Overheard Talk By The Devil -- down the street from the agent

"I removed the old soul. It was worn."

Overheard Talk By An Agent

"You can only wear that if you are sitting at Lake Como, in a deck chair, sipping a glass of Pinot Greej."

Current favorite song lyrics to a song I haven't heard

Artist: Art Brut
Song: Mysterious Bruises

I've had one Zirtec, two Advil
With the drink that made me feel invincible

I don't know how I managed to do this
But I woke up this morning covered in bruises

I only dance to songs I like
So I was sat down most the night

I don't know how I managed to do this
I woke up this morning covered in bruises
Hahahaha

I found a bruise on my arm, one on my knee
I can feel some more in a place I can't see

Is this a new bruise, or has it been there forever?
When did I do it, I can't remember

Can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won
I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won
I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won
I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won

I don't know how I managed to do this
But I woke up this morning covered in bruises

I'd finally decided to tell you how I felt
I mistakenly thought that the drink would help

I don't know what happened
The planets weren't aligned

I kept giving you a wink
You kept missing the sign

I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won
I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won
I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won
I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won

I finally managed to unravel the plot
It's not a happy ending, but it's the best that I've got

I woke up this morning covered in bruises
One Zirtec, two Advil are gonna get me through this

I finally managed to unravel the plot
It's not the happiest of endings, but it's the best that I've got

I finally managed to unravel the plot
It's not a happy ending, but it's the best that I've got

I had one Zirtec, two Advil
With the drink that made me feel invincible

I had one Zirtec, two Advil
Then I bounced around, just like a pinball

I had one Zirtec, two Advil
With the drink that made me feel invincible

I had one Zirtec, two Advil
Then I bounced around, just like a pinball

Alan Ayckbourn describes symptoms of his stroke

“A very nice doctor came in and said, ‘Are you aware that when you say yes, you’re saying no?’ ” Mr. Ayckbourn recalled, speaking by telephone from the house he shares with his wife in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. “I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘I don’t think this conversation can continue.’ ”

from the NY Times 4/22/09

J.G. Ballard has died.

http://www.tomorrowmuseum.com/2009/04/19/jg-ballard-our-greatest-living-novelist-is-no-longer/

The song of the day has changed to no song.

Song of the Day

"Sparkle and Shine" -- Steve Earle

Last night's dream

I was in a very dark place, large and open like a warehouse. Although it also seemed it could have been my house, as at times I thought my cat and son could be there among the many people. It was pitch dark. I couldn't see anything. One, then maybe more, animals attached my feet, latched on to my and bit me, with sharp teeth. Rats? A cat or opposum? I couldn't tell, but it and/or they were fierce and kept at it and it hurt. I was panicking as the attack(s) increased, and was trying to call out "Help" and "Ow!" but my voice was for some reason only a very low whisper. I couldn't see the animals, couldn't kick them off, couldn't knock them off with my hands, though I was afraid to try to use my hands, afraid that the attack would escalate to my hands and the rest of me if I exposed my hands to the animals.

Stout Hearted Man

Samuel Beckett on the type of encouragement offered by his family, and why he might not have "bother[ed] his arse to move" to Paris even if he had the money:

"Here at home they encourage my endeavours to build myself up on stout, and I feel that for stout my world is better lost than for Lib., Egal., and Frat., and quarts de Vittal. They don't say anyhting about my getting a job and I begin to be impervious to their inquietude."

from a letter to Thomas McGreevy, May 13, 1933.

Tristan takes the measure of Big Dap

". . . Tristan took the opportunity to give him a good once-over; Big Dap not so big in private, a little taller than him, a lot heavier, but his body was peanut-shaped, pear-shaped, some kind of food-shaped, and he was ugly, stubble-haired with slit eyes under a heavy brow and a sour mouth like a small MacDonald's arch."

from Lush Life, by Richard Price.

From the Song of the Day

"There is a crack, a crack in everything.
It's how the light gets in."

from "Anthem" by Leonard Cohen

Unfortunate Choice of Words By A Professional

Radio reporter Annie Murphy, reporting on the hunger strike being staged by President Evo Morales of Bolivia:

"It's his way of showing how fed up he is."


On the PRI radio show "The World" April 10, 2009

Every novel's story

"Yet I had felt from childhood that I -- that I was different -- I mean that I was not like other children my age . . . . I was like something rounded, made of rubber: you throw it in the water and it doesn't get wet, you throw it on the ground and it bounces back."

Season of Migration To The North -- Tayeb Salih (tr. Denys Johnson-Davies).

Disorder

The moral, aside from the obvious one about hubris, that de Segur draws from Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign: "Disorder, the most contagious of all diseases, spread among them, for it would seem that order is an exertion against nature."

Nicely modulated sympathy and judgment

from a book with many nice long sentences:

He remembered the familiar landscape better than the conversation. He remembered that Liza Hatter had begun to talk, and that he had begun not to listen, because to listen, to really pay attention, would have to become that other self, the one that smiled and nodded, the one that seemed to be on loan to someone else, the one that completed his four years of college education, the one that for years to please his parents and succeeded very well in doing so, the one that had made him popular, admired, and envied by virtually everyone he'd been around every day for the last half-dozen years, so that he felt a huge chunk of his life had been used up by this other self on loan to these other people, answering their demands, giving pleasantry for pleasantry, joke for joke, sage advice for the asking, while the self he wanted to be and felt most comfortable with, the self that thought and acted boldly, erratically, somewhat dangerously on certain occasions, was a private self that had not got all it asked for, ever, and could seldom go about its business unhindered, and it was that self, there in the car, that tried to shake loose from Liza Hatter's conversation, sought escape through the windows into the woods and the wheat fields, the fireworks stands and the casinos on the reservations, the dusty streets and violent taverns of the reservation towns themselves, and then later, after it had turned dark, into a little game that this self liked to play, and in which Liza Hatter had joined to the best of Tristan's recollection, a game that involved leaving the brights in and drinking from a whiskey bottle, kept always under the seat for this purpose, each time another driver on the lonely highway flashed them, which was often enough that Tristan felt fairly dizzy by the time they pulled off the highway and onto the road to the lake house.

from The Dart League King, by Keith Lee Morris

A man's man, but not at six a.m.

This is how to begin a novel. Note particularly how expressive the protagonist's growls and grunts are.

The jangling of the phone was an angry intrusion. Jack Galleon sat up in bed, looked at the electric clock on his night table. Six o'clock in the morning.

"What the hell!" he grunted. The phone kept up its persistent jangling.

"He jerked the receiver off the rest bar. " "Hello!" he growled into the mouthpiece.

"Mr. Jack Galleon?" A woman's voice, low and throaty.

"At any other time I'd be interested," Galleon said. "But it's six o'clock. In the morning. Call me in the afternoon, sweetheart."

"I'm not your sweetheart, Mr. Galleon, " she said, her voice higher. "I need help."

from the book by Arnold Marmor, entitled either "Case of the Eager Nymphs" or "Trollop Trail" (1963). My copy uses both titles.

The Next Poem

Bruises
can also be
clueses.

(from the "Murder of Ogden Nash: A Mystery In Rhyme." This is a work that no one has written.)