No, I'm not dead,

sorry to disappoint. I am in Spokane working for King Marketing selling Comcast door to door (or trying to).


A couple of commonplaces from Alias Shakespeare, a very convincing book positing Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford as the real Willem Shakespere:

"...that last infirmary of ignoble minds, respectability..."

"In the absence of verifiable data, speculation flourishes, biography (like nature) abhorring a vacuum."
Schoenbaum


and from Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

(On the profligacy of nature) "This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital."

"The whole creation is one lunatic fringe... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe."

"We are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus."

"Van Gogh found nerve to call the world 'a study that didn't come off,' but I'm not so sure. Where do I get my standards that I fancy the fixed world of insects doesn't meet? I'm tired of reading; I pick up a book and learn that 'pieces of the leech's body can also swim.' Take a deep breath, Elijah: light your pile. Van Gogh is utterly dead; the world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty."


some Hopkins:

"I caught this morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon..."

"All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him."

"These things, these things were here, and but the beholder
Wanting..."

"...not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet."

"...Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep."

"I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day..."

then read Carrion Comfort, and to end Hopkins on a slightly less depressing note:

"We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood
Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood..."


Finally, Dunnett (as is appropriate for the reader of my blog),

"So where has he gone?" Gelis asked.
"There are several possible places," Nicholas said, "if my prayers have been listened to..."

"And by night, to lie at your side, so that I may give her my love, my dear love, ki mon cuer et mon cors a..."

Guds frida veri med ydr.

jb