess that exists in his study and on his desk with the following question: “Are we able to think clearly when surrounded by a mess? Chaos, he continues, is inherent in all our minds, even those of the great writers and thinkers?--Ron Price with thanks to:(1) “Denton: Elders,” 30 November 2009, ABC1, 8:00-8:30 p.m. and (2) several interviews and columns of Clive James available on the internet at his website.

It’s always a pleasure, Clive,
although I can’t say I’ve read
all your 30 books..there is too
much else which catches my

fancy, my mind and emotions

down the road of life: you too?

You said a good deal tonight
which pleased my sensory &
intellectual emporium...your
words about creativity & sex;
your comments about our wide-
wide world thrown off with an
insouciance and concern, with
a humour and seriousness as...
befits your life in the world of
erudition and our pop-culture..
entertaining the mass as you’ve
travelled your road during these
epochs, my age, contemporary,
Clive, just a little bit older and
so much more well-read: how

on earth did you do it, Clive?
How did you do it, Clive????

Is this all there is, Clive, this life?
Ah well, we can’t agree on every
line of thought, can we Clive????(1)

(1) my Bahá'í beliefs posit an afterlife. But whatever one believes, in the end, we are all in part at least--agnostics, since belief and knowledge are different things.

Ron Price
1 December 2009

(slightly updated for

Fiction Forum on: 16/4/'10)

——————————-

TESS

I first came across Thomas Hardy in grades 11 and 12 in Burlington Ontario. His novels The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D’Urbervilles were the novels we studied in those last two years at Burlington Central High School.  I was a good student, near the top of my class, but I remember finding Hardy: heavy, cumbersome, difficult reading, although nowhere near as difficult as the Shakespeare play we also studied each year. I did not come across Hardy again until some thirty years later in the early 1990s when I taught matriculation English at a technical and further education college in Perth Western Australia.  Again, it was Tess of the D’Urbervilles.  

And so it was, when I saw this novel brought to life by some of Britain’s best young acting talent, filmed in the U.K. in 2008 and shown on ABC11 this week, I could not help but reflect and so wrote this prose-poem.  Greek humanism and not Christian revelation, in the end, stands out in Hardy.  It is a road I would have gone down myself had I not discovered a new Flame-Voice and Its extreme solutions, a new prophet placed in Israel’s oven where the heat consumes everything but compassion.2-Ron Price with thanks to 1 ABC1 TV, Sunday 8:30, 11 April 2010 and 2Roger White, Occasions of Grace, George Ronald, Oxford, 1992, p.102 and p.97.

How could one forget your words:

happiness is but one occasional….

episode in a general drama of pain!

No wonder I found you ponderous at

the age of 16 when the oils of youth

were bulging out…seeking to grease

and light my life beyond that world

of sport, school, girls and endlessly

familiar stuff that was my life then.

Your reputation for extreme pessimism,

your pessimistic pantheism, precedence

of feeling over thought…..religious and

metaphysical uncertainties…a nostalgia

for the things of everyday, a longing for

lost faith, seeing change as superficial in

your world—its doomed stronghold of

ancient ways of life, morbid in a way, but

also sublimely compassionate: your many-

sided personality, Thomas, very attractive.

Your sense of dignity, of awe and a power

of endurance in a timeless universe: what a

grand and strange place which we glimpse

only momentarily through the accidents and

coincidences, the tragic fate and a series of

kicks on the long road, long haul to disaster:

no light at the end of your tunnel, eh, Thomas?

Ron Price

16 April 2010