“EMPTY AWAY” by James McCarty Yeager



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“Crescamus in Litus”

EMPTY AWAY

A Novel of University Life,

by James McCarty Yeager,

copyright 2000-9

"It is not things, but men's opinions about things, that trouble men's minds."

-Epictetus

“…your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”

-Joel 2:28

“What should certainly be protested against, in cases where there is no authorisation, is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that.”

-Thomas Hardy

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE - COMPOSITION OF PLACE 5

CHAPTER TWO – STUDENT SUPINITY 7

CHAPTER THREE – IN THE DINING ROOM OF SHADE HALL 12

CHAPTER 4 – The Tale of the Board and the Bulletin Board 19

CHAPTER 5 – Annoy Cometh in the Morning 23

CHAPTER 6 – STOMPING GROUNDS 26

CHAPTER 8 - Before Rehearsal, in the Dining Room of Shadwell Hall 28

CHAPTER NINE – The Opening Rehearsal 30

Measure for Measure Schema 31

With extraeneous verbiage suitable for stripmining 31

CHAPTER 12 - Dormitory Daring 35

CHAPTER 17 – An Ecclesiastical Feuilleton Left Lying About in the Pews of the Student Chapel 38

CHAPTER 10 - THE LETTER IN THE NOTEBOOK 40

CHAPTER 30 – An Embarrassment 41

CHAPTER 39 – A Theologian’s Folly 42

CHAPTER 23 – In the Little House 43

CHAPTER 19 – Parked In the Galago Outside Fossanuova Hall with Blue Jean 44

CHAPTER 40 – Arbitrary Squelchage 45

[from the Official State History of East Coahuila entry on Harrasville] 46

WWI lecture…. 47

CHAPTER 15 – AT HAZARD STREET 48

Chapter 27 – Sermon 49

Dream sequence on the RR 55

Ordure of the Chapitres 55

WHEN THE TRAIN PULLED IN THE STATION 56

DRAMATIS PERSONAE 56

BUILD THESE SETS: 57

THE FLOW 57

SOME SCENES 58

On Campus 60

Classrooms 60

Monuments & Statues 60

School Colours 60

Administration 60

Academic 60

Residences 61

Class List 61

NOMINAE CHARACTORII 64

Professoriat 65

JOINTS & BIDNESSES 67

Alcool 67

Stockbrokers, Medical, Law, Accounting & Consulting Firms 68

Industries 68

Bands 68

Families, Clans, Factions and Parties: 70

Parishes 70

Schools 70

NOMINAE GEOGRAPHIA 72

Countries 72

Features 72

Streets 72

Politics 74

254/254 County Names 74

States 76

Municipalities 77

Artistes (dec’d) 77

des oeuvres literaires 78

INSTITUTIONII 78

Noosepipers: 78

Ships 79

Railroads 80

Automobiles 81

Prescriptions 82

LOOSE PHRASES 83

troilus v cressedy 93

Epistle Prefatory, Dedicatory, and Expository 94

Scraps & Leftovers 96

Cryptic Massage Company 96

is this a potential plot point or what? 100

This Is Dedicated To The Ones I Love 103

Literary 104

Clowns, Jongleurs, Tregetours 104

Zeitgeististical Collocation 105

And a Tip o’ th’ Fiduciary Fedora to 105

magnificat 106

CHAPTER ONE - COMPOSITION OF PLACE

In the excessively fairy-tale State of East Coahuila, not far from a tepid seaside on a spit of land between Mule Bayou and Howe's Bayou in the industrial, languorous port city of Harrassville, stands a series of one-and two-story buildings bearing the uplifting designation of Sanctas Esclavos University. The University was the work of an obscure order of priests called the Travertines, self-exiled by their doctrinal rigidity from Europe in the 19th century (while still in mourning for the soothing dogmatic inflexibilities of Pope Septimus VII,) barely maintaining an existence in the Federated Columban Nation in the 21st. They named their University after a particularly grisly set of coastal colonial-era martyrs distinguished solely by their having been native rather than European corpses. The newer campus buildings were exposed-steel-beam-and-fossil-limestone-slab confections by Davie Lennox, the elderly tyrant still celebrated as most famous homosexual architect in our great Nation. The older buildings were converted domestic one-story balloon-frame vernacular-architecture houses. That Sanctas Esclavos University existed in that time and place was as much an historical accident as the steps through which the University's founding President, Fr. Tontino Alaouest, OT, had hired Lennox in a fit of enthusiasm that long preceded, though it could not not elude, the revelation of Lennox' proclivities.

The conjoined, mud-enriched, chocolate-brown streams of Howe's Bayou and Mule Bayou empty into the Chemical Coast's torpid and waveless LaSalle Bay – itself only slightly flocculent with petroleum byproducts – a few dozen garfish-filled miles downstream from the campus and the city. The same climate that favored the mature growth of oak trees in twenty years and pine trees in seven produced humidity sufficient to mildew books in two months. Accordingly the Travertines air-conditioned the library before any of the other campus buildings except, of course, for the Gregorian Mansion, the main Administration Building. That's how long ago all this was. Senior students of the time actually remembered hearing those who had been seniors when the current crew were freshman reminisce about a time on this very campus when most of the converted houses in which classes were held didn't even have enough window units to air-condition the classrooms. Electrical devices marked progress faster than any other element in those days, as oil once did, and coal before it. For these were also the days just before computers, when an electric typewriter was, if not an object of luxury, at least then only recently in general use.

Laid out amid the bare, forked grid of streets that had been at the edge of town as late as 1956, the campus had grown from three buildings to seventeen in the years since the Cochinian War. Surrounded by the city which was itself embedded in an oak and pine forest, the University never wholly flourished but didn't die out either. A modest building campaign had led to the hiring of Lennox to design and plan the eventual sweep of the campus buildings around a central mall on the model of Mr. Redtom’s Academical Village in Carlottenburg, State of Elizianna; and a few of them were actually built within five years of the ink's drying on the plans. But at the time we are speaking of, most of the freshmen had classes in the new buildings while most of the seniors still remembered almost all classes being held in converted houses. So it was an institution very much in transition as it inched toward its interim goal of having 800 students and 50 professors by the end of the last century.

The priests who founded and maintained the University were from an obscure teaching order in Brabt whose foundation dated from the papacy’s antimodernism enthusiasm of the 1890s. As a corporate entity, the order made up in stubbornness what it lacked in graciousness. The Travertines’ collective travels throughout the New World had been as implausible as they were extensive. Now long separated from their Brabtian heritage and wholly Columbanized, except on Saints days, the Travertine Order had become domesticated in the Federated Columban Nation to the extent of running high schools in the States of New Shropshire and Norssex, and Universities in the States of High Bohernia and Azuria, with foreign missions in swampy El Verdeplatz (a banana republic) and frigid Owntarot (the richest province in Arcady away up there in the frozen north.) They were not particularly concentrated in their use of resources. Unlike their more famous (and numerous) counterparts in the Cassinonian, Citeauxien, Clementine, Cluniac, Dibernardonist, Jebusite and Rosarian Orders, the Travertines had neither endowments, fame, nor the favor of the papacy to speed them on their way. But they did an unromantic job almost well almost all the time, and so had avoided extinction for many a long year.

When they came to dull, semi-tropical Harrassville in East Coahuila to build Sanctas Esclavos University a half-century ago, the Travertines sent an economist, a theologian, and a biologist, all priests, who then hired a librarian and a registrar. An English professor, an historian and a philosopher were added to the priests, while a chemist, a mathematician and a bevy of foreign language teachers were hired as laymen. In a growth rate so slow as to almost be organic, Sanctas Esclavos graduated 10 seniors after its first four years.

The great pioneering days were gone by the time Sanctas Esclavos approached its 25th anniversary. The original University President, the economist priest Fr. Alaouest, had been ousted in a coup and honourably retired to fundraising. His successor, Fr. Adalbert Vernmont, a full-time administrator who did not teach, was not a success and was sent to Norssex in a subordinate position on the pretext of unraveling a financial scandal involving the bankruptcy of a former large donor. His second successor was a physics professor of great dash and doubtful practical intelligence, Fr. Wolfric Bardenwinbern, who died relatively young and relatively unmourned. Now its fourth president in six years, Fr. Florian Sulross, a professor of languages, was so competent he was in danger of being promoted to become head of the entire Travertine Order, a post of sufficient complexity (administering 600 priests across a dozen educational institutions in three countries and six states and provinces) that he would have to resign as president of Sanctas Esclavos.

Accordingly there was unrest among the faculty, both lay and ordained, though it is a truism that there is always unrest among the faculty. The students were naturally too busy to take much notice. They were pursuing what one of the foreign, hence more articulate, students called "the twin undergraduate grails of puke and pudenda." But they were certainly aware it was going on. You couldn't not be in an institution that small.

As usual, the social groups among students were as fissiparous as they were numerous. Aside from the general run of undecided liberal arts majors, the school divided by discipline. Among the prominent students in this tale are the art historians. They are not to be confused with the few poor souls who wanted an arts, as in how-to-do-painting-and-sculpture, department. (They were denied their wish, being firmly told by blunt Fr. Wilfred Milstead, the historian whose teaching was as rigorous as his pronounciamentos on the nature of liberal education were strict, that "Sanctas Esclavos University is not a trade school, even if the trades sought are properly useless.") The actual practicing visual artists on campus were not drawn from the said poor souls, who were commonly both infertile and unaccomplished, but were instead mostly English, history, philosophy and theology majors, along with a few language students, scratching aesthetic itches in their spare time. The media-ites (radio, TV, film) were mostly philosophers also. As we shall see, the ex-seminarians outnumbered the actual seminarians by the end of the year we speak of, though not at the beginning. The authentic philosophers were not all ex- or current seminarians, nor all media-ites, nor all visual artists. Many of them, in fact, tended to write. There was not a drama department either, on similar Milsteadian grounds. However, there was a flourishing student theatre corps. Its actors, singers and musicians were not drawn from any one discipline, though English was overrepresented among all of them.

Then there was the vast backdrop of other students of various kinds. And off in the margins were the kids from the States of Fairtron and Freedonia, the sites of other high schools run by the Travertine Order, many of whom could not, strictly speaking, be said to be likely graduate material. Sent south by their parents in a dismally hopeless custodial move, they happily played intramural soccer, got drunk with astonishing violence and regularity, and annually cluttered up the student election process with resentful cabals. Occasionally they showed up for classes, but too much of this was considered unsporting and was punished by having to buy extra beers for the non-attendees.

The student body was divided, as is customary, into three parts. On one side stood the academic stars of the various disciplines, sleek and nervous with intellect and emotion that quivered in them as in the muscles of racehorses. On the other sprawled the back row boys and girls who had been sent here, either two rivers or one mountain range away from home, so that their drinking habits would not show up on local court records. Naturally the vast, yeasty middle of confused, inarticulate, struggling, mildly interested, vaguely bored students was the largest grouping, and is therefore, for the purposes of this narrative, wholly superfluous.

For as with mankind's most wonderful and most terrible actions, we must look to the edges for that contrast which alone can distinguish the ordinary from the uninteresting. And in the vapor-wreathed cauldron of learning and experience that Sanctas Esclavos University represented were stirred enough of both to be getting on with.

CHAPTER TWO – STUDENT SUPINITY

The fall semester began that year with an attempt at tradition which, unfortunately for its spurious authenticity, had few antecedents, and those inglorious. Nothing is less convincing than a creaky new practice being justified on the grounds that it resembles some older, more solid, perhaps even outworn, heritage. But the university was so new a postwar foundation that where tradition did not exist it must perforce be erected.

This alleged tradition, as so often occurs with those who build new to look old, involved the discomfiture of newcomers and the imposition of strictures which no one, least of all the unfamiliar, could be expected to keep. Naturally, the orientation hazing of freshmen was a spectator sport to the rest of the students and a few either sentimental, passagerous, or grim-minded faculty.

From the lofty perch of his sophomore year Newsie LaBlonde, also known as the Newspaper Student, found that the spectacle left him less than gruntled. He was called that because whenever you saw him in the cafeteria in the student union building, Schwimmen Zwei Vogel Hall, he was always surrounded by the detritus of one of Harrassville’s three daily or two weekly newspapers, and when in funds some dailies from out of town as far away as the great cities of New Wark or Loach Nailest as well. He watched journalists work with the same intensity he devoted to watching women walk. Secreted in the light booth high above the dais in the huge lecture room that formed the center of Edward Estlin Hall, Newsie observed the leader of the senior power cabal trying to whip up enthusiasm in a few hundred freshmen for seeing some of their contemporaries, whom they had never yet met, being humiliated.

Edward Estlin Hall, named after a donor from the wholesale tire trade who uncharacteristically insisted that he would not permit his middle name to appear on the building, was locally famous for not being all there. The architect Lennox, normally so imperious to his clients that hardly any of them ever dared argue as to his designs and plans, had found himself up against a metal as dense as his own. He was firmly instructed in the matter by Fr. Alaouest, who looked so guileless beneath his white mane of hair that you knew your pockets were being picked even as his eyes twinkled at you. The ukase he had blandly, though decisively, issued was, “Despite the sloping ranks of seats, this is NOT a theatre. It is a lecture hall. There will be no theatrical lights. There will be no theatrical sound system. The tiny, tiny semicircular dais will hardly serve as a stage. There will be no curtains. There will be no orchestra pit. There will be no backstage, just a nice brick wall. You may have a minuscule projection room at the top from which the Art History Department may project slides of vases or, in cases of extreme necessity, amphorae or kraters. That is all you may have. This is NOT a theatre.” And the dictum was rigidly adhered to, at least as far as the architecture went. Lennox humbly built as instructed, having less interest in interiors than exteriors anyway. The students and faculty, of course, began staging theatrical productions in Edward Estlin Hall even before Fr. Alaouest retired, by the simple expedient of not using any of the forbidden items while speaking lines and acting out parts in dramas all the same.

It was from this tiny projection room that Newsie observed the freshman class – not all of it, by any means, merely the gullible and the fair-minded among the inexperienced and the naïve, who imagined that if they were summoned by self-appointed upperclassmen to some function other than the classes for which they had paid, they ought to go – sitting in the stacked ranks of seats, perhaps a hundred freshmen in a room that would hold 350. For in addition to being a relatively young university, it was a surprisingly docile one.

Classes at Sanctas Esclavos started by local custom on the Feast of Travailmas, which a long-dead Father Superior of the Travertines had wedged into the diocesan calendar by a judicious mixture of flattering and intimidating a long-dead bishop. The arts of the schoolyard persist in the chancery, or as Terence Hanbury has remarked, the battle of Crecy was won upon the playing fields of Camelot.

Stocky Ethelred Mortshire (Red for short, despite being black-haired) stood flanked by a couple of grinning heralds or lackeys on the Estlin dais looking out over his prey. It was a crisp fall day by Harrassville standards, which meant the temperature was less than 80 degrees. Classes started tomorrow. This was the senior power cabal's first and main chance to create an impression, employing the ballpeen hammer method of social conditioning alloyed with public shame, on the malleable freshmen.

Red wore the genial, untroubled face of one in whom self-doubt was superficial and righteousness high, plastered over a conscience unspeckled by examination. Newsie had watched Red, from the backseat position of Treasurer, achieve effortless dominance of last year's Student Council elections. While another now held the Presidency, Red, as it were, wore the pants.

Too close attention to the minutae of student politics of course argues a masturbatory degree of self-regard; yet the official structures had their use as a public parody, or shadow-play, of the real tribes into which the students naturally, inevitably, and unselfconsciously fell. This primary and irreducible mimetic function sufficiently sustained the student government hierarchy, since usefullness could not.

Red asked the crowd tired, rhetorical questions, attempting to whip up an amount of enthusiasm sufficient to support, though it could not equal, his egotism at being able to do so. “Are you proud to be Sanctas Esclavians?” he boomed. “Yes,” came the perfunctory answer. Why school spirit, whatever that is, should be expected to manifest itself at the top of one’s lungs over matters so miniscule as to barely bear mention, much less shouting over, is one of the universal and everlasting mysteries of academic Babbitry. Religious orders in particular seem susceptible to a form of public ritual said to be indicative of “school spirit.” Possibly this is merely a subversion of the liturgical instinct, though it may go as far back as tribal dances.

“Do you even know the story of the Sanctas Esclavos?” Red asked contemptuously. A few beats of silence, a few hands wavered tentatively in the air. Predatorially, Red picked the prettiest.

“Your name?” (in false bonhomie.)

“Zoe Higgins, sir.”

“Tell us what you know about the story of the Sanctas Esclavos.”

“They were several dozen Amerindians of the Cabeza Pedras tribe along the coast here who sought refuge in the Mission Santalbano when pursued by a band of enemies from the Bug Jerky tribe in the 1700s. The Cluniac priests of the mission failed sufficiently to guard the refugees, who were horribly massacred. They were subsequently canonized under Pope Havelock I, himself a Cluniac, as an act of contrition by the Cluniac order for their inability to protect those who sought help from them. The Sanctas Esclavos have been the patron saints of this part of the coast since the 18th century.”

“Very lucid, very fine, thank you.” He was befuddled, not knowing how to insult her.

“Oh, it was easy, sir. My brother is in the seminary.”

Red looked disconcerted, as if he suspected her of making fun of him but could not quite understand how. He tried another question at large but was met with blank silence.

Disgusted at the flaccid response, he sent forth into the multitude a minion, implying with a complicitous glance, “Fetch me a recalcitrant freshman.” One Courtney Sparks, a motorcycle blonde, went from him unto the crowd and seized by the arm a short, fully daswed, unlucky fellow with the poor judgment to be sitting on the aisle. With the innate politeness of the overwhelmingly powerless he let himself be led to the dias.

“Your name, fellow?” came the query.

(Barely audible.) “Meko.” (A little stronger.) “Meko Clovished.” (With a weak attempt at humor) “Your humble servant, sir.”

Red shouted, “Any jokes around here I’ll make, you worm of a freshman. Do you not see my manifest upperclass power?” (Striking a pose like a pirate, foot up on a dead man’s chest.) In a more normal tone, he said to Courtney, “See if you can induce some grovelling, will you?”

Courtney looked at Meko like, “C’mon, be a sport,” and tugged his arm. Meko duly bowed.

Apparently nothing symbolic would persist beyond the present room, Newsie noted in his notebook on high with disgust. He had otherwise rather fancied doing a series in the school paper on the Anti-Humiliation Squad: freshmen walking to class with carefree impunity!

He knew this Courtney distantly as one of Red’s campaign hustlers from last year’s elections team, and resolved to ask her afterwards, “So, how do you like rounding up waifs and strays for the Big Enchilada?” because he knew it would annoy her.

“What’s your major, Freshman?” Red leaned over Meko, who was on the diminuitive side, menacingly.

“Undeclared.” Titters across the room.

“And do you know what an honor it is to be a student at Sanctas Esclavos?” Red exuded false bonhomie, like Hardy preparing to assault Laurel.

“Yes, sir. Not just anyone gets in here.” Said Meko gamely.

“Right-o, Freshman. (Pause, pause.) “Your parents have to pay for it!” Red’s guffaws were louder and more insincere than anyone else’s. He waved Meko back to his seat.

Meanwhile the lame show continued, with successive victims pulled up to the dias, asked inane questions in a threatening tone, and sent back to quiver in oblivion or boredom. Red hadn’t even thought to ask his crew to prepare skits or other means of propaganda of the deed.

“Say what you like, the English still do apathy better than anyone else,” said an astute observer of that Albionesi music hall stage known as Parliament. But he was unaware of what these Federated Columban kids were made of. They’d been done over by experts throughout high school and nothing dished out by a bunch of strangers could come close to the humilating power of classmates who had known you pitilessly and intimately.

The upperclassmen had set themselves a behavioral trap from which it was hardly likely they could escape. Lacking the costly impedimenta of humiliating freshman beanies to be distributed, the wearing of which could subsequently be enforced by roving patrols of intimidators, and without a true spark of rebellion in the oatmeal-backboned freshman class to fight against, the upperclassmen were doomed to obtain dutiful compliance. But conformity to what?

Apparently, the mute, deadening and irrevocable vote of the freshman class was that they chose to conform to a degee of bovine inertness sufficient to stock an entire pasture. Newsy had his story, and walked out a mildly contented man.

CHAPTER THREE – IN THE DINING ROOM OF SHADE HALL

“Just scungle those mushrooms around in the pan, would you?” said Fr. Mt. Rose.

Tall, twinkly Fr. Augustine Mt. Rose was an all-round man of moderation. He considered, ruminated, and expatiated upon ideas, poems, plays, history, novels, politics, philosophy, society and, under sufficient but rare provocation, the motives of others. He was the only teacher we had who could make as much sense out of the inane burblings of a back-row boozer as of the well-thought-out position of a front-row serious student, and use the words of either to teach the rest of us.

He said, “I only ever had one idea, and Aristotle had it for me. It is that a work of art is one thing.” With this simple, defensible credo he immediately doomed himself in the sight of 31/32nds of his critical colleagues; but mercifully for us he considered himself a teacher first, a critic second, and so was in no way discommoded by the disdain of the academic world at large. He did chafe under the indifferent lash of the administration; as Chairman of the English Department he pronounced his position to be that of “secretary to the secretary of the Registrar,” meaning his main perquisite of rank was having to chivy the professoriate into turning in their grades on time.

He was an accomplished chef and occasionally entertained high-ranking academic and ecclesiastical visitors to Sanctas Esclavos as if he had been executive chef to the President. But he also made lunch every day for himself and a few invited guests, usually other English Department faculty, one or two chosen students, and an alumnus, alumni, donor or board member. He wasn’t actually trying to be politically influential within the University, he was just trying not to be bored at lunch and, to this end, preferred the company of those with their wits about them and some degree of tensile resistance to the anodynes of suburban respectability.

Shade Hall, home of the English Department, was a 40-year-old wooden-stucco bungalow on Lee Street. It stood on a shaded lot two streets over (Guinan Lane, Sullivan Road) from the Gregorian Administrative Mansion and one street over (Schieffen Street) from the newer classroom buildings of the Academic Mall. Shade Hall had been named by Mt. Rose after one of the minor poets of the 1950s; Mt. Rose rated Shade’s poetic virtues somewhat higher than did Shade’s principal annotator, whose critical apparatus famously swallowed the poems whole, never to disgorge any light upon them whatsoever. The rakish Earl of Mitchellion said, “If Shade had burnt all he wrote, and printed all he spoke, he would have had more wit and humour than any other poet,” which might have had something to do with it. Or else Mt. Rose just liked the name which, in view of the 30-foot magnolia tree in the front yard and the 50-foot oak in the back yard, was entirely appropriate.

Only old Dr. Monvernon held classes in Shade Hall; his seminar on the arid, abstruse but weighty modern poetry of Fenton Akimbo was a pinnacle for seniors, but only about three of them per semester. Why he never retired (despite failing eyesight, diminished motor skills and terminal lassitude) was probably because – having taught for the wily and parsimonious Travertines the latter half of his academic life – he had no savings on which to support himself and his even more ailing, even more elderly wife. In order to use his doctorate to help maintain academic accreditation, the Travertines let him keep on teaching as long as he could dodder in; and, as so often is not the case, the few students who took him were rewarded.

In addition to Fr. Mt. Rose and Dr. Monvernon, Shade Hall officed two more lay teachers, both of whom had graduated among the earliest classes and had returned to teach after their graduate work elsewhere. Frank Colquitt and John Branard were affable colleagues verging on friends; both utilized Mt. Rose’s methodology of inducing class discussion by asking questions directly of named students regardless of the embarrasment this caused the unprepared. Either or both or neither might stay for lunch on any given day; today it was Frank Colquitt, the freshman English teacher with a large beard and a love for sesquipedalian 19th century sentences not far this side idolatry.

The principal guest today was Charlotte Allen, who had yet to arrive. Charlotte was as overbearing as a middle-aged heiress married to a tennis-loving piano player could be, but in Fr. Mt. Rose she met a suave and gentlemanly interlocutor who, while savoring her curiosity, deprecated her judgmentalism. Whenever she came to lunch there was a good chance of hearing some diverting exchanges. She was on the Sanctas Esclavos Board of Directors as a consequence of her inheritance; the University had gotten far less of it than it wanted but had not given up hope for the future.

“Don’t let the butter get too dark. Turn the fire down while you move the mushrooms around,” Mt. Rose advised. His student cook du jour was Alix Streeter, separable for once from her great friend and roommate Sara Tarte, who was working in the Registrar’s Office that shift. Alix bore the twin curses of intellect and beauty with a courage that did your heart good to see, and a spirited liveliness that attracted people to her of all ages and sexes. She was, however, modest about her achievements and never preened herself on either her successes or others’ failures. Insofar as Mt. Rose looked with greater than normal benevolence on any one of his students per year, she was it that year.

Let us be clear here, to the dismay of the cynically prurient. Whatever sexual tortures of the damned this set of good fathers may have privately undergone in their solitary monastic cells at this time and place, they did not act upon them with those students in the circles concerned in this story. Call it coincidence, call it a miracle, call it omission in lieu of emission, but this set of priests were educators and men of God who, if not wholly exempt from the dirty laundry of the church's celibacy policy, did not visibly soil it themselves. Maybe it was something in the Howe's Bayou water, maybe it was a conjunction in the stars, maybe it has never happened before or since: but it happened at the time of this story that students, both men and women, did not find themselves sexually exploited, invited, harrassed, or interfered with by their teachers. Believe it or don't, but refrain from telling anyone who was there at the time any cheap theories, doubtless drawn from the bottomless ignorance of television, of the inevitability of the prevalance of ecclesiastical sexual misfeasance.

Thus when Mt. Rose spoke to Alix there was no throbbing subtext beneath their discussion of sautee technique. Behind her on the kitchen shelves stood the packaged ranks of the Federated Columban Nation’s consumer product brand names: Ebbing, O’Colmac, Major Calories, Houndts, Schweins, Choc o’ Late, Hissy’s, Aunt Jeremiah’s, a cornucopia of corporate packaging whose contents Mt. Rose bought with avid care based solely on taste rather than advertising or reputation. Thus the cheapest brands mingled with the most expensive as they appealed to his heterodox palate.

Oblivious of these colors of industrial design, vastly starker and ruder than those she studied as an art history major, Alix stirred as directed. Mt. Rose was gathering plates and silverware from where she had placed prim piles of each upon the counter for his transport to the table. Colquitt placed placemats on the tablecloth in the shadow of an illustrated Etrurian church so vast it took up one whole wall. Meanwhile over in the corner the radio uttered Baroque complexities in a calm and reassuring way: Rhadamanthys or something equally seria.

The principal visual feature of the Shade Hall dining room, which separated Mt Rose’s kitchen from his office on the first floor of the building, was a 6 foot by 8 foot enlargement of an Il Giambattist’ cathedral interior. He had secured it after an Art History Department show of Theoretical Architecture – upon the Severian Union’s Futurist works of which he had remarked, “It is one of the great tragedies of the world that the Severii were the first to get hold of Communism.”

For Mt. Rose never lectured, he discussed. And those privilieged to eat at his table were there for the discussions and the company as much as for the food. And at his table in general, for once the three agreed with one another as so infrequently is the case.

Any six-foot tall woman who hasn’t developed a good line in flamboyance hasn’t considered her options very well. When Charlotte Allen swept into the office it was in her most ostentatious manner. She was one of those tall, largeboned women who by sheer exuberance amplified their social powers. With due care for physical appearance she was not beautiful but she was striking. She greeted everyone in sight, “Father, there you are,” waving at him. Turning to Alix, “I believe I have met you before, haven’t I? If so, you are Alix and it is good to see you.” Over her shoulder, “Frank, I trust your mother is well.” (Old Mrs. Colquitt bulged large in Frank’s domestic life, a constant care in her old age though not, to him, a burden.)

“Ah, Charlotte. What’s your version of reality?” inquired Fr. Mt. Rose, standing still with place settings in his hand long enough to twinkle an eye in her direction. “Come help me set the table.” She dutifully came over and transported more silverware tableward. Alix finished the mushrooms and decanted them from skillet to bowl. Frank brought the laden stewpot and all sat down.

Mt. Rose said Grace as if it were the most natural thing in the world -- indeed it was for them -- and served up. As they began eating, Charlotte said to Mt. Rose, “I missed you at the opera.”

“I was there, I assure you, in my cloak and sandalled shoon. Way in the third balcony with Ms. Streeter’s fair friend Ms. Tarte, glorying in every tessatura.” Mt. Rose beamed. “It was high-class shouting in the nth degree.”

Mt. Rose operated on the old Milesian rule of courtesy which specified that you treat your inferiors as your equals, your equals as your superiors, and your superiors as inferiors -- except insofar as affected by the vow of obedience, of course. Therefore in class he always called each student Mr. or Ms. and did so socially, out of class, frequently enough for it to seem natural.

“Next time you shall sit in the box with me,” said Charlotte. She loved every opportunity to appear regal.

“Father,” said Alix, “Sara said she meant to ask you at the time. In Moldovna's central aria of lament, she does not mention her lost love Gorboduc even once. Instead she sings of waiting for the postman as a little girl, waiting for letters from her father away at war, letters that ultimately cease to arrive. Yet she conveys both heartbreaks at once. Why is the emotion so over the top?”

Mt. Rose paused, hand in air, made a motion of equivocation. “I surmise opera to have been invented, or at any rate practiced, for rich, bored men and women in their forties which, you may not recall, was an advanced age for a human to reach as recently as the time of our great-grandparents.” He looked around the company as they helped themselves to bowls and platters being passed. “Excessive emotion is the natural condition of the young. Only later in life does one burn out, as it were, and require stronger and stronger stimulus to that leathery and worn muscle, the heart. Opera plots are designed to supply such pokes in the emotional gizzard as will start forth tears.”

“It is a little less successful at raising laughter, however,” noted Charlotte. “No doubt the capacity for laughter never leaves us, whereas the capacity for tears is, as you say, stronger in the young.”

None of which should be, or was, allowed to interfere with the serious immediacy of food. Of meals it is as Plum Grenville remarked of sartorial adequacy, “There is no time at which ties do not matter.”

“Do I detect something that closely resembles gravy?” asked Frank. They had been told that what they were having was a provincial Ostfrieslandisch recipe called boerenkool (kale with spuds and a pork sausage in gravy on top) so the murmured “Yes” was universal and had no tinge of discovery to it.

Alix said, “They can’t have meant ‘boring kale,’ can they, since kale is much too strong a vegetable ever to be boring.”

“As near as I can tell the translation is ‘farmer’s kale,’” said Mt. Rose. “'Farmers' is an intensifier, rather than a distinguishing mark as against there being a city kind.”

The clink of fork and plate rang companionably. Alix was nervous among the great but Mt. Rose’s affable courtesy supported her. Frank and Charlotte took it on faith that if Mt. Rose had invited you, that fact automatically made you interesting right there.

“Speaking of kale, a notoriously strong and pungent leaf,” munched Frank, “it must be the Northern Frengistanian cousin of our humble collard green, which must always be cooked with something else lest it colonize the tastebuds irretrievably.” Frank was as interested in the lineages of food as he was of literature.

Alix looked up, surprised. “This weekend, as it happens, I am going to hear a folksinger so authentic he is named after two separate East Coahuilan counties. Collard Stocktank is his name.”

“How funny,” said Charlotte. “I went to school with a Stocktank. I may even have dated him briefly. Frederick I think it was. I wonder if they are related. It is not that usual a name.”

Mt. Rose never chose to dominate a conversation, though he clearly possessed all the requisite power had he desired to exercise it. But he was always questing. “Why do you suppose that nobody plays any instrument other than the guitar nowadays? There are forty guitar players for those of any other instrument. I cannot make it out.”

Frank spoke out, “It is a fact that will, upon investigation, no doubt prove related to the 17th century complaint that no one played the 8-stringed, gloriously plangent lute any more, but that all now played the simple 6-string Tartessian guitar.”

“A matter of accompaniment, then,” hazarded Charlotte. “Simpler than the piano, and you can't sing along while playing horns or strings.”

Frank inquired of Charlotte, “What do you hear about the Dean of Students' plan to close off the Library steps to gatherings in the evenings? My students tell me it would be a severe imposition on customary social practices.”

“Ah, that is a matter far below my august station, something that would be taken care of by Bursars and things,” Charlotte laughed. “On the Board, we only think the higher thoughts. Like where is next year’s money coming from.” This was no joke. She shook her head in doubt as did anyone who knew about the full situation. East Coahuila was not a religious state nor Harrassville a religious city, at least not as regards this religion, and not when it came to supporting a sectarian university, however fine and noble.

“Surely the public peace cannot be more under attack from those who would defend it than from those against whom they conceive the defense necessary?” Frank said disdainfully.

“Once again so, I fear,” said Mt. Rose. “Possibly it does not seem silly to Dean Kipling to build a university for people to come to and then to restrict how and where they do so.” He paused. “Although, of course, it is silly...”

“I doubt the threat of noise from the library steps can interfere with the studies of those safely inside its air conditioning,” said Frank. “This must have something more to do with the Dean's power than the students' habits.”

“Thou sayest it,” Charlotte murmured. She was the closest thing to a free spirit on the Board, an institution not known for fostering multivariance.

Kale – collard – coffeehouse performance – estremaduran tartessian guitar – pearshapeindity threat – tryouts – duke's incompetence parallel claudius'

a comedy ends with order being restored, a tragedy with it being imposed.

Agnes Herbert

Lawrence Bowe

Catherine Fourmantelle

Liz Mollineux

Eliza Lumley

Honor Barbary

Hawdonia

Lydia Stern

The Life and Opinions of Parson Yorick

on tarte at opera, or charlotte on opera?

Did you read Wenlock Jakes in the paper this morning? No, I usually read the paper back to front and didn’t get that far. I had to stop at Will Krautbrother-Cohen, whose more than usual degree of perniciousness was sufficient to waylay me in my tracks.

What degree of upness is proceeding in your vicinity? He talked like that…

cannot account for it

“Advertising is the toxic mimic of poetry, although – or perhaps especially because – conducted with compression, intelligence, heightened emotion and imagery. A poem may be a fleeting moment of uplift; an advertisement is a drive-by shooting of the spirit.”

He didn’t love words, he loved meaning, of which words in proper order are sometimes a decent approximation.

Someone should send hm a bomb in the mail

Infest the alray constantly

9/10 of all etomologies are wrong.

Read history constantly

You don’t know enough to commit a mortal sin until you are 40.

Creon was a gum-chewing go-getter.

Infest the Al-Ray constantly.

Ronald Reuel’s ‘King of the Orb’ cycle is to teach us how to die

Miasma, from the old Greek miasma, meaning miasma.

The plays of hwyl hexpyre were written by hwyl hexpyre or another man of the same name. Vs earl of orrery. Most useless, one-sided, punchless controversy in the history of academia.

He was a temperamentally conservative man who made himself into a liberal by dint of sheer intellect.

Spring sprang / And sank his fang / In my favorite icicle. / One weeps / For keeps / At so a blow. – Pangur Ban

A writer is he who hath written.

"A bishop is a collection of laws," by which he kinda meant, "The hierarchy's job is to keep the lights turned on."

duc des gueux

gambetea team

zim allen

kalixhaven

hodad ministers

flinchworthy the butler

kim catter-wall

coupe de foudre

clara ronaldo

hugh lyons acque

petulanza

intergalacticos

fistfight bourbon

hough auto

ss morganatic

brand gnu

the obese wrecker driver with the tweaker skinny girlfriend. He wants to work his way up to repo man...

Catenaccio's Bus Parking Service

Zona Mista Bus Lines

has been wafting around in a state of euphoria

sumoud

hudna

.

the question of Johnson’s masochism (on which, to borrow Boswell’s verdict on the aristocratic pretensions of Johnson’s friend Richard Savage, ‘the world must vibrate in a state of uncertainty’).

Anybody who thinks one form of spiritual life is inferior to another probably doesn't have much of one to begin with.

"Cuius testiculos habes, cardia et cerebellum autem habeas." --Imperator Filiusjohann II

anticatholicism is the antisemitism of the left

Julienne’s argument on the complexty of existence, “If carrot and bean be finely slit, there is nothing wrong with it.”

“The Canonical List of Cheeses,” an Embroidery over the Sink in Mt. Rose's Kitchen in Shade Hall

1. Red Leicester

2. Tilsit

3. Caerphilly

4. Bel Paese

5. Red Windsor

6. Stilton

7. Gruyère

8. Emmental

9. Norwegian Jarlsberger

10. Liptauer

11. Lancashire

12. White Stilton

13. Danish Blue

14. Double Gloucester

15. Cheshire

16. Dorset Blue Vinney

17. Brie

18. Roquefort

19. Pont l'Evêque

20. Port Salut

21. Savoyard

22. Saint-Paulin

23. Carré de l'Est

24. Boursin

25. Bresse-Bleu

26. Camembert

27. Gouda

28. Edam

29. Caithness

30. Smoked Austrian

31. Sage Derby

32. Wensleydale

33. Gorgonzola

34. Parmesan

35. Mozzarella

36. Pipo Crème

37. Danish Fynbo

38. Czechoslovakian sheep's milk cheese

39. Venezuelan Beaver Cheese

40. Cheddar

41. Ilchester

42. Limburger

CHAPTER 4 – The Tale of the Board and the Bulletin Board

The formerly sleek, entirely outmoded two seater sports car crept slowly up the raked gravel drive to the side door of the Gregory Administrative Mansion. It was late afternoon. Fr Blodgett was returning from a trolling visit seeking downdown donors.

The trouble with the "ancient pile," as universities are historically referred to, was that it was swiftly running out of money. At first, the good Travertines thought they had trapped a millionaire -- a pair of them, in fact. ... Two ancient sisters, living in the splendor to which Papa had accustomed them, clung to life on a plantation south of town whose acres, though now untended, were vast. A fortune in old railroad stock was allegedly theirs, and would allegedly pass to the University when they died. Persistently the youngest of them clung to life.

Meanwhile the touch of panic even spread from the University Boardroom and reached the Hinterlands Club, high atop the tallest downtown skyscraper whose fabled chemical company name (Octogon) was blazoned in advertisement and grocery store alike. At the corner table where old Johnnie Browne always sat, eldest oilman on the University Board and kingmaker in Harrasville politics, concerned friends discreetly inquired how soon the University's assets would be up for sale. Mostly these inquiries took the form of modest protestations of hope that such an eventuality would prove unnecessary, but Browne noted the bidders' interest with bland courtesy.

What had brought this pretty to a pass? There are those whose estates are so tightly bound that no one, least of all a mere daughter or grand daughter, can dispose of them freely. Others fall far more easily. Of the latter sort was that of the sisters O’Shaughnessy, elderly unmarried granddaughters of one of the original oil-boys whose fortune, much burnished before the Second Great War, had since sunk into obscurity. But it was widely reputed, and may even have been true, that the Travertines had been left the full reversion of a load of the last worthwhile railroad stock in the country, but had to wait until the last O’Shaughnessy in the direct line gave up the certificates, the estate and the ghost. Old Granddad had specified their life interest in it and also its ultimate distribution to the Travertines. What no one had foreseen was that the O’Shaughnessy sisters would live on into their nineties and that the railroad would linger into becoming one of the world’s great technological curiosities.

“The drop deed date, as it were?” “Just so.”

You are to understand tht the civic ethos of Harrasville in particular but the whole state of East Coahuila in general is such as to favor the tearing down of perfectly functional ten-year-old buildings and houses should marketing and financing, as they not infrequently do, coincide. One that lasted a full twenty-five years was the Five Proctologists in Search of a Tax Deduction Building at the corner of Manifesto and Proclamation Avenues downtown.

Fr. Vernmont, commonly known as “the Dogfather,” could be seen walking his even more ancient canine charge across the sacred sward that none save he, the oldest priest in residence, would dare profane with dog deposits. The sun slanted sideways across the lawn and picked out the hedges with a fine, sharp shadow. A playful glint in the western windows made the back of the building seem warm and inviting. Fr. Blodgett was humming cheerfully to himself as he put the car away in a shaded parking spot. Fr. Vernmont continued communing with the sun’s fall and his dog’s snuffling exploration of the lawn.

ramblings of the dogfather: good dog! Want a boot in the ribs? Go on, tell me you don't. You can't, you little illinguist, can you? No. doggies can't talk. Or understand, can they? No. So you don’t care that I am still not sentenced to the Home for Decayed Priests. Because who would care for you then?

the dogfather

-[upon meeting a man with a feisty young dog that wants to fight] this dog is fifteen years old [shrugs] it's beyond good and evil.

Synopsis of barks

a dog too far

don't eat that bicycle, it's not good for you

tighe, a dog

albiceleste, another dog

proposed admin reform: system D

I spuriosi

as for br'er [handel], that is #22a, or #23, or #25, depending on whose musicological system you use,  from 'the messiah,' an air for alto. he repeats in order to drive home the point, over one of the loveliest melodies ever penned. it is about christ's (and bart's and yours and my) condition -- he was despised, rejected of men -- so that we get it that christ came to be our brother, that no suffering of mankind is foreign to our higher power, that nothing that shames or humiliates us is untouched by god's grace and consciousness of our poor plight, that we are not alone. and it takes several repetitions to drive that home, because nobody on god's earth starts out believing it. although 'messiah' is liturgically easter music, about sacrifice and resurrection, for some reason it has been translated to christmas where the story begins rather than ends. in any case, any excuse to listen to it is wonderful, even if you don't like opera. (i couldn't even hear opera in my thirties, nor listen voluntarily until my 40s. something about its heightened emotions being useful to older people, in whom the fires are banked, but unnecessary for the young, to whom over the top emotion is a daily occurrence...) and handel is early enough to be at the very beginnings of opera, so what he composed for voice is not all that different from his other work, and all of it is wonderful...

"geat of the week" in "weekly student bulletin"

The Inseparable Lex and Sara inspecting the Student Weakly Bulletin. Black tights, bluejean miniskirt, black sweater, short hair. Vs Chambray shirt, no bra, blue jeans, chesterfields. One was darker than she was small while the other was smaller than she was dark, but they were both delectable.

Pat Stamper’s is the fifth biggest used-car dealership in town, but papa says he’s only one strategic bankruptcy away from becoming number two.

Wsport, a 23 hour cable network featuring women athletes from around the world, games from soccer to tennis to golf to that rarity, all woman Antipodian-rules football.

13 weeks of TWFS

Geat of the Week

The Alan Steeves Show TV Comedy tonight, with Alan Steeves and his Rude Mechanicals: Gordon Hathaway, Tom Whompost, Mr. K.B. Morrison, José Jiminez and Guido Panzino.

The Brinemaidens TV All-female tugboat crew works a major port

My Little Shiksa! TV A TV producer’s WASP lover’s modelling career

Street Blood TV Murder most illiterate and hugger-mugger mayhem

Oeddy and Jo TV Amnesiac king and his older queen reign quietly in the midst of their domestic bliss

Me and My Tweeker TV A rural Oregon father bonds with his high school daughter over their shared meth habit

The Tortures of the Damned Opera High-class shouting, yellage and vocalise

L’Excruciatione Opera Twelve-tone row

Della Feminae Vexatoriae Opera Society trembles when a young woman decides to marry for love

Les Voracieuses Opera A chorus lines as Wantonia, Lascivia, Callypgea and Pneumatica go looking for an honest, strong young man

La Figlia del Pirata Comic Operetta Love, and a bit with a dog

Die Flabbergast Opera Monster of the mountains astonishes a village with his kindliness

Fortinbras! Musical Hijinks as young King Fortinbras makes Elsinore into a music hall and gambling destination. Local talent: singing duo “The Gravediggers”

Psyche & Vulcan Drama Passion and dirt

Otherguy Overby, Poolsitter to the Stars TV A criminal lays low in the menial underground of Hollywood, sharing lives with garderners, domestic staff and caterers while waiting for the next big score

Toss in the Saddle TV A St Joe Missouri family of horse-traders supplies animals to an endless variety of Westward settlers

Government Mule Documentary a view of the U.S. Defense and Interior Departments' animal management processes

Narcs at Woodstock Documentary an investigative history of CIA, DIA, FBI, NYSP and other police informers listening to music in the mud while cut off from all communication with the outside world

Iowa Smythe and the Bad Hat Adventure a series of improbable events involving a handsome young structural linguist’s quest for The Fifth Gospel manuscript

Beer and Loading in Las Vegas TV a man and his buddies work on the loading docks of a mega casino hotel complex

Adalbert & Melisandre

Giuseppi & Ludmilla

Mornamont, a 17th century thriller

reviews of:

(no) (twa) (three) reeves for mister thurl, a musical

the first supper, a suburban musical comedy

death of the first real estate speculator in texas, ferdinand de la salle

i monsignori, a comic opera

the devil's son's software company opera

violin wars: the devil and the gypsies, an opera

dick and bebe and bob, a wacky service comedy

squalour cam, five guys and their nintendos...

Tame, Newspeak, Prole, Dreadbook, Vague, The Dubuquer, File, Unnatural Queries, Reactionary Street Journal, Propagandist's Digest, Faux Noise, The Dismal Scientist, Fiscal Post

he's trying to sieze your minds...

whinging lon guylendor loony hornkeister, all footwork, no punch; all setup, no lkquor; all shtick, no wit

CHAPTER 5 – Annoy Cometh in the Morning

Preceded by the vast belly of his melancholy, Fr. Adalbert Graustark, OT, slowly entered the classroom. Languid, almost torpid, morbidly obese, he moved at the walking pace of a man a dozen years older than his early sixties warranted. Head bowed, one hand on a battered leather briefcase and the other meditatively clinging to the breast of his cassock, he brought with him his own cloud of dismally self-referential thought.

Whether that cloud held any nourishment for you was the debate topic of students before and afterward, with an oddly tripolar distribution. Some held he had once been brilliant and had then declined. Others swore he had never been any good and was a fraud, a blusterer, a rhetorician without the grace to be manqué. Some actually defended him but were in the distinct minority.

Reaching the podium and propping the briefcase against its foot, he raised his rubicund, rounded face toward the rows of students, displaying to them the distant, mud-colored eyes of the inertly self-regarding. With sparse preamble, he began lecturing:

“Good morning, depending upon what you mean by good and what you mean by morning.”

Graustark always had a kind of flat and droning delivery. If you could get the fat bastard to be honest for a minute, which he never by any chance was, you would get him to admit that his attitude was, “You will miss my exquisite jokes if you do not listen hard enough, but then I shall feel superior anyway so it hardly matters whether you pay attention or not. Besides, I shall explain the difficult ones in order to congratulate myself upon my perspicacity.”

The sun slanted through the venetian blinds casting bars of light and shadow across us all. We students were like the zebras of the plain, grazing lethargically but poised for flight or, in our case, excitement, should any eventuate. For Graustark was unpredictable, we gave him that.

“In a fit of inarticulateness which some of my students, if not most of my colleagues, might wish I were more frequently afflicted, I have doubtless disappointed our Ms Dahl in that I failed to answer her question fully at the end of last class.”

This was, of course, persiflage of the first order since Ms Dahl -- an heirhead who remembered her own name and possibly yours if you were handsome or rich enough -- could not remember what she had asked in the last class much less what he replied.

“Note that I did not fully fail to answer Ms Dahl question, since I did indeed make an attempt, however inadequate; but I concede that my previous effort might be called defective had it issued from the lips of a lesser mortal. All of which sideshow neatly illustrates Captain Abraham’s astute observation that mutually reciprocal opposites are difficult to formulate in English; for instance, that it takes “a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.”

“Be that as it may, and it undoubtedly will, Ms Dahl had wanted to know how the phrase ‘altogether ucky’ had entered the public lexicon. The less somnolent among you will recall that I said it derived from the irritatingly catchy theme-music to an ancient TV series called ‘The Twistedds Family.’ What I did not tell you is that not only is the title misnamed, it is mispunctuated. It ought to be ‘The Monster Family’ or somesuch, and, if not, it ought to lose the definite article and be punctuated ‘Twistedds’ Family.’

“Why so? Well, first I must reference the cartoons by Charles Twistedds for the Dubuquer magazine that are popularly, invariably, and incorrectly known as the ‘Twistedds Family’ cartoons. These, my children, are not animated, televised cartoons of the kind with which your childhoods were blighted in lieu of any actual entertainment. No, these are stills; drawings; for years such immobile, unanimated swatches of line and color were almost the only things making the Dubuquer worth opening. Nowadays, I am reliably informed by my colleague Fr. Rosedale, who checks upon the situation regularly, they are not even that.

“Now, here is a lesson in probability. Charles S. Twistedds published more than 1,300 cartoons in a professional life that had already begun by the time he graduated from a State of Nouveau Guernsey high school in 1949 and lasted until his death in 1998. How many of them or, alternatively, what proportion of the total, specificially featured Rigorcia or Sanchez or Woeday or Thugsley or Stumble or Uncle Suppurate or the nameless grandmother as one of the other so-called Twistedds Family members?”

A pause in the classroom grew from Pinterian to Quaker-meeting proportions. We all knew better than to contribute anything other than the most anodyne observations or the most innocuous questions. Graustark looked upon all other speakers in his classroom as potential rivals, ones to be squelched immediately and scorned thereafter. That was why we left the field clear for the Mona Dahls of this world. If he got on them, they were too thick to notice. Nobody bit this time, as he doubtless intended we shouldn’t.

“Seventy-eight. There are seventy-eight works featuring Rigorcia’s family. That is to say, about 6% of his output has been conflated with the rest to produce more than 98% of his reputation.

“And I insist it is Rigorcia’s family, not Sanchez’. They are not called the Sanchez Family for the simple reason that Sanchez, although properly his last name, has married into Rigorcia’s family. Like a Harrassville millionairess picking up a Tropicalian Republic polo-player with whom to disport athletico-amorously -- whether or not she marries and subsequently murders him as appears to be the local custom -- Rigorcia seems to have picked up Sanchez for possibly both purposes. Uncle Suppurate, I take it, is her uncle and not, as the movies have it, his brother. And the house is clearly Rigorcia’s and her crone of a mother’s, for all the proprietary air with which Sanchez is allowed to sit about it reading his outmoded newspaper in his even more outmoded smoking jacket.

“The movie versions are to be congratulated for the sensible decision to employ Celestia Dallas as Rigorcia, the inspired one to employ Jules Raulio as Sanchez, and the miraculous one to employ Marina Lucci as Woesday. But the films’ facile joke-huckstering is a far cry from Twistedds’ mordant social commentary, despite the fact that the moviemakers outright stole several of the cartoons and set them, as it were, to life.

“Yes, they are the family created by Charles Twistedds, and so are properly Twistedds’ family, but no, they are not the Twistedds Family as if Twistedds were their (and not merely the artist’s) last name.

“I make quite a point of this seemingly trivial jot or tittle; yet the Scripturally competent among you, if any, will know from Biblical scholarship that the presence or removal of the merest jot or tittle, which are the names of the smallest marks in the Hebrew orthography, can completely change the meaning of a passage.

“For misplaced apostrophes, of course, Hollywood bears much blame, not that anyone would notice spelling errors beside the tides of inaccuracy upon which the place evidently floats. Yet nothing beats the grocery trade’s handwritten signs, “Your’e Welcome!” being one of my favorites.” A sigh, a pause, a shuffling of the feet.

We all loved it when he got going like this, having arguments with himself, outlining one position only to demolish it immediately thereafter, as absorbed as a cat playing with a ball of yarn. It was here that his real disdain for students showed its worth, as he failed to engage with anybody while pursuing his intellectual, or at any rate rhetorical, chimeras down the dusty lanes of controversy toward the golden city of resolution.

While all this badinage was treacling o’er the classroom’s ears, x was watching Y.

“And by ostensibly I mean invariably

student reaction shots throughout

The light and weather

What do you supppose the old bustard was on about today?

Haven't got the faintest. The funny thing is, you know, he's not drunk when he says that stuff.

CHAPTER 6 – STOMPING GROUNDS

One conception of a University is that it is a series of tax deductions embodied in the form of buildings, endowments, and other accounting gimmicks rendered fertile by a state and national tax code written on behalf, and often at the express direction, of extremely wealthy people. Though this is not a very good definition it is in almost universal use, especially among private foundations and their satraps, beneficiaries and manipulators. Accordingly, the Student Union building at Sanctas Esclavos was named by a doddering millionairess for her late millionaire husband, who had joined the other famed oil-boys of the early 20th century in racing their Wade Motors Model P autos from field to field across the dusty inhabitabilities of the States of East Coahuila and Occraham, shooting up the joints on weekends and making and losing fortunes on the turn of a drill.

Boasting a huge atrium open to an enormous sheet of glass on one side, Warden Jay Troplong Hall crowned the upper east side of Davy Lennox’s austere but expensive plan for the North-South oriented, rectangular, spectacular Sanctas Esclavos University Academical Mall. The glass wall was two stories high and faced the green quadrangle so that students eating and conversing could see the interplay of harsh East Coahuilan light and hazy shadow upon the innocent lawn.

Sitting amidst the detritus of several gutted newspapers, the Fiscal Post prominent by its pink and black sheets next to the pale pages of the Reactionary Street Journal, Newsie LaBlonde contentedly sipped coffee, looked out that spectacular glass wall and cheerfully awaited events. He had completed the day's classes, had no plans, and had that day ingested – if not fully digested – the contents of six dailies, three local, three national. He attributed his speedreading abilities to a youth spent trying to gain privacy within his large and noisy family; his proclivity for newspapers arose from equally pragmatic grounds. News was easier to read than fiction.

He had no idea how to analyze the structure of a novel, poem or play; his reactions to literature were purely emotional. He could discuss the feelings or the tastes, but not the architecture, of works of art. It was a sad burden. But news, and particularly political news, held no terrors for him. He could tear through that stuff like a frat boy through a sixpack.

If asked, “Why don't you do your homework at school?” he would say, “No, no, in order to truly comprehend, I need the chaos of my family manse where I learned to read as an act of self protection. I turn on some music loud enough to muffle if not mask the snuffles, cries and poundings upstairs and down of my multifarious brothers and sisters, and dive into whatever textbook is required. I go so far down while reading that I have been able to shut out a virulent argument between two of my sisters sufficiently long enough for the thing to flare up, die down, reprise, climax and extinguish itself. As they have a longstanding and deeply rooted antipathy, and much lungpower, this takes some doing.”

How do we know this to be true? Because it just happened. His interlocutor was Alix Streeter's roommate Sara Tarte. She and Newsie knew each other from afternoon Gallic class, a lightly attended but intense seminar run by the junior dean, Mr. Donald Kipling. Sara and Newsie would stand outside the classroom blaspheming, “Holy Mary Mother of God please let Dean Kipling be sick today, Amen,” in that rapid, almost mumbled, delivery that distinguishes the truly church-educated from mere Sunday participants.

Sara had stopped off on her way to her parttime condition of servitude as a data entry drone in the Registrar's office. Dull and underpaid, it at least beat working in food service. Sara liked Newsie's opinionated insouciance. He knew she was a woman but could see further than her breasts. She felt he had a heart but was not called to explore it. So they were closely distant, or distantly close, depending on the weather.

Sara sat down and Newsie began, familiarly and without preliminary, “So I'm talking to Zondra and shes giving out about what a drama queen Shelia is being over Burt, citing chapter and verse and telling me how boring Zondra is for all the cheap theatrics, and I'm thinking, Sheila, darling, if only you knew how many of your friends say the same abouit you.”

Sara tilted her head at him and asked, “So why didn't you tell her that?”

“Well, as Satch the Preterist said, 'There's some folks that, if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.' If she ever learns she is a drama queen it is going to be because of some interior process, not because somebody told her anything. So I pursued the highly uncharacteristic course of holding my tongue.”

“Using both hands, no doubt.” And then Sara, knowing a strategic gesture/moment combination when she saw one, stuck her tongue out at him and left.

Newsie went back to the bowels of the Fiscal Post. There lurked a detailed article on the effect of the opium trade on the currency of the lush jungle Kingdom of Lan Na: “More Bhang for the Baht?” He was again content.

CHAPTER 8 - Before Rehearsal, in the Dining Room of Shadwell Hall

"I dunno, Marty, what do you want to do?" Jean (Blue Jean) Flagler delivered the line heavy with quotation marks straight from the good, strong black and white TV kinescope she’d seen in film studies. They were standing around the table in the dining room of the English Department faculty offices, which were in a house called Dunciad Hall. Blue Jean had just come in from Fr. Mt. Rose's office, Marco from outside. They were waiting for TJ, who was late from rehearsal. The Newspaper Student was in the corner, looking through the verses in an elderly paperback copy of "The Visioun of the Faire Field Fulle of Folke."

Marco, who was not named Marty and had never acted in either the play of the same name nor the one Caitlin was quoting, put his gloved outdoor hand on the stack of books at the end of the dining table. He asked her, "How about the Spot? It's closer. Or there's Onesie's. Support the alumni."

The selection of student boiteries within walking distance was eclectic but not extensive. The "Spot o' Bovver" was, despite its English name, an Irish pub from the days long before such things were either famous or franchised, its origin merely that an Irishman had become involuntarily stranded from the diplomatic service and opened a bar rather than go home. On the other hand, "L'Albergo d'Italia Una" was founded by an alumnus who had read too much of the works of Jozef Teodor Korzeniowski. Both were located in bungalow houses of the 1920s, wooden balloon framed one story porch-girt structures with narrow wooden siding overlapped like boat strakes. It was the vernacular architecture of Harrassville, standard but unsung since the Grand Fire of 1901 had destroyed the rail yards and altered the city's history.

The true bar district lay between the campus and downtown along the great ribbon road called Young Street that led from the water impoundment structures west of town that kept downtown from flooding most years to the Vessel Channel on the east. The inner miles from downtown to just west of Sanctas Esclabos contained more restaurants and bars than half the rest of the city combined. But students infrequently ventured far enojugh t drive since so few had cars. Yes, this was a long time a go, wasn’t it?

You kinda pick an older couple who are the adult windows onto the world that are not your parents.

Is it as faudian as all that

Probably

You mean all we did in the 16th century was escape from medieval systematizers onlyh to have another pair of them, economic and psyuchological, try the same trick in the 19th and 20th

You’re onluy riight.

Humodor club procellian visitors non sybarite

The unfinished song will just lie in wait for you, whimpering like an abandoned child in a snowstorm, waylaying every extra moment of consciousness with sharp guilt and bright shame. That's the artist’s drive for you. It's the grain of sand out of which you get to make the pearl. At the usual oyster-high price, of course. No discount.

It was a characteristic of that time and place that cultural allegiances manifested themselves far more intensely, regularly and visibly in musical tastes than in literature, sculpture, dance or photographic choices. As Fr Milstead observed in wonder one day, “Doesn’t anybody play any instrument other than the guitar?” Well, statistically speaking, no. But even within that one portmanteau lay strong differences. At the time we speak of tastes were largely said to be divided among those of shit-kickers and goat-ropers, ex-hippies, the terminally cool, and vigorous party animals.

Now appearing at the coffee house I Solisti di Zagreb, a folksinger so authentically East Coahuilan that he is named after two counties, promoting his first record, "Live and in Pain." Here’s Collard Stocktank!

Here’s a little tune I’d like to play called X, and it goes something, but not exactly, like this.

I first recognized this song years ago when I heard Y play it, but now I’ve played it so many times I no longer recognize it.

That evening the wind had kicked up with that raw bonepenetrating quality that mere 50 degree temperatures can achieve at 80% humidity.

Your mama says a prayer for you, it gets to God faster than a regular prayer. Same for a grandmother.

What’s a cold Bohemian sandwich in Etruscan opera? “Che gelida panina.”

How are the girl;s treating ou? Same as usual, I guess. Well, don’t let two of them give you a head to toe baby oil massage more than once a week. Why? More than that is bad for the skin.

In heaven croissants are a vegetable. Hey, there's an idea. Transplantations. In hell, sex is torture. No, not the same. In hell, torture is sex. Better.

CHAPTER NINE – The Opening Rehearsal

Sandy-haired, affable John Branard was of the University’s second graduating class and had returned after his armed services commitment to teach modern drama. He directed two plays a year, a Hexpire classic in the fall and a modern effort every spring, at no extra charge to the university, just because it was fun for him, instructive for the students, and a cultural beacon in a vast wasteland of lukewarm civic culture. This fall we were doing “Measure for Measure,” the final comedy, and the seats of Estlin Hall were dotted with those who were about to try out. It was customary for Branard to sketch the conception of the play aloud and then ask students to read parts with reference to his schema so that he might select his cast.

That evening Branard, who could impersonate a sixty year old by dropping the tip of his nose one quarter inch and shifting his stance a millimetre to the left before even uttering a line, stood on the Estlin dias and looked out at two dozen students.

“As Fr. Mt. Rose has taught us all, Hexpire is always concerned to have two motions active in every play, public and private. Each character bears a public burden and a private grief in a tragedy, a public function and private activities in a comedy. In Measure for Measure, or MM for short, the rightful Duke, 'the fantastical duke of dark corners,' decides to temporarily abdicate in favor of a young, untried deputy, one Angelo. Saying he wants to have more draconian law enforcement than would make him popular if he did it himself, he hastily departs and leaves Angelo in the hands of elderly Aeschulys, a counselor in the ineffective Poloniusoid mode.

There is a fine line among taking liberties with the tgext, and amplifyng the text.

Measure for Measure Schema

1 With extraeneous verbiage suitable for stripmining

In the course of writing what I hope will prove to be a comic novel set at a place not a thousand miles from the University of St. Thomas, I need to fabricate a student production of a Shakespeare play. I had planned on using Troilus and Cressida, with the conceit being the soldiers are all football players clumping about in cleats and shoulder pads, carrying helmets (Texas orange vs. Oklahoma red), the women are all cheerleaders, Ulysses, Priam, Menelaus are coaches, and Pandar, gawd bless ‘im, is the Press with a great big card sticking out of his hatband. (Thersites was a special problem until I decided he would make a great sports medicine trainer/waterboy.)

However, upon rereading the play again, I decided it is just too tragic for my purposes. Doing war as football unfortunately disguises the savagery of war – I loved Branagh doing Hank Cinq all in the mud – and provides insufficiently acrid commentary on Troilus’ essential betrayal of not wooing honorably this woman he supposedly loves, in the face of which treachery nothing she subsequently does can be condemned.

Last night my Canadian friend Ted McGee (SMC 7T1), now of St Jerome’s at University of Waterloo, and I went to see the Folger Shakespeare Measure for Measure directed by Philadelphian Aaron Posner. Despite some excessive gimmickry with puppets (evidently intending to point up the Duke/Angelo, Overdone/Pompey, attempted Angelo/Isabella relationships) and an overly-commanding Duke (Mark Zeisler, though his orders are never by any chance carried out!) the Isabella (Karen Peakes) managed both the necessary innocence and the requisite force, while the Angelo (Ian Merrill Peakes) properly broke out in concupiscence as if it were cancer. At the end, the Duke holds his hand out to Isabella after all the other couples have embraced; but she stands still as a figurehead, deciding, and the lights go down on his outstretched hand and her immobility. That lovely tiny stage at the Folger, I swear no bigger than the dias at UST’s Dahl Hall, is always a treat. Besides teaching, Ted’s devoting the last 10 years of his academic career to doing the first new definitive text of Othello in fifty years, so consults the Folger archives every spring.

Afterwards, I was inspired. My latest device is to have my student-lover-pairs (two, of course) try to do Measure for Measure. The plan is worked out below. My question to you, esteemed sir, is – other than

-- how are you surviving,

-- do you squeeze sufficient recompense from the wily and parsimonious Basilians and the Alley,

-- are you letting life treat you well,

-- are prosperity and contentment suitably conjunct upon your hearth,

-- is your health bouncy,

-- are your integuments tensile, and

-- are wife and childer all a-tanto,

-- etc. etc.?

– if this actually were to be produced, depending on the various skills of director and cast, would it have a reasonable chance of working theatrically? Or have I cluttered it up too much with over-interpretation?

I know I have no claim upon your services as a dramaturge other than ancient acquaintance verging, in my case, well over into affection and respect; but if you would have time to dash off an ASCII scrawl to the effect, “yes, you could get away with this,” or “no, forget it,” I would consider myself materially assisted at what I hope would be small cost to your good self.

Mine own circumstantialty is employed as a tech writer at Fannie Mae documenting business process reengineering, divorced after 25 years, two sons (23 and 19) living with me, sober 26 years in AA, heart attack survivor, as overweight as Nero Wolfe’s seventh of a ton, living in the close-in DC suburb of Bethesda, running a political blog on the side and, to end where we came in, working on a novel. I have the agent lined up, half the first chapter, 2/3 of the second, and 7/8 of the outline done. When I complete that assemblage the agent will unleash his stipendiary-seeking hound-pack and I will possess my soul in patience until they bring down some prey.

Measure for Measure: a treatment for a possible production

Shakkspir’s last comedy, 1605. Quoth Edward Gregory Lee, CSB: “The plays of William Shakespeare were written by William Shakespeare or another man of the same name.”

Act 1 Scene 1, 2, 3: Center: Mistress Overdone’s front garden, tables. Right: Friar John’s cell’s front garden, statuary. Left: Nunnery’s front garden, hedges. Doors opening into back. Stage apron is the street connecting Mistress Overdone’s, the Friary, and the Nunnery. Streetsign crossed at far corner of stage, Spielstrasse and Traumstrasse.

Duke is manic, impulsive, febrile, thoughtless – no gravitas – all emotion, no brain. When disguised as Friar, he is acutely manipulative, sharply argumentative, pouting, controlling, impatient, sighing, ready to explode but doesn’t.

Angelo is an accountant, an ear-whisperer, “not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be, but an attendant lord, politic, cautious, meticulous, one who will do to start a progress, swell a scene or two...” totally out of his depth and cannot believe his good luck at being allowed to twiddle the levers of real power, so he does so irresponsibly from the git-go, just like Dr. Faustus.

Escalus is a PR man, sleek and smooth; rapid darting glances.

Claudio is a vacant, vapid frat boy.

Juliette is a sullen Goth.

Provost is a huge, hulking bouncer missing teeth and speaking cockney.

Lucio is a soldier on leave, a jarhead, weightlifter, short-tempered, ill-used.

Overdone is fat, proud, rheumy-eyed, glasses-wearing, mobcapped, aproned, uses refayned vowels, an upper servant.

Pompey is butlerine, dignified, erect, slow, deferential, lacking Stephen Frye’s Jeevesian lofty disapproval.

Friar John is portly, jovial, corrupt: (Duke bribes his way in).

Isabella is a jolly hockeysticks athlete (not tennis but lacrosse), chunky, muscled, ungraceful except in full flight.

Sr. Francesca, never to be seen again, is a slender, radiant butch-haired lesbian far more beautiful than Isabella.

Mariana is a mousy, decayed aristo in good clothes (with a huge ring on one finger) but with a distinct aura of repressed, bitter fury.

The conceit is that, (before summoning Escalus in I, i) in dumbshow – while dozing at Overdone’s garden table – the Duke gets a threatening letter delivered by two silent, menacing Mafiosi and promptly starts packing (Overdone brings him his suitcase, evidently he lodges there) and organizing his flight, intending to leave Escalus in the lurch and Angelo as the staked-out sacrifice to cover his retreat. “The bleating of the goat excites the tiger.” Angelo is too young, inexperienced, and dazzled to notice he’s being set up. Seen within the bawdy house over the conversing shoulders of Duke and Escalus, pregnant Juliette is pole-dancing, tapster silent, Pomp tapster waits. “Look where he comes,” sarcastic, as Angelo emerges from a curtained alcove, clothing in disarray. A naked female arm (Mariana’s by a jewel, perhaps) caresses him goodbye from behind as he leaves to nervously answer Duke and Escalus, who are drinking at a front table, buxom serving wenches parading by to change ashtrays, fill glasses, bringing copies of Vienna Tagblatt, bending over all the while, ignored by the older men as Angelo’s eyes pop out of his head… The Mafiosi, recognizable by their fedoras, overcoats, and violin cases, will later reappear as prison guards and anywhere else they can be slipped in along the edges to prevent the Duke’s escape – and only at the end, after the Duke gives them a fat envelope whose contents he separately got upon his return from Overdone, Angelo, Escalus and Friar John, will they remove their hats and coats, pluck out real violins, and join the wedding guests.

Tha’s about the size of it. I intend to work out the other scenes as I need to show my characters interacting in rehearsals, but this is the gist. Bless you, Charles, retrospectively, now and henceforward. For this relief, much thanks, should you be able to give it; and if not, may you have been amused, however slightly, by my attempt to secure it from you.

Shakespeare hated incompetence. It was the biggest sin a ruler could commit, because it was a betrayal of the realm. Murder your cousin, well, maybe OK. Have a courtier not respond when you call for him? Fatal. If the court wasn’t efficient, that was the ruler’s fault without exception.

In his tragedies, Shakespeare has a little device that works every time. It clues you in on whether a kingdom is well or ill-managed. When the king needs a messenger, there’d better be one ready. If there isn’t, that king is doomed. The comedies, however, are a little trickier.

Tom Stoppard’s formula in the mouth of the Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967) is deceptively simple: “The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.” Shifting its gravamen to comedy, the dictum might emerge as, “The bad end luckily, the good happily.”

In Shakespeare’s moral universe, few artifacts are as complex as his last comedy, Measure for Measure (1605). In sum, the good intentions of the Duke are frustrated by the evil intentions of his Deputy; but then the evil intentions of the Deputy are then frustrated by the good works of the Duke. The result is a stalemate, or standoff, in that the kindgom is no worse than it was; and a bunch of people get married, some cheerfully.

The plot is that the Duke of Vienna, at a time of possible war with his Hungarian neighbor, fails to raise an army but instead temporarily abdicates his throne to a deputy, Angelo, and goes off for a while. The deputy immediately starts enforcing old laws, long lapsed. Evading public questions of poverty and disease, the deputy instead displays an unhealthy sexual turn to his authority, closing some whorehouses (but not others, to the dismay of Mistress Overdone and her bawd, Pompey.) He also proclaims that any young man who has impregnated an unmarried woman must die. The first legal victim, Claudio, is haled to prison despite having a contract of marriage with Juliette that has not been solemnized until a dowry question can be settled. Claudio’s friend Lucio rallies round and sends Claudio’s sister Isabella, about to enter the convent, to plead his case with the deputy. As she pleads, the deputy’s moral center cracks and he determines to release Claudio if virgin Isabella will sully her vows and her integrity by having sex with him. Isabella repudiates this hideous bargain, weighing her soul as more important than her brother’s life. The Duke, hiding out in a local friary, hears of his deputy’s corruption and mismanagement, and instead of coming out to put a stop to all the foolishness, proceeeds to compound it… He scares the liver and lights out of Claudio, breaks Isabella’s heart, lets Juliette think her man is dead, stirs even the stodgy Provost to pity, and provokes Lucio into insulting him. Yes, he does discover Angelo’s weakness and Escalus’ ineffectuality, but need not have risked the peace of the kingdom, and the happiness of so many subjects, to do so. And he does all this to produce a result that could have been obtained by his never leaving town.

Add Kate Keepdown to the canonical list of Shakespearean whores.

Angelo = Claudius, Escalus = Polonius

CHAPTER 12 - Dormitory Daring

My room was on the 1st floor of a 19th century mansion whose various rooms the university had divided out for student housing. The ceilings were 15 ft tall, a magnificent proportion. It was not a square room; it was pentagonal, with the upper right hand corner cut off for the 5th side, and a window onto the front porch set into it. It is directly behind the pillar that seems to grow out of my head in a photo taken by Scott VanNote when we were there for the 70th AA Anniversary Convention.

That cloudy, mild October day in 1968 the window was open. I had had classes the first 3 periods straight and come home. Alice had 4th and 5th periods off and then one last 6th period math class. So she came by unannounced and just stepped through the open porch window into the room. My roommate was off at lawschool and never came home before dark.

Al looked so sexy and fresh turning sideways to put one leg through that window in a navy wool above-the-knee skirt, a dark patterned blouse, a charcoal jacket, gray panty hose and smart black shoes. I would wear jeans or khakis to class but always with a button-down ironed shirt and a tie and, being in Canada, a jacket. So her being dressed not all the way up but kinda sorta was no surprise.

I came over to take her hand to help her balance, and the gesture just flowed into an embrace three steps from the window. Now, there is something elegant about kissing someone immediately upon getting together and proceeding while doing so to removing one another’s clothes, still standing, not necessarily in haste but with no damn delay either. It was just we-suddenly-figured-out-this-is-what-we’re-here-for eagerness that may or may not precede passion but always accompanies sensuality.

Al shrugged off the jacket about 90 seconds into our kiss, right after I reached up under it to palm her right breast. I caught the cloth before it hit the floor and draped it on my chair. I was lucky we were so close to it; otherwise I would have been tempted to drop the jacket, whch would have upset her; and that would have slowed us down.

Possibly some people have forgotten how much of a turn on it is to be nuzzling your woman’s neck with your nose while nibbling on her clavicle, hands on her ass under her skirt, sliding her pantyhose down her hips. But not me. Meantime Al was standing on one foot to slip the other shoe off while simultaneously unbuckling my belt.

When Al bent forward to help slip her pantyhose over her knees she revealed the naked nape of her neck beneath her hair. Standing out of pantyhose one foot at a time instead of lying down to slide them off is an acrobatic act indicative of fervor. And anybody who does not nibble that magnificent neck muscle in such a position has lost his mind, while he who does do so helps her lose hers to the sensation.

Many young women went braless in those days, and this was Al’s first semester at doing so. She had those small handfulsized breasts that didn’t really need supporting. She said she was surprised by how much she liked the way the engineering students in her math course looked at her. Once she straightened up, shivering from the neck down, I unbuttoned her blouse while stepping out of the pants she had so kindly unbuckled for me.

While I pulled her blouse out of her skirt and back off her shoulders, she was trying to undo my shirt buttons. We had to break the kiss to do this and were laughing at each other’s clumsiness as we did so. She swayed her torso from side to side twice to rub her nipples across my chest. Soon I was naked and she had only her skirt on. I reached in underneath it with one hand to graze her wetness while cupping a breast with the other.

During the de-shirting we had crossed the three more steps to the narrow iron bed, so she fell away from me onto it. When she lay back I slipped a finger into her and lifted gently to raise her hips; with my other hand I pushed her skirt up under her ass and up over her hipbones so she was naked above and below the narrow band of cloth at her waist.

She kept her hips cocked because of my pressure within her and her hipbones stuck out as her belly sank in: one of the most erotic views ever seen on the face of God’s beautiful earth. My eyes feasted for a moment and were replete: hair splayed on the pillow, skirt bunched at the waist, my hand gripping her sex, her arms urgently reaching up to me, a look of pure concentration on her face.

One of Al’s less agreeable temperamentalities was that she would not let me go down on her. I later came to think she was afraid of enjoying herself too much in some guilty way. One of her more agreeable ones, however, was how much she liked the moment of insertion. Her eyes got wide, her mouth dropped open, her breathing changed, the little muscles at the side of her mouth twitched, she was so eager and wondrous that I always tried to prolong it and tease her. But ever since the first time she would always grab my ass to drive me inward while shoving her hips upward to complete the connection. “That’s the best part,” she sighed as we repeated the dose that day.

“Yeah?” I said in that funny voice everybody gets when they try to talk while making love. “How about this part?” I asked as I moved slowly within her, tense but languid. “Hmmm,” was her only answer except to push herself onto me harder.

She liked to feel me in her at the angle created when my arms were straight at the elbows holding most of my weight off her, looking down at her face and hair slightly from the top since I was about 5 inches taller than she. She preferred the frog position herself with her ankles crossed across my calves or, in extremis, the backs of my knees. As we moved together I loved looking further down to watch her breasts jiggle, the arc of her nipples echoing our strokes with the tiniest timelag, like wavelets in a pool. And the adorable, unreachable crease at her waist where her legs bent wide and upwards to admit me was shockingly offset by the dark cloth of her wanton skirt above.

I knew we were getting close when she would scrunch her neck up into her shoulders and throw her head back so she could see my mouth and chin instead of looking straight out at my chest. My play was always to go as slow as I could stand to do so she had the fun of urging me on faster with her hips, her hands, her increasingly rapid breathing and fluttering eyes. We always made the little iron bedstead creak alarmingly and I hoped no one came up the walk and across the porch to hear us as we had not closed the window; only a thin curtain offered no sound, and little visual, protection.

Usually she pushed me out at the last minute so as to simulate birth control, but today she was very far gone in ecstasy and had her hands firmly on my ass keeping me in, instead of on my hipbones pushing me out. With sighs and panting we sped into the final gallop and crashed into blinding fireworks simultaneously, a trick we had mastered from the beginning and never lost. She slowed down moving sooner than I did, but I kept stroking slowly until the exquisite tip-pain stopped me. I treasured that wetness we both made and how she gripped me in the contractions of her overflow.

Hearing her breathing slow I tried to bend down to suckle a breast, knowing this would slide me out of her. Then I slipped further down to slowly kiss both nippletips in turn, then her bellybutton, her iliac crests, her pubic mound – but no licking further down because she didn’t like it. I straddled her by putting one foot on the floor; she moved her leg in so I could lie beside her; I cuddled on her shoulder, my top knee on her near thigh with my hand shielding her sex as we heaved the last full exhalation together.

Hearing returned to us gradually, but the house was quiet with most of its denizens being in class, and only a small breeze stirred the curtains. The afternoon light washed into the room tentatively but it bathed us both as I looked at her profile from a distance of two inches while she gazed straight up at the ceiling so high above. The wall my bed was against had a short corridor on the other side so at least we had not been entertaining anybody in the next room.

Al said dreamily, “The other time we made love in the afternoon I could feel you leaking out of me the whole class I went to after. Do you think anybody can tell?” I kissed her and said, “No, honey, no, they can’t. Besides, they’re too busy staring at your breasts.” She smacked me with her free hand but not too hard.

Knowing she didn’t want to be late, soon I slid out of bed and gave her a hand to sit up. I said, “Good thing that’s a strong wool skirt. The wrinkles will hang out of it while you walk, just like a Scotsman’s kilt.” She wrinkled her nose at me and held out her hand for her shirt.

Once dressed she ran her hands through her hair and said, “Well, I guess I’ll see you for dinner tonight at the Co-Op. My, my, what would my mother say if she knew what I did between classes?” I said, “She’d be envious of your good fortune. Are you going out by the window you came in by?” She said, “Of course. Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

And I exhaled deeply, contemplatively, exhaustively and gratefully, and went back to reading Shakespeare or Chaucer, I forget. I do know it was somebody really absorbing; they were strong enough words to take my mind off the tingle in my spine, the scent on my finger, the little cut underneath my tongue from kissing so strongly.

CHAPTER 17 – An Ecclesiastical Feuilleton Left Lying About in the Pews of the Student Chapel

Archdemon’s Lenten Appeal

To be Read from the Pulpit in All the Parishes

of the Archdemonicate of Hell Gate

 

Dearly Beloathed Spawn of Satan:

 

It is the festive time of Lent, during which we rejoice in and commemorate how our Maximum Leader’s near triumph over the Forces of Light led by our Enemy was so closely contested. In the midst of such vast matters it is easy to forget how simple our duty ultimately is. And as we continue our Lenten celebration and rejoicing it behooves all of us to remember the humble Hot Cross Bun.

 

Defaced as it is with the symbol of our Defeat, you may wonder how we, the parishoners of the Archdemonicate of Hell Gate who do not even eat, can draw any inspiration or insight from a raisin-besmirched lump of gluten.

 

Yet as we go about our modest daily duties of multiplying pain and suffering, we too require sustenance and reinforcement if we are not to backslide into routinely torpid efforts. Continually subjecting humans to temptation, deception, and fraudulent glimpses of what they foolishly hope will prove to be the tastier sins in the catalog, is not a piece of cake!

 

As we have no material bodies we must subsist upon ideas. And the idea that gives our work the strongest impetus is fear. Just as Homer depicted the gods as feeding upon the smoke of the burnt offerings of cattle, so in a manner of speaking do we feed on the fear that humans exude like their very sweat.

 

What wonderfully bleak and sodden days the earthly weather in the Northern Hemisphere now brings us! These are among the best in the liturgical calendar; they precede the unfortunately irrepressible annual outbreak of new life among the temperate species. Naturally, such vulgar fecundity is not for us. We may instead extort grim satisfaction from the readings of Horrid Scripture with which the humans beguile themselves at this season. The sacred texts are rife with betrayal, hatred, stupidity, despair, hopelessness, political chicanery, economic inequality and racial prejudice, especially during Horrid Week.

 

And on Palm Sunday we read of the fickle crowd acclaiming the ridiculous figure of our Enemy’s Son riding upon a donkey. Yet that same crowd in Jerusalem, representing all of humanity, would turn upon our Enemy’s Son and demand his death, as we read upon Horrid Thursday. It is this propensity of theirs -- to be so easily induced or distracted into rejecting not only the source of their salvation, but the only sure and certain hope of happiness in their short and burdened lives -- that makes our work one of encouraging their natural tendencies. So rewarding!

 

When the baker makes a Hot Cross Bun, the last ingredient applied is the white sugar paste, drawn in the form of the mechanism of the Son’s satisfactorily humiliating, though regrettably temporary, death. It is this symbol that transforms the pastry into a teaching tool for the Enemy. To the Enemy, ordinary life leads to salvation, and even ordinary bread can remind the dullest human of his salvation and redemption.

 

Fortunately for us, however, whose Maximum Leader has always striven against the Enemy and all his ways, the ordinary can also lead to damnation. It is our happy task, in fact, to convince humans that damnation is preferable to ordinary life and is, in fact, inevitable so they might as well not struggle against it.

 

In this conceit we are materially assisted by a huge concatenation of social and economic forces. Indeed, the world seems to have constructed itself these days to assist us, rather than the Enemy. There are even those who posit that this is some Divine Plan of the Enemy’s to strengthen his ultimate triumph.

 

This kind of defeatist talk is naturally being dealt with by our Maximum Leader with the utmost ferocity, force, and dispatch. Our condolences go out to the families of the disappeared, but we remind you that a defeatist Demon Spawn is no spawn at all, and deserves whatever disappearance the Maximum Leader may devise. For truly is it said, The Wrath of Our Leader Is As Justice Unto Us.

 

Their sad passage reminds us that we must resolutely pursue the souls of humans with every device at our command. At one time, doubt was a useful snare. We could confuse men and women into destruction with a little logic and less effort. But now we need stronger medicine when the faithful are impervious to logic while the doubtful are some of our strongest foes.

 

No, only something as simple as the Hot Cross Bun itself will work. And the primal simple something of all humanity is, of course, forgetfulness. In forgetfulness of the Enemy, humans always find fear. Anything we can do to distract humans from the Enemy’s presence will lead inevitably to fear.

 

For of fear are born our best friends: pride, self-centeredness, lack of sympathy, oblivion to others, superiority, inferiority, self-effacement, defensiveness. All of these disproportionate views of the human self stem from fear, and lead straight to our Maximum Leader. His soothing whispers of riches, power, domination, and all the false flags that take away freedom, substituting reactivity instead – it is these that we prepare the way for when we wean humans away from the Enemy and into fearfulness.

 

So go forth, my fellow Spawn, and discourage the humans while it is still today. Their need shall be our opportunity; their weakness our prey; their fear and pain our constant labor to increase.

 

And thus, when you see the seasonal bakery goods of song and story proliferate upon the earth we labor so hard to doom, we remember always our motto, “Loathe thy neighbor.”

CHAPTER 10 - THE LETTER IN THE NOTEBOOK

You know it wasn't fair of you...You looked so cute shaking your head "No," so emphatically. With your head down, not looking at me, your hair flew side to side like you were a photo model tossing your head. Just shaking your head "No," like you didn't want to be saying it but you had to and it took all your strength to. Like your reluctance and desire were crossed, interbred, mutated, with all the strength of misalliance. It was like you were trying to convince yourself as much as you were trying to convince me, maybe even more. Meanwhile the moon peered across the darkened hood through the trees illuminating only one chrome spot, and pierced the windshield to land on your shoulder. And you wanted to say "yes" but didn't. Yes it's complicated. We don't have any more time than now. "As a piece of pomegranate are thy temples within thy hair," sang some somber, sacred King ….I still see you, still shaking your head "No," and when I do, for some reason I think we are both still crying…

CHAPTER 30 – An Embarrassment

The night Duke got beat in the Sweet Sixteen there was Courtney who had been running the bar at the Strine Steak joint with her usual iron hand and her hair flipping past her ears all the time as she moved in her usual efficient hurry and then she ducked out even though the crowd was way anti-Duke and excited and actually cheering and got out of her uni real fast even before shift end at 10 and I saw her come out in a black kneelength skirt with a kind of pelisse jacket over a blouse and black stockings and boots and stood at her usual spot at the end of the bar taking a drag off her girlfriend's cigarette and smiled at her of course you can't hear but it looked like she was telling her friend something and shrugged her shoulders with a half smile and then she was sort of standing on tiptoe and then down again like she was exercising and then this dude comes in with a macho stubble and short hair and a black jacket and he's even shorter than she is and he sits down at the end stool and she comes up to him and puts her two hands on his head and holds his hair and kisses him a long one and then doesn't stand back any when she's done and he's nonchalantly sitting there and she looks over at her girlfriend and raises her eyebrows but not like she's unhappy just oh well and then after the game is over they walk out and I can tell she's a lot hotter for this date than he is and I'm going Oh god why does she have to get it up for someone who won't even look at her much and probably is kind of OK in the sack but not nearly enthusiastic enough for her and he looks like one of these stoneface real estate developer lawyers or somebody with some bucks but not much heart and here she's been busting her but keeping this dive running halfway efficiently and halfway humanly and instead of getting some kind of relief or release instead it's another swinging dick convinced of his boring superiority and in no way interested in her various curiosities and she's too deferential to notice that he's not helping her open up and he's too self-centered to think she might could stand some encouragement so she'll probably break her heart overe this guy who won't hardly notice after he gets bored and decides a waitress is beneath him and goes after some barbie doll corporate PR type instead and Courtney goes back to work and wonders what she has to do to get a decent one to stick around but it all takes months and by then maybe basketball has started up again the following fall and she's got some more scars on her heart and he's got another notch on his gunhandle…

CHAPTER 39 – A Theologian’s Folly

Preceded by the huge and terrible belly of his melancholy, Fr. Eustacio Westmayne entered the classroom with his customary lassitude. Though ostensibly buoyed by his faith, Fr. Westmayne (“Stash” to his paucity of friends) brought to the teaching of philosophy a temperament so thoroughly depressed that his students felt instinctively and automatically cheered in contrast. Only the most rarified of seminarians and a few brave lay souls dared inhabit the lifeless and lethargic lectures with which Fr. Westmayne struggled to cope. A certain brotherhood of the trenches therefore obtained even among those seminarians whose conflicting theological styles kept them otherwise apart.

he evinced a certain pious thickness, a resistance to exploring the nearer corridors of thought that was as much temperamental as intellectual.

Dialectical Ephemeralism

Dibernardonists

Hypotheorism

Neo-Expedientialism

Normalism

Post-Ecstaticism

Texegetes

Thersitical Ontology

Ultraquists

CHAPTER 23 – In the Little House

The Art History Department was presided over by three dishy young professors, much desired by both male and female students. (One of them was gay, but nobody knew whom it was.) Martin Clay, “the slimy Limey,” was an iconographer.

“The Ingres young man of today is the Bouguereauoisie of tomorrow.” Discuss with reference to the efflorescence of French Academic painting.

CHAPTER 19 – Parked In the Galago Outside Fossanuova Hall with Blue Jean

Fossanuova, the Citeauxian monastery where St Thomas Dominaquin repented his unfinished lifeswork of heartless logic and died reconciled to the messy disorderliness of God’s own humanity.

You know how when you surprise yourself into kissing someone for the first time and one of your hands is like in the wrong place under her chin or squashed behind her and you don’t want to move it because you don’t want to break the kis but yu cant figure out how it got thee and nw its starting to go to sleep or ache but you are still liplocked with utter astonishment and joy?

CHAPTER 40 – Arbitrary Squelchage

the blue monks performing their epistrophy ceremony on the steps of the library booted to welder etc... climactic crespucule round midnight pearshapidity of tone then in walked bud from the bright misissippi … Well, You Needn't Trinkle, Trinkle Ruby, My Dear Rhythm-A-Ning Pannonica Off Minor Monk's Mood Monk's Dream Misterioso Just a Gigolo In Walked Bud I Surrender, Dear Green Chimneys Four in One Evidence Eronel Epistrophy Darn That Dream Crepuscule With Nellie Bye-Ya Bright Mississippi Blue Monk Ask Me Now 'Round Midnight

[from the Official State History of East Coahuila entry on Harrasville]

Adjoining counties: Wall, Mt. Gomez, Freed, Rooms, W. Gall, Braz and Ft Curl.

Harrass County

County Seat: Pierce's Junction (now subsumed within incorporated Harrasville)

the muddy bogs of the coastal prairie... sweet gum, razorgrass and swordweed... The forty-three-inch annual rainfall and temperatures that averaged from a low of 45° F in the winter to 93° in summer... yellow fever epidemics... despite the efforts of Masons who greeted one another in 1837 and the Presbyterians and Episcopalians who formed churches in 1839, the town remained infamous for drunkenness, dueling, brawling, prostitution, and profanity... a whisky and trombone town, a journalist called it...

Saddleleigh Wuorn Estate, magnificent 150’ tall live oaks with canopies carefully propped to cover 150’ circles of ground, the result of millions of hours of sweated labor in the heat now standing, somnolent and noble and oversized and underutilized, a plantation home whose cotton and rice and cattle laborers had always received less concern than the commodities they grew and shipped. Now all that money was nicely purified by time so that the house did not strike you as the endless factory districts of Crim Tartary might -- malific, horrid and repellent -- but more benign, casting the illusion that you, even an ordinary reader, might have lived there rather than been one who worked the cotton stooped with a shorthandled hoe over the harsh and unyielding earth.

Entry handbook east coahuila

Whisky & trombone town

Kinda town whose state u loses 4 minor bowl games in a row

Uecah-throwup

WWI lecture….

CHAPTER 15 – AT HAZARD STREET

James, I'm bored.

Paul, I'm reading.

Yeah, but, I'm really bored.

But I'm really reading.

Aw, come on, do something.

I already am.

Let's go. C'mon, I need to go pick up a stash.

Chapter 27 – Sermon

It is in the nature of the religious life tht a great deal of eloquence is habitully employed with some effort and assiduity in forms that are never preserved and almost always half forgotten before they are completed. Nevertheless the work goes on, and it is compounded on a university campus by the fact that sermons are but once a week whereas lectures are every day. Few of the profesors had written books, none had written up and published their lectures. Yet the labor and thoughtfullness exerted was as much as if they had done so.

Saturday 15 March 2008

 

Dear Kerry-

 

We have been going round about the point of God’s goodness and love – “the care of God as we understood Him” – for quite some time. The instant passage from Job is the fifth or sixth time we have been here. So I propose to treat it at some length, as much to help me as to help you.

 

I am given to understand (by those more studious than I, whom I recall but cannot cite) that the Lord of the Hebrew Testament is an evolving presence. Beginning as a formless Creative Power He develops into, or is progressively revealed to be, the Giver of the Law, whose commandments His people omit at their peril. He shows His people His power over other nations and over all of nature. Periodically His people worship Him well, but then also periodically they backslide and are punished with plague, exile, wandering in the desert, etc. Even after the imposition of the commandments and the establishment of the Temple and the Holy City their government becomes lax at times of sin, and disasters result.

 

Now, all of this speaks only to God’s power. So far He is no different than any petty tyrant who happens to occupy the Throne of Heaven, and that is the rock and hard place of your current condition as I understand it.

 

But by the time you go from Kings (600 BCE) to Psalms (250 BCE) God begins to be worshiped as the font of all goodness, mercy and love, and it is these attributes that are the unique historic contribution of the Hebrew God to world cosmology. The ascription of infinite and irresistable love for His people on earth to God is a major human breakthrough. (Though God is what He always is, our understanding of Him improved.)

 

Job is written toward the beginning of the changeover period from a merely all-powerful to an all-loving God (500 BCE.) Inherent in Job’s notions of power are, however, certain elements of love. If we conceive the Divine Order as naturally and inevitably inclusive of love, as impossible without love, as empty without love, then we see the path travelled by the prophets as they learned, and revealed, the thorough power of God. That power is ultimately inconceivable in its fullness without love. The Divine Order would be measurably less orderly without love and therefore, to the extent it was lacking, less Divine.

 

The fact that God’s love is a discovery made within history implies that there is a parallel psychological breakthrough available to, though not inevitable for, God’s people today. We proceed from certainty as to God’s power to the realization that that power must be only good, or it could not be complete. The goodness of God’s power is impossible without the love, the lovingness of God’s power includes the goodness. And without both God’s power would be imperfect.

 

So in this passage from Job, he starts out by implying, “No, I am not afflicted by the Lord because I have been sinful. I am afflicted by the Lord because He would have it so for His own reasons which I do not understand, nor need to.” The he goes on to catalog some of the powers of the Lord, showing that all men and all nature are subject to God’s will and power.

 

The list does not explicitly enumerate love for His creatures as one of God’s attributes. But the notion of a just and righteous Lord, though not mentioned, pervades Job in general and his list(s) in particular. And by this point in history it is extremely difficult to separate out Divine justice from caring, Divine order from love. If the Lord is going to bother with justice at all, He is going to temper it with mercy and love. If He has any regard for His people whatsoever, it is not merely to punish and torment them but it must be to care for them, care for them as infinitely as His power extends.

 

The problem of evil always is, how did the Lord leave room for evil within his creation without Himself instituting it? And the answer always has been, the evil is the creation of mankind and fits into the spaces of creation where mankind goes and leaves God behind. Evil is the absence of good, and it must be labored for with vast human effort or else the Divine would automatically fill that lacuna.

 

Accordingly Job’s place in the larger scriptural story of God’s relations with His people is, like Abraham and Moses, to show that utter trust in the Lord is the only possible stance, whether one feels rewarded in consequence or not. God’s power is so ultimate, and man’s so finite, that only total trust in Him will cover the gap. If you trust in the Lord even in deprivation you have an easier time of it than if you say, “I will only trust Him if good things happen to me.” For then you are in the position of measuring God’s power by your perceptions.

 

If you believe that God’s power is exerted to cause pain to humans, or is capriciously not used to prevent pain when it could and should be, then you are not looking to the Hebrew Lord as revealed in our tradition. He takes care of His people as He sees fit, and part of how He sees fit is, “Bad things happen.” But they do not disprove, much less undermine, God’s love for His human creation.

 

The mystery of how a loving God can allow suffering is one that defeated Job’s friends and, were Job less steadfast of heart, might have puzzled him as well. But he blithely persists in praising God no matter what happens to him personally. And it is that ability to reason beyond his own personal circumstances that makes Job a teacher as well as a subject.

 

Job gets it that God’s plan for mankind in general and for himself in particular is inherently loving and caring. In the classic question, “Who you gonna believe, Me or your lying eyes?” Job always answers, “You, Lord. Insofar as my eyes think they perceive a lack of love from You, they lie.”

 

Affectionately,

Jamie

Job 12

Job's Reply to Zophar

You Think You Are So Great

1 Job said to his friends:

2 You think you are so great,

with all the answers.

3 But I know as much as you do,

and so does everyone else.

4 I have always lived right,

and God answered my prayers;

now friends make fun of me.

5 It's easy to condemn

those who are suffering,

when you have no troubles.

6 Robbers and other godless people

live safely at home

and say,

"God is in our hands!"

If You Want To Learn

7 If you want to learn,

then go and ask

the wild animals and the birds,

8 the flowers and the fish.

9 Any of them can tell you

what the LORD has done.

10 Every living creature

is in the hands of God.

11 We hear with our ears,

taste with our tongues,

12 and gain some wisdom from those

who have lived a long time.

13 But God is the real source

of wisdom and strength.

14 No one can rebuild

what he destroys,

or release

those he has imprisoned.

15 God can hold back the rain

or send a flood,

16 just as he rules over liars

and those they lie to.

17 God destroys counselors,

turns judges into fools,

18 and makes slaves of kings.

19 God removes priests and others

who have great power--

20 he confuses wise,

experienced advisors,

21 puts mighty kings to shame,

and takes away their power.

22 God turns darkness to light;

23 he makes nations strong,

then shatters their strength.

24 God strikes their rulers senseless,

then leaves them to roam

through barren deserts,

25 lost in the dark, staggering

like someone drunk.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: MAGNIFICAT

magnificat

Magnificat anima mea Dominum;

I got me a pretty good feeling about God

Et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo,

When I think about God, baby, I feel REAL good.

Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae;

Because, you know, I ain’t much, but he done treated me right.

ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes.

So one day, people gonna look back and say, wow, man, SHE WAS OK!

Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est,

Like, he is the Man, and he has sent a shitload of good stuff my way.

et sanctum nomen ejus,

You just gotta respect that dude.

Et misericordia ejus a progenie in progenies timentibus eum.

The deal is, you stay with him, he gonna look out for you and your kids, guaranteed.

Fecit potentiam brachio suo;

That man got muscle like you never seen.

Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui.

The chill dudes, they think they something, he done sent them running.

Deposuit potentes de sede,

The top honchos in the thousand dollar suits, he done fired ever last one,

et exaltavit humiles.

and he promoted us no-accounts to run the show.

Esurientes implevit bonis,

The hungry people, he sit them down at the Ritz, eight courses and cognac to finish,

et divites dimisit inanes.

while all the rich guys, they doing the trashcans, looking for a crust.

Suscepit Israel, puerum suum, recordatus misericordiae suae,

He don’t never forget! He say he give you a hand up, he give you a hand up, you just ask his man Israel.

Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semeni ejus in saecula.

Like he told the old guys, Abraham and the whole damn family, he ain’t never gonna forget, you better believe it.

Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto.

He is the Man, and his kid is the Man, and the pigeon is the Man too.

Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

Like it always been, and ain’t never gonna be no different. Amen.

Michael Swan

November 2004



(With help from Jamie Yeager)

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO:

theology 9ofufo's. 'we are all the philosophers there are.' the experimentally minded deity constructed a vast, orderly astronomical set of huyge spaces interrupted by occasionaly gaseous eruptions, against which a teeny tiny seedpod of humanity and its lush background, earth, could act out the drama of rationality and emotion which is the pinnacle of life as we know it.

Dream sequence on the RR

thre sonething about this list

these names

i seem to remember them

wait a minute]

this isnmt a cdlass list

thats why wo couldnt findthem in the old yearbooks

these are towns

te names of towns

i remember my father tellimg me

these wre the towns ont he railroad

where the land was going to go up

amnd who ever owned lots

was going to make a packet

quinlan and guinana and mahaffey and voss and badner and lee and mognahan and shieffen and krohn and swilley and mckee and anderson and mcagy and deminl and mitchell and applewhite

that's why theyr not in alphabetical order

Ordure of the Chapitres

50 1500 wd chapitres is 75000 words is 300 pages

composition of place (done)

the students are revolting, as usual (done)

lunch at dunciad hall with the board spy che and the rr rumor (new)

driving up to the admin mansion/ standing in the couryard reading the play announcement (new)

after last class in dunciad (below)

rehearsal (new)

outside the girls dorm (new)

1-7 all in one day

addams class (almost done)

at the hinterlands club (new)

finding night gleams (katy poem) (started)

fucking in the afternoon (done) (15,000, 20%)

screwtape letter

twfs

confletta di amori at rehearsal

the play series

casting

readthrough

blocking

x rehearsals

tech

dress

performance

cast party

…play performance and reconciliation lovers

…opening of the legacy

…afterword (parking lot, etc.)

1 WHEN THE TRAIN PULLED IN THE STATION

The final production of Measure

The board committee meets at the estate

The lovers are reunited

Building a 650 space $13.3m parking garage that generates 2.2m annually on the site of the old convent, a 16.5% rate of return…

the mcguffins are: the gin bottles in the steamer trunk, the play without the play, the dogfather, the portrait of julie baby

2 DRAMATIS PERSONAE

1.Members of the Travertine Order

Fr. alaOuest, current president, physics teacher

Fr. Richmond, member of the board, education teacher

Fr. Yoakum, novice master, theology teacher

Fr. Mt. Rose, member of the board, german teacher

Fr. Bar den Winbern, ex-president, economics teacher

Fr. Sulross, superior of the community, philosophy teacher

Fr. Shadwell, shakespeare, greek drama, dante, romantic poetry, universal themes

The Dogfather, an ancient

2.Lay teachers

Mr. Colquitt, modern drama

Mr. Monvernon, freshman english

Ms. Blake, spanish

Mino Badner, art history

Mr. Eller, political science

THE ARGUMENT - Fall term begins at a minor Catholic university in the depths of a wasteland coastal city. Tom Meath, an ex-seminarian philosophy student who plays guitar in an art-rock band, pursues Gilbertine Roche, daughter of a car dealer and student in art history. Fr. alaOuest, University President, desperately needs to increase the endowment by converting minor donorsinto major ones. He hustles around town in a borrowed Morgan attending parties, stroking egoes. Fr. Sulross, religious superior of the community of priests of the Travertine Order, tries to mediate disputes among the faculty as to whether to make the University a bastion of conservative theology or of liberal education. “There is no such thing as Catholic accounting,” notes a lay teacher. Lex & Sara, inseparably boyfriendless though sharing bedpillows named The Sorrow and The Pity, haunt the English department and lay snares for the feet of Martin Clay, the scrumptious art history teacher. The newspaper student and Tom rag the ex-seminarians while the seminarians are restive under the insane tutelage of Fr. Yoakum. A student production of Measure for Measure is being mounted by the English department under newly-married Mr. Colquitt. The police are sniffing around Dark Jeff suspecting him of marijuana use. And rumors of a great bequest to the University begin to infiltrate the priests’ house.

Will the newspaper student accommodate all the girls who are after him? Will Gilbertine slow down long enough for Tom to catch her? Will Susan and Sandra trade in dreams of Mino for the actualities of Sam and Dan? Will the play be successfully performed? Will the police catch Jeff and Dan?Will the benefactors actually pay up? Will the faculty self-destruct?

3 BUILD THESE SETS:

The President of the University’s Office on the 2nd floor of a decayed mansion

The English Department in an old house, esp the kitchen & the dining room

The Stage that is really only a lecture hall

The cafeteria

The quadrangle

The philosophy classrooms in the new buildings

The Publication Office “Havah Nagilah Cigars” on the wall

The Albergo d’Italia Una, a bar in a house down the street

The Fossanuova girl’s dorm down the street

Sandy’s garage apartment

The interior of a 1961 Chevrolet Belaire 6 cyl 3 spd coupe

The dining room of the dead benefactor’s plantation

The Art History house library

Mrs Watanabe in the cafeteria

1 THE FLOW

The campus sees the incoming tide of custodially-placed misfits from out of state settle into dormitories alongside innocent locals banished from home. Joe and Gilbertine meet in theology class. Coffee in the cafeteria as the ex-seminarians drift by. Sandy and Susan say hi, go to the English Department. Mr. Colquitt and the dental chair under the painting of Julie Baby stolen in a midnight raid from the Admin Bldg. Discussion of Mr. Monvernon’s forthcoming student production . No credit, just work. Intramural football with the misfits, covered by the newspaper student. Faculty discussion of upcoming board meeting in cafeteria. Night at the Albergo d’Italia Una with Lix the pinball witch. Louie pukes on the untenanted bandstand.

Ex-president’s office, McQ and Weeks and the switchboard. The guileless old horsetrader warns the newspaper student about police interest in Tom. The walk past the old cafeteria in the garage apt with the theology offices above and the not yet new library to the Art History library to find Gilberte. The crushiness of Mino Badner as discussed by Sandra and Susan. Sam and the forthcoming dance where his band plays. The financial crunch in art history. The board receives notice of a legacy. Fr. Physics and his loaned Morgan. Fundraising in the community... Turtle races... Motley Crew... etcv...

2 SOME SCENES

Fr. Sulross walks with the newspaper student in the residence garden behind the chapel window. The bacon cools in the kitchen by the board where the priests’ communal car keys are.

Mr. Colquitt directing the student production of “Troilus and Cressida” with the Trojans and Greeks dressed in opposing football uniforms, Priam and Agammemnon as coaches, and Helen, Cressida and the women as cheerleaders.

Student romance between Tom meath and Gilbertine Roche, the art rocker and the art historian

Student drinking party in the Albergo d’Italia Una, featuring Lix the pinball witch.

Red Jeff and the fattest Harley

Ex seminarian rockers.

Ex-president Bar den Winbern’s office being asked to warn cousin,

Mets vs Gringos annual bloodletting at intramural football

Outside the Fossanuova Dorm at 10 pm as the girls run for the door where the wine-drunk matron waits...

Jimi Hendrix playing in the walkup garage apartment with Susan and Sandra, writing papers on Thursdays while her boyfriend’s at another university, sitting on the bed, typing...

Inhaling Tolkein while the stereo plays and smoke rises.

Watching Truck down at the freeway between classes.

Fr Yoakum leaping on the desk in his cassock screaming at a scared freshman girl who gave the wrong answer in theology.

Portrait of Pope Julie Baby on the wall over the dental chair in Mr. Monvernon’s office, taken from the Admin Bldg closet by the English Dept in a midnight raid.

Big Sammy kissing little Susan in the corridors beneath the stage

Laura Lou Blackburn in the middle of the afternoon

Louie Anderson supinely retching on the bandstand.

Frs. alaOuest, Richmond and Montrose open the trunk containing the false bequest, empty prohibition-era liquor bottles, out at the estate under the hot oak trees.

In The 1959 Studebaker Across The Street From Fossanuova Hall

Linda Shackleford's Apartment

Liz And Sandy's Apartment

The Garage Apartment On Hazard Street

Walking With His Breviary

The Engineering School Down The Street

Gulf Coast Ostentatious Venetian

Burning Of The Yearbooks

The East Coahuilan Marauders Drug Investigative Unit

Streetlight In The Humid Midnight

Martha Hirsch's Feet Under The Blanket On The Couch

Griff's Down The Street In A House

On Campus

SANCTAS ESCLAVOS UNIVERSITY

3812 Leguinan Boulevard

Harrassville, East Coahuila

1 Classrooms

Florence Alighieri Hall

Mahatma Kane Hall

Kemp Burbage Hall

Marshal Galaxy Hall

Nitram Sima Hall

Page Chausseur Hall

Ronald Reuel Hall

Tyger Albion Hall

Juliette Massina Hall

Louis Douglas Hall

No-Three-Name Hall

Morton D. Arthur Building

2 Monuments & Statues

The Dermot Trellis, located in back of the priests' residence in honour of Fr. Isidore Dermot, the gardening priest...

sign put up by nun who had not so much a complete ignorance of physical laws as a serene indifference to their existence... elevator up notice from kober kogan

Private Melvin Kaminsky, 1104th US Army Engineer Combat Group, WWII

Obedience Fort Smith

3 School Colours

Woad and Whyt

4 Administration

Gregory Building (Main Administration)

Sully Building (Student Union)

Vincent Building (Library)

Edward Estlin Hall (Classrooms)

5 Academic

Carl Tobenik House (Languages)

De Selby Hall (Philosophy)

Elstir House (Art History)

Fossanuova House (Theology)

Panza House (History & Economics)

Sant’ Perpetua House (Biology)

Shade Hall (English)

Shandy Hall (Education)

Slawkenbergius House (Math, Chemistry & Physics)

Vinteuil House (Music)

6 Residences

Arletty House

Barbary House

Clique House

Cloud Hill Cottage

Rodmell House

7 Class List

“Broader Rick” Raceme

“Dark Jeff” Glassfield, the narc

Alban Montsalvo

Alfred E. Nguyen, A Vietnamese Refugee

Alice Havers

Alina Goldcoast

Alisoun O’Connell

Alix Duyrell

Amy Lee [Johns]

Amadis deGaulle

Anne Rexer

Archer Wolfblack

Archer Wolff

Arthur Leonard

Arthur St John

Barb Hawdon

Bearskin Caldwell

Bert Milton

Betty Becky Babbington

Blue Jean

Brunt

C.R.F.L. Ffrench

Caitlin Rayle

Capt. Dan Reid

Caron “Killer” Diller

Charles Portamento

Chester Nylak

Christy Smith

Clay Fields Potter, Member, Board Of Directors

Clive Densett

Connie Adler

Dave the Resurrector, a janitor

Deborah Rouiller

Dickson Quartus

Dow Zabolio

Eugene and Guadeloupe duMenin, patrons of the University

Evelyn Gardner

Evelyn Heygate

Fenicula Morris

Fenton Akimbo

Fingal O’Flaherty

Francine Shacklefall

Francoise Cotton Fortune

Frowniel Dank

Gerd Nombreuse

Gilbertine Roche, art history

Gloriana Kurtz

Governor Lucius Quintus Catullus Pillocque

Groom Bright Bailey

Heinrich Spoor

Higher Ed, a dropout

Holy Joe & Religious Ed, the prefects in the seminary

Hughell Fosbroke

Babs Wickham

Irene Norton

Jacques Du Coeur

James Butler (JB) Trim

Jay Swaff

Jenny Aldiluna

Jude Pretre

Julie Henri

Karen (Killer) Mueller

Kathleen Carella

Kaye Serra

Lavnour Monnah

Lecompte De Gaz

Leo Simon

Leo Spencer

Linda Crispian

Lix the pinball witch

Lizza Rhedd

Lizzie Fayer

Lynn Delanore

Maneesh Bhuy

Margo Best

Marianne Kelleher

Matilda Angelina Araminta Phelps

Matt Aubrey

Mimita Grieux

Mona Dahl

Morsel Morceaux, A Mime

Mr Thurl Reeves

Nicholas Hende

Nicky Newton

Nimont Raypa Vojams

Nimonte Rajpas Vobyams

Nora Linderby

Patrick C. Reynes

Patrick Von Pendink

Paul Farthingwing

Pearse James

Philip Neri Goodman

Risa Mitchell

Roy Rooinek

Sam Boson-Higgs

Sanmaria Swett

Sari Amistu

Sidney Earl

Stella Marris

Stevie Martello

Steve Bloomer

Sue Costalinguini

Susie Wouters

Sylvester Perry Whinnwitte

Tom Meath, art rocker

Tony de Valero

Valet Des Coeurs

Vikay Ratcliff

Votchud Veydu

Will Giexcks

Wilson Smith

Woody P Grenville

NOMINAE CHARACTORII

“Crowbait"

Adalbert

Annilea

Athelstan

Bagotrix

Brunt

Callypgea

Clodine

Col. Miles Glorio

Desolata

Divan Porp

Emperor Calendula

Epiduros

Euphemia

Eustacio

Faustina

Felisa

Florian

Geleed

Gina

Holycolour

Hydoor

Ildebrando Malaparle

Incompetanza

Juan-Bjorn Evriminnat

Jenncie

John The Revelator

Jovita

Kwaneesha

Lagrimada, a housekeeper

Lalla

Lamentia

Lashonda

Lech

Lex & Sara

Ludferg

Mahgahd

Malizia

Malenka

Marisa

Medora

Merline

Ottoline

Paunch-Neigh

Petulanza

Plangencia

Pussy-Face

Rembert

Rosaline

Salathiel

Sarazella

Squaleed

Tante Lamine

Tetralogos

The kitten Nepenthe

The Mighty Gloss

Thryza

Tontino

Torpeed

Tsing-Boum, a professional soccer player

Tumeed

Turgeed

Two-Lay Dukes

Vapeed

Varlalee

Wendelin

Wilfred

Wolfric

Wulfstan

[Cheney] The Unensouled, The Disensouled, The Unsouled

1 Professoriat

Father, Professor, Mr or Ms

Alaouest

Autrey

Blodgett

Branard

Col. Rosbiff

Colquitt

Dunlavy

Graustark

Grimes

Hazard

Mandell

Milford

Milstead

Mt Rose

Mulberry

Pinedale

Prussian Bates

Richmond

Sul Ross

Vernmont

Westmayne

Woodhead

Yoakum

Yupon

JOINTS & BIDNESSES

Blue Haze Room

Borrachio’s

Cat-Ass Trophy

Clump of Plinths

Concrete Floor

Copa Cetic Club

Corporal Trim’s Snuggery

Ferret & Trouserleg Pub

Fine & Private Place

Fretful Porpentine

Glowing Prawn, A Boiterie

Hinterlands Club

Hundebistro

Cucina Empedoclean Catarella

Knurled Bevel

La Grenouille a la Peche

La Tarjeta Amarilla

Landless Peasant

Last Cat in Silver Spring

Le Chevalier Grognard

Lo Yum Chinese Restaurant

Loathesome Squit

Low Dive

Low Key

Lysol Room At Grif's

Madonnarlot’s

Moral Pub

Nathan’s Five-Chime Semi-Han Restaurant

Necks ‘n Okra

Om-Burgers and Omlettes: We'll Make You One With Everything

Orkéd Cow

Pantalones de Fuego

Runcible Spoon

Sal Monella’s Glorious Etruscan Home Cooking

Salle Magundi, a boutique hotel

Sign of the Dilettante, a teashop

Sodden Prelate

Sweaty Pouch

Thalian Infarxion

Truly Unctuous Sausage, a diner

Vorpal Blade

1 Alcool

Auld Auchtermuchty Scotch Whiskey

Chiliast Vodka

Ctesiphon Beer

D.H. & A.P. Hill’s Bourbon

D’Enghien Brandy

Dayspring Wine

Edgar Allan Absinthe

Forty-Rod Corn Likker

Gutterbred Rye

Hogarth Gin

Lone Spur Beer

Marthambles Rum

Numbing Juniper Solution

Old Overcoat Bourbon

Pale Fire Sherry

Port o’ Leith Scotch Whiskey

Spudmeister Vodka

The True Gin

Zythus Beer

2 Stockbrokers, Medical, Law, Accounting & Consulting Firms

Bookwright, Tull, Armstid & Quick, Accountants

Dr. Invertine

Drs. Bushey, Bagot & Greene

Drs. Wayney, Wieeddy & Wiiki

Susan Derkins, Esq.

The Lords Conjurant

The Lords Repellant

Woad, Fardeaux & Baer, Attys.

3 Industries

Comegys Corp

DeMoronis Consulting

General Behemothian

Grand Mastodonic

Manley Hydraulics Corp

Matzerath & Bronski, Grocers

Ortnumaso’s Emporia

Pocketa Queep Industries

Sigerson & Moran, Travel Agents

Porlock Productions

Tyger's Light Press

Varitek

Wamble & Wurch, Wholesalers

4 Bands

Azuria Monsoon

Basmatics

Battered Torsos

Bo Richards

Boomvangs

Buddy Watter

Cash King

Celtic Moon

Celtic Splendour

Celtic Squalour

Chrestomathy, a madrigal group

Chuck King

Doll Drums

Dread Simoom

Escorts

Fortune’s Fools

Hans Pfunft

Hevonkuusi

Intergalactic Funkology

Itinerant Scousers

Junior Guy

Lefthanded Hedgecreepers

Leo Norman and the Buckskin Boys

Littlo Diddlo

Madison Steamship

Mercer & The Stray Horns

Mojo Filter

Muddy Wells

Neoprene Nubules

New Wark Drogadictos

Nipper Darling

Panaesthesia

Pantalones en Fuego

Polyphobia

Quarrybirds

Raw Teen Disturbance

Riley B. Berry

Reptile Fund

Roasted Heretics

Sanantony

Sandlads

Sartelle

Serpents of Various Malignity

Shinola Boys

Slag

Spasmodics

Speckled Band

Squirrel the Girl

Stonequarriers

Strong Fives

Sucking Chest Wounds

Tessa Turra

Theophanic Shovels

Trendi, a singer

Troubles Inc

Twisted Teenage Schemers

Venetian Windows

Will Burry

Whipstitch

Xing-xing

Yardmen

Zampanistas

5 Families, Clans, Factions and Parties:

Chesney-Wold

Fraffly-Riffayned

Hemppe-Cravatte

Mondieu

Sacrebleu

Sapristi

Sloat, a country house

The Friends Of God

The Given

Tutticornuti

Wonderleigh Plantation, O’Shaughnessy Foundation

Zutalors

6 Parishes

Beati Strangulati

Holy Rhythm

Measly Comfort

Mille Indulgencii

Our Lady of Joy

Precious Scourge

St Dimwald’s

St Famine’s

St Swyvely’s

St Morbidd’s

St Almsell’s

San Pelligro

Slaughtered Infants

7 Schools

Atomsk Middle School

Cardinal College, Cambridge

Choake Preparatory

Exton Preparatory

Governor Drubber Academy

Harridan Country Day School

Jeanette Rankin Elementary School

Kate Keepdown Middle School

New Wye School

NOMINAE GEOGRAPHIA

1 Countries

Arcady

Antipodia

Baba Chodna

Brabt

Coalstadt

Essenia

Holodomor

Iroj

Nova Zemla

Republic of Zeugma

Star Vinh

Tarquinian=Etruscan

Thule Deuce

2 Features

Chalybeate Springs

Doheny Falls Oilfield

Flumenic River

Lagrima Madre Mountains

Madre de Dios River

Mt. Dern

Mt. Joy

Nearallon Islands

Notary’s Dome

Pellagra Hills

Rio Fangosos

Rio Pinto

Rio Verde

River Twee

Russet River

Smrt Square

Snosqueamish Mountains

Starved Rock

Traffic Vulgar Square

Windlepoons River

3 Streets

Addison

Atlantic

Brookline

Brougham

Calle Sixto

Capitol

Clark

Congress

Cove

Crawford

Eutaw

First

Half

Hamilton

Jersey

Landsdowne

Potomac

Texas

Third

Van Ness

Wambsganss

Waveland

Anderson

Badner

Bass

Brezik

Caird

Courtney

Dubay

Femiano

Guinan

Haffey

Knaggs

Krohn

Lamb

Lee

McAgy

McKee

McQuoquodale

Mitchell

Monaghan

Myers

Quinlan

Roethlisberger

Schieffen

Swilley

Sullivan

Vasek

Weeks

Young

4 Politics

Flag Party

Desultory Faction

Dilatory Faction

Land Party

Demonstrator Faction

Demographic Faction

5 254/254 County Names

‘Leven-Foot Sack County

12/10ths County

Abogado County

Adze County

Agape County

Agua Fria County

Allison County

Almighty Dam County

Amble County

Anopheles County

Back o’ Beyond County

Bad Cess County

Badlands County

Baja Sexto County

Bajazet County

Bandido County

Bareskin County

Bbq County

Beelzebufo County

Bejart County

Big Hair County

Blackstrap County

Blind County

Blood County

Bluetick County

Bob Wahr County

Boll Weevil County

Boot Hill County

Boudreaux County

Box O'Parts County

Bracero County

Braiser County

Brewery County

Broke Toast County

Broken Plow County

Broonzy County

Rootbrown County

Buffalo Chip County

Bug Jerky County

C. F. Martin County

Cabeza Pedras County

Cabron County

Caleche County

Camionero County

Carnitas County

Chestwound County

Chorizo Springs County

Christmas Tree County

Chuckwagon County

Chupacabras County

Cilantropic County

Clochmerle County

Coconino County

Collard County

Como Se Llama County

Compress County

Convenience Fee County

Cool Papa County

Cordite County

Coward County

Cracking Tower County

Cripple County

Crosstie County

Cruddup County

DeCay County

Denim Flats County

Despicable County

Devilthigh County

Dobro County

Dorsoduro County

Dr Bob County

Dry Bones County

Dry Gulch County

Dry Spring County

Dustarval County

El Gordo County

Ellis Unit County

Elvin County

Errors County

Fahraint County

Faint Ember County

Farfisa County

Farmarket County

Farrago County

Fireball County

Firedog County

Five Members County

Flatiron County

Foul Furious County

Freedman’s Bureau County

Frito Mixto County

Fritter Away County

Fromholz County

Ft. Curl County

Fungoid County

Furbelow County

Galvanic County

Garfish County

Gary Nunn County

Gatemouth County

Gayplace County

Gibson County

Gran Despojo County

Gran’barrio County

Grits County

Gutbucket County

Habanero County

Halfbreed County

Har Yew County

Hardtime County

Harrass County

Headstorm County

Heavy Metal Wells County

Honky Tonk County

Hoodoo County

Horrors County

Hound County

Icebox County

Inhospitable County

Isolate County

Jael County

Jezebel County

Joe Ely County

Johnny Clyde County

Knucklebone County

Kolache County

Ladron County

Larcenious County

Latifundio County

Lemon Jefferson County

Lightnin' County

Lilith County

Littlebird Ptolemy County

Loanshark County

Lomax County

Lonesome Iron County

Long Dog County

Lyle County

Lynch County

MacAbre County

Mance County

Marion Morrison County

Mattock County

McIlhenny County

McKinley Morganfield Co.

Melismatic County

Mojito County

Mortar Fork County

Mordida County

Mosey County

Mould County

Mt. Gomez County

Mulatto County

Muleskinner County

Murther County

Mutanza County

National Steel County

No Loam County

Obadiah Woman County

Octoroon County

Orphan County

Otha Bates County

Overcharge County

Overdue Bills County

Pachuco County

Pair o’ Docks County

Parouisa County

Paunch County

Pelham County

Penal County

Pharoah Ferry County

Plumb Tuckered County

Po’Boy County

Pond Scum County

Porosity County

Potlicker County

Prester John County

Quien Sabe County

Rackenrune County

Rattlesnake County

Ratzenfrassel County

Ray Wiley County

Razorgrass County

Rebel Yell County

Relaxification County

Repossessed County

Revolver County

Rifle County

Riley King County

Rio Grandiose County

Ritmo County

Rockabilly County

Rooms County

Rotten County

Sabroso County

Saltmarsh County

Saltpetre County

Samsara County

Sashay County

Sawgrass County

Selena County

Seraphta County

Sharecrop County

Shemeika County

Shiv County

Shorthandle County

Sidewinder County

Sir Douglas County

Slide County

Slit Gullet County

Slow Bleed County

Smokepit County

Spec’s County

Spoons County

Starvacre County

Stevie Ray County

Stocktank County

Stroll County

T. Bone County

Tamburlaine County

Tampa Red County

Tanhide County

Taylor County

Tenderfoot County

Thibideaux Counthy

Tinpail County

Tooraloom Tay County

Torrent County

Townes County

Toxics County

Travois County

Tulane Blacktop County

Twelvestring County

Twin Fiddle County

Velvis Paintings County

Vendido County

Venom County

Verklempt County

Vexans County

Vile County

Virago County

West Gall County

Wallet County

Waylon County

Whipsnade County

Widow County

Willie County

Willis Allan County

Wills County

Windmill County

Winter Brothers County

Y’All County

Zugzwang County

6 States

Azansani

Aksarben

Barataria

Bidon

Cackalackie

Cis-Flumenia

District of Ellingtonia

Desertia

Favela

Flurristone

Fumarole

Hokoham

Imijondolo

Meriador

Neieu Wark

Nether Viceroy

Ourcains

Pondsiltick

Puerto Estribor

Rockfish

Sylvanpuck

Upper Zan

Vegetaria

Zaftigia

7 Municipalities

Balbec

Bishop’s Capon

Bruce

Camp Peachy

Cleaver Devvises

Cri du Coeur

Crybourg

Durotesta

Fort Blivet

Gray Star

Hochelaga

Isotope Wells

Laudable Putz

Mackey O'Velli

Malhado Isle

Much Bad Minton

Notlob

Port Marcelline

Proud Flesh

Red Stick

Tadoussac

Westongall

Zorches

8 Artistes (dec’d)

Amos Kingslsson

Arch Stanton

Arthur Stanley

Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez

Boozer Brown

Brookman Kaminsky

Brauleigh Feckit

C. J. Inkling

Charles Spencer

Dryden Wheeler

Fingal O’Flaherty

Giles Cripplegate

Heinrich Schmutz

Hwel Hexbyer

Ilsa Lund

James Augustine

Joe Ament

John Birks

John Huffam

John Naseby

Molter Viviace

Moore Cornwell

Nadine Moriss

Petty Fraunce

Pico Rivera

Richard Russ

Robert Rueuel

Samuel Barclay

Sphere Fryar

Terence Hanbury

Urbano Barbiani

V. Sirin

Zoltan Kaparthy

9 des oeuvres literaires

10

The Argiviad

INSTITUTIONII

1 Noosepipers:

Chemical Coast Clarion

Globe Abstract

Lancaster Defender

Whig-Standard

Wire-Advertiser

2 Ships

Bethnall Green

Fiddlers Green

Golders Green

Gretna Green

Kensall Green

HMS Crete

HMS Force Z

HMS Medway

HMS Plymouth

HMS Solebay

HMS Texel

HMS Virginia Capes

HMS Walcheren

Bastinado

Bludgeon

Cadaver

Carcass

Carnage

Epidemic

Famine

Garotte

Massacre

Pandemic

Pestilence

Plague

Poule de Luxe

Pyloric

Quexundbrand

Spatterpattern

Slaughter

Strappado

Banjax

Gobshyte

Gobsmack

Grobian

Grasscomber

Gurrier

Jackeen

Lobcock

Looby

Ragabash

Rapparee

Scrovy

Shoneen

Spalpeen

Spatchcock

Streel

Thooleramawn

Whiteboys

3 Railroads

Beauty Hill, Sour Lake, and Western Railway Company

Tucson, Tucumcari, Tehachapi and Tonapah Railway Company. TTT&T: Nuclear Route of the Old Spanish Trail. An uranium-hauling line over the western mountains, utilizing the last cab-forward steam engines to remain in commercial operation. George Lowell, General Manager. Stops on the TTT&T: Mortar Fork, Depheted, Gorrey, Box Junction, Tuxedo Junction, Fluxiona, Splendora

“Big Uranium” built the line to supply a ring of southwestern nuclear power plants, and it survived on government subsidies and cheap operating expenses far beyond the decline in other railroads.

[W. Gall] [Veston] and Russet River Railroad

Big Fork & Diehl Railroad

Ft Mudge & Okeefenokee Railroad — the FMO’s unique combination freight loadings (consisting of orchid sprays and osprey feathers for the flower and designer trades) necessitated a large number of refrigerated cars for the orchids and of plain boxcars for the osprey feathers, which first had to be compacted and baled. Interchange was with the Panther & Typhoon out of Pellagra, South Carolina. Kelly Walters, General Manager.

High ‘N ’Xiety Railroad

Stumpf Lake, Watab & Lake Avon Railroad – interchange w/Arctic Atlantic. Founded by mutant Teuton rock farmers. Gary Keil, General Manager.

Panther & Typhoon Railroad

Oyster Creek, Brays Bayou & Barbour’s Cut Railroad– Interchange w/HBT

Median Pacific

Arctic Atlantic

Executive car “E.M. Frimbo”

trackside industries:

* Minderbinder Syndicate

* Teamster Cement

* Woolfork Funeral Parlor

* Mrs Baird’s Bread

* Commodore Hotel

* Holy Rosary Church

* Bad Axe Grain

* Buff's Stadium

* Faketor’s Office

* Guild of Lily Gilders

locomotive numbers:

* 12

* 533

* 1217

* 1729

* 3123

* 3812

* 5095

* 5220

* 5821

* 7136

* 7500

4 Automobiles

Huángsè Empire Motors

Escalation

Ruthless

Xiangsheng

Zemstvo

Wade-Buchanan-Vulcan Automobiles

Hough

Jupiter

Galago

Routeporc

Amalgamated Motor Trust Vehicles

Bupmobile

Carondelet

Clochard

Fond Du Lac

Frontenac

Oubliette

Vaisseau Enorme

Etruscan State Motor Mfg

Cornutto

Diomerda

Fiasco

Forza d’Oro

Multicattivo

Testossarossa

Fritzling-Lujan Automobiles

Belchfire

Dundahed

Kramler

Puritan

Ersatzgruppen Automobiles

Besserwessi

Das Boot

Mercredi-Bints

Wendehals

Seppuku Motors

Gaijin

Kono Yaro

Oyabun

Tsubomi

Yachi

Yakuza

Yaochou

Yasukuni

Zaibatsu

Amilcar Motors

Farang

Fida’i

Hashishin

Hirondelle

Nakba

Car Dealerships: Will Kempe Wade/Buchanan, Heminge’s Seppuku, Etc

Jack Heminges, Will Kemp, Ric Burbage, Gus Phillips, Tom Pope, Hank Condell, George Bryan, Bill Slye, Bill Checkpayr

"Pat Stamper" Wade/Buchanan Dealership

5 Prescriptions

Banzopamil

Bonsantin

Mortadone

Usherfellig

Vamostatin

Yyprion

Cigars

Club Porcelliar

Monte Cassino

Hava Nagilah

Il Fumarole

Banks

Farrajh Pitts Bank

Kinell Fu Bank

Regiments

Apparateers

Bufadoras

Dowlings

Fifth Fusiliers

Gondoliers

Gyrenes

Halberdiers

Hardboots

Lafitteiennes

Mechanicos

Petardistas

Pigstickers

Pistoleros

Preterites

San Patricios

Squadristi

Stochastics

Xocolatl

Yildirim

Hotels

The Beaugrave

The Bunbury Arms

The Grymmelstark

The Lord Voltimand

The Monopole

The Peaceflame

The Rosewars

The Tummlerplatzhof

The Vindaloo Station

The Wheat

College Conference Teams

Bruised Forests

Fighting Flapjacks

Gandy Dancers

Marsupials

Sausage Forcers

Silver Ferrets

Wild Annelids

Feral Catamites

Ferret, Weasel, terrier, enespanol

Professional Sports Teams

Hammersmith United

Pervingly Gaspful

LOOSE PHRASES

I’m not important enough to refuse when someone wants to talk to me

Feringhee

A few isotopes short of a beaker

Coptic food restaurant, all brass bangles and Bokharan spices

Judge Harley Sponaugle

Paunchover Inn

Pauntley House

More Bhang for the Baht – drug prices in Primeland fall – Thigh Minister of Primeland

Chesterfield: "Tyrawley and I have been dead these two years, but we do not choose to have it known."

Touchy over points of their masters’ honors, like squires brawling in a stable, bringing dishonor where they meant to serve.

Of Margaret Thatcher that "she is democratic enough to talk down to anyone"

Penelope Gilliat's best line (and I paraphrase) was that every Sunday morning in The Sunday Times, London was awakened by the sound of "Harold Hobson barking up the wrong tree."

Stickrib, roughneck

you earl so uppy?

The xacred number 224 derived from the number of cantatas by the composer r.l. Foreward.

The bleached sky, featureless and flat, sliced along the knife-edge of the horizon as if the lower and upper edges of the world had never met.

Baseball box scores hexpyre etc vs pratchett? Or milton, marvell, dryden, [defoe,] newton, wren, pepys, hooke, boyle, evelyn…

ACCRETING A COMMUNIUTY: the Rule of the Travertines

Intramural soccer: we killed them, absolutely annihilated them, 1-0.

Where 17 railroads meet the sea

Oil-boys and indians

An old salopian from merkin college…

supercilious academicals

Ugly, even by French standards,

"Foreign Excellent Raincoat Company" in Bruce

Same like always

Pearshapeidity

“quarternined”

Miz

She lived in one of those subdivisions out beyond 99th and plowed ground at a location formerly known as “Starveacre Junction,” with a brick plinth out fronting the main road with the name “Endive Estates” on it, or whatever the marketing boys came up with. Then they must’ve named the streets for their investors’ daughters, e.g. “Jillian Court,” when they didn’t name them with evocative movie-based grandeur things like, “Bleakthorn Drive,” or “Massive Vault Way.”

Senterian Professor of xxx

Chaplain Tappman’s

Charles Adnopoz

Duke of Octroi

pantalones de fuego

Admiral Aubrey, Admiral Jack, Admiral Stephen

Pusilanime

Large naked missy willette and the dulcimer. Cassock.

Serpens nisi serpentem comederit non fit draco

Draco quomodo

The o’shaughnessy sisters. We scare men.

Anne Diamo

Fort Less

Wobetide University

there is nothing even to his own advantage that can be got out of him, but by mere force. So full of policy he is in the smallest matters, that I perceive him to be made up of nothing but design 30vi63

The poor cat I’ the adage, I dare not wait upon I would, the cat would eat fish but would not get her feet wet.

The night train to Il s’Agit with intermediate stops in Birnam, Dunsinane, and Beetle-O’er-the-Cliffs.

where unbruised youth with unstuff'd brain Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign

Yes, I have a much better french accent in english than I do in french… [zat is savoir faire]

> gods, I have to go through editing that, too... > far too much to dooooooooooooooo....

Kamikaze blonde

Suicide blonde

Motorcyle blonde

Emperor hasdrubal the bald

I’m too old not to believe in fairy tales any more.

That man whom you ruthlessly exploit into exploiting you.

‘Lazzo dritto non vuolt consiglio.’

"so did you guys have an affair or what?" Elaine replied, "Exactly".

Sports motto: ‘let’s give ‘em something to whine about.’

From the beaches of Ypres-Nimes

“which is as ridiculous a piece of ignorance as could be imagined”

“Hither we sent for her sister’s viall, upon which she plays pretty well for a girl, but my expectation is much deceived in her, not only for that, but in her spirit, she being I perceive a very subtle witty jade, and one that will give her husband trouble enough as little as she is, whereas I took her heretofore for a very child and a simple fool.”

A lengthy, rugged voyage of divorcement

My seriously bizarre cuousin… whaddaya mean bizarre? …. I mean if you and me was mainstream can you imagine the wrenching off its present course the rest of the world would have to endure in order to catch up to us?

I thought the NJ crowd might be amused with this for various reasons ranging from schadenfreude to morose delectation.

The weather forecast: A lusty day today with a sprinkling of shame towards the evening.

Tattered showers, weak mizzle, a mist and a drizzle

Talk Belgian to me, baby.

Wahoonie-shaped

KMA-it’ll all end in beers.

She had a way of sayin the word husband like if she ever got ahold of such a thing in her life that when she got finished with him whoever he was they would have to pry her cold dead hands off him with not one but several crowbars and the indent of her fingers would still be left on him wherever she’d grabbed ahold of him on account of there wasn’t no one thing anywhenre on earth she thought was going to change her life as much as that (and she may have been right too) and the one thing she knew for damn certain sure about her life was it needed changing.

The stomachs of the peasants are quite hard – o dura illia messorum

any road to damascus will do, as long as you can contrive to be stricken blind upon it.

Down down I come like glistering phaeton wanting the manage of unruly jades. To the base court!

Lou- a sense of obligation has impeded me from fulfilling your wish promptly. That was to fulfill it thorougly. Your kindness to me over the years has been inestimable and your curiosity as to my views flattering.

Juggling thirty-seven things at once, half of them on fire.

A rugby team drinking song with 27 obscene verses called ‘the hedgehog can never be buggered at all’

After the massacre pope sixtus vi stripped the cluniacs of their possessions in east coahuila and returned the cluniac lands to the settlers.

Why are the heads of the legislation not ready, given that the Minister of State has been traipsing around the Gaeltacht giving an impression of energy?

he never recovered from that success.

Molto copacetico

Spring back, fall forward

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate |

| William of Ockham (1285-1347/49)

my clock just chimed all over me, i hafta go beddy now and rub off all the time inside my sheets

but he's dead

it's ok to be dead if you're good. just don't quit early.

In order for it to remain active and avoid a temporal hold on your funds,

calculus of pain

Cosmic crowbar

Neighborhood called Seamyside or Seamy Valley or something like that

moist calisthenia

we’re off to the see the lizard, …

uppances will come.

The thought did cross my mind, and yet the attendant nubule did not cross my fingers.

We have to learn how to take yes for an answer.

The universe only gives lessons in yes.

the only good mormon is a jack mormon.

May I take your ordure? Fuck you very much.

normal outrages of urban life

cosmic kickstart

smoky voiced vocalist

recreational forklifting

bartleby-class bureaucracy

merciless but not malciious

st neot, patron saint of bartenders

dork farces

"You can't be nice to somebody just because you like them." -Lillian Garnes

P.G. Wodehouse, "less than gruntled"

"different kettle of wax"

"muddle the waters"

"flaw in the ointment"

"flusterated"

"freudian slops"

"gasted in the flabber regions"

“happy as a pig in clam sauce”

“it ain't rocket surgery”

“speaking of another pair of boots”

“quelle fromage”

“that hit the nail on the cuticle”

“fanaticized about”

“fervious”

nail head-hit: one interfibrose friction fastener soundly smacked about the head and shoulders with an enormous hammer...

insecurity technology

the reason the calabrezzi are more hard-headed than the siciliani is simple. The siciliani want to leave, but cannot. They cannot build boats fast enough. Whereas all the calabrezzi have to do is walk if they want to leave, but they don’t.

management by invective

ran up to lake stanley to play in a summer club and caught a dose of lord simcoe’s revenge from drinking the local beer. Those arcadians, man, they have to be tough.

different tones, different joneses

Mahmadhan Ptolemy Thayerdbee-Dazlykzis

The level to which this event has degenerated is highly encouraging. And we haven't even arrived yet!!

playing upon the sackbut and the tulking horn, the dulcimer and the lyre

repeatedly dispensing the benefits of infidelity to a number of willing females

“No two campaigns are different.” – Jerome N. Eller

"Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl." --V.V. Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1967)

Give me liberty, and give me dread.

Professional football cheerleaders look like they hold out the promise of very, very expensive cheap sex...

sympathetic corruptor

opinious

operose

skin that smelled of balsam, eucalyptus and perfidy

farraginous

11.5 millimetre Aggro autopistol

slept long and long

contemplating the infinite that hides withinl the ordinary…

‘lauded it in reverential voices pitched so high that an ordinary human ear could not make much of that treble volubility’ ada

"rude mechanicals" cf motley crew

waiting shadows

shakespeare's whores: nel touchet, doll tearsheet, mrs quickly, mistress overdone, jane nightwork, jane smile, susan grindstone

fijifilm

mahmadan ptolmey thayerdbee dazelykzis

calders in the kitchen, pollocks in the jakes

"I'm glad the Fiver has confirmed readers' opinions of its impeccably poor taste. Why Not? is not a trendy Edinburgh nightspot (yesterday's bits and bobs), it is a place young trustafarians attending the local uni go to when they want to snog eight people and throw up everywhere like it was a Capital FM teen party" - Toby Bucks

so sick my teeth hurt

a repeated mistake begins to look remarkably like policy

when charles ulick farley arrived, a callow scion of a beer wholesaleing family...

two nations under mammon

the sin of morose delectation

responsible celebritism pledge

"a capful of light," short stories

In ancient Greek hapax legomena means "uttered only once". It is a term used in linguistics to refer to words that are found only once in a text.

COB- clothes of business

Below and beneath the crawl of duty beauty cooties ruthlesness

her two pillows were named the Sorrow and the Pity.

all the polyphobia you can use

if, as gore vidal advised, "you should never pass up a chance to have sex or go on television," is it true that you have merely substituted the one for the other?

Mulier cupido quod dicit amanti, in vento et rapida scibere opportet aqua.

What a woman says to her lover should be written on the wind and running water.

Catullus, Veronensis, 70

no, you're right, she hadn't changed, she still had that wistful look of completely false innocence about her, and as soon as i saw the hat, i said, well of course she would wouldn't she...

exactly the way to put it! wistful look of completely false innocence -- i think that's what i found most attractive about her...

Its not invalid, its expired. That’s invalid. no its still me, its just that a date passed while I was being me, and I am still me. But that’s invalid. No its expired.

Atrocity comedy

We’ve reached cryptic mass at last.

The holy rosary was out of sync, kilter, balance, sorts, true, control, sight.

The Michigan Upper Peninsula, Northern California, Northern Virginia, Upstate New York and District Of Columbia Statehood Bill

Coherently is what I am muttering on in.

“Don’t put all your legs in one basket,” as Dr Frankenstein remarked to Igor.

Pat Stamper’s is the fifth biggest used-car dealership in town, but papa says he’s only one strategic bankruptcy away from becoming number two.

Have I been, he wondered, ‘a converted pagan living among apostate Puritans’? (CS Lewis, Surprised by Joy)

--Better not end up behind the 8-ball. --We don’t have any 8-balls! –-That’s why we mustn’t be behind them.

There might be a gallinaceous bird in the event somewhere.

Irony deficiency anemia

but he’s dead

it’s ok to be dead if you’re good. just don’t quit early.

calculus of pain

“’See if he remembers me. Tell him I’m a bearded fat man in a white straw hat.’

“’You a white guy?’

“’All my life.’

“’Ok, that’s him. He’s a smart ass…’”

Spirit Cinema: Hummingbirds and Butterflies

Bang-Startled Spanner

[richard wilbur] do you dare

so to butcher [moliere]?

had he known that he was fated

to be by you so mistranslated

surely he would, now confess,

have acted more and written less.

My favorite cousin and law and I drove over to the oldest cemetery in North Harassville looking for one of my bobbetailleknaggs ancestors. The oldest one is over by the harbor and has almost fallen in, but the one in the north side is different. Stone walls just like the old country in Contadina or Allmans, huge gate with ironwork of vast intricacy and pretention. They’ve had to put up a chain link fence on top of the walls to keep thugs from knocking over the monuments. Once inside we drove around looking for the landscape to speak to us; we had no map or indication of where we might find the folks. We were looking for cousins of great-great aunts and uncles of around 1900, Tailles who have been particularly hard to document. Came over from Cockaigne around the time of the Commune of 1871 after the Allman-Cockaigne War but can’t trace anything over there. Anyway, we didn’t find them. But what we did find at the columbarium in the far corner was, I swear to God, all the grandparents of the guys I went to high school with: Tamborello and Lucia, Zabolio, Zagst and Zeis, Romano and Attinasi, Hogan and Hennessy, all the polyglot variety of ethnicity which had only become ‘white people’ in United Columba after the end of WWII.

troilus v cressedy

pandar is still the press

camo unis, ar-15s vs black pajamas conical straw hats and ak-47s

women as miss saigon bar girls

off to the clear creek armory to buy…

Epistle Prefatory, Dedicatory, and Expository

Brave reader, I had long craved to open this book (indeed, to preface this Preface) with an appropriate, though preferably not appropriated, coat of arms. It would be my intention to strike with a throwback against the sad truth of the book business that the frontispiece is many decades out of favor, while the colophonic lacuna at the other end of the book is also, alas, too well established.

Several candidates proposed themselves. There is no family crest, we being medievally and up until arriving on this continent mere sergeants or yeomen to the nobility, for which I thank the Lord. None of the impositions, machinations, or economic cruelties of the aristos, which customarily blot escutcheons, can have done so to the dishonor of those of us without them. Subsequent to the desuetude of inherited titles, we were farmers and teachers, making leather goods in the Revolutionary War and bearing arms in the Civil War and WWII at need but without prominence.

So the conjectural familial coat of arms my cousin-in-law and I devised, while standing on the back patio looking at the heaped flowers after my father’s funeral, would do well here, could we but complete and draw it. The balsamic flower impatiens holds one quarter, and the shameful but longsuffering mule another, of this putative crest. Surely three books must take a third quarter, modeled upon the device of the most alma-ly maternal Universitate Torontoniensis. ()

The fourth remains unsettled upon, though crossed whisky bottles, a typewriter, or a quill and ferrule would not be inappropriate. The motto, drawn from my father’s case but projected, not inaccurately, over the whole geneaological line, would have to be “Operor non fatigo super mule, mereo sarcina plaustrum.”

An alternative source of appropriate heraldry could be found in the cap-badge of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers, incorporating the Earl of Leven’s, later the 25th, Regiment of Foot, in which my spiritual ancestor, the storyteller Corporal James “Trim” Butler, served at the Battle of Steenkirk in 1692, part of what Americans know, if at all, as King William’s War, which the Irish remember for the sorrowful and sanguinary Siege of Limerick.



Most likely fit for my purpose is the 1967 parody of the former crest of the University of St. Thomas, now replaced in daily use by a mere logo. This St. Thomas is not to be confused with any one of the other same-named higher-learning institutions in such places as Minnesota, Florida, the US Virgin Islands, New Brunswick, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, or Rome. This was drawn by Roger “Rock” Romano, a Houston musician and artist who was one of the more skilful of the Doomed Seventeen Seminarians who were forced out of the university’s [unnamed, to spare them the burden of their shame] custodial and founding religious order by the simple expedient of the order’s having put as novice master over them an acute untreated alcoholic whose roaring self-righteous rages and niggling persecutions were in no way pedagogical nor in any way defensible. This drawing shows a pigeon (all pigeons are doves, but not all doves are pigeons) with a drink in its wing lying on a chaise longue on a beach under the ray of the sun that is all that remains from the college coat of arms. Efforts are underway to recover a copy from its custodian who reposes, and hopefully does not languish, in the Home for Decayed Priests.

Finally there is the coat of arms devised by Joe O’Connell of Collegeville MN as book cover ornament for J.F. Powers’ 1962 novel Morte d’Urban, the wicked, wicked Sheeno-Cushingite-McIntyrist-Spellmaniacal-Mundeleinien motto of which is, “Be A Winner.” Having sold all my books in the wake of divorce I cannot scan that image but certain cunning ways of obtaining it remain open to me and shall be pursued.

Likewise a choice dedicatory susbsists, as between two moderns this time, the delightfully operose Martin Amis and the lamentably late John Meagher.

Martin sayeth:

And John Meagher saithe: “To my lovely wife Shiela, whose utter indifference t the entire project was a constant source of perspective.”

You may have noted a certain omission of explanation or commentary on a book that, in the normal course of events, you have not yet read. This is deliberate. Having laid out the facts and images as I understood them in the order I believed necessar to tell the story, I would be even more foolish than I feel naked in public were I to try to pre-tell it here. So there.

And if this whole farrago hasn’t been expository, I’m a Dutchman.

The Author

Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance

Scraps & Leftovers

It was the custom at my University to give comprehensive examinations to departing seniors. If they were Honours students the subject matter was identical to their Honours registration; if they were General BA students, as I was, the subject matter was in one’s major subject. Mine was English. For, as I recall it, three mortal hours I read various unidentified passages of English literature and wrote as much as I could in identification of the author, time-period and style or theme of the work in question.

Deminl museum francis box unfolded paper handwritten emerson Arleen manuiscriptrs Eileen francis priestrs exceptr you didn’t kneel or strand you flew like delia I had tro take a small stone exhibit and flow it up to the ceiling to bring down a little putti with which to fluy. Reading trhe bgaby the manuscripts in the glas cases

tooly deuce

had gone to bruce

to see the communaute, ho

it wasn't there

except for where

they kept the dah dah dah dah, ho

he wasn't mad

for he was the lad

to find the hidden cash, ho

Dio, che dell'alma infondere tenor-baritone duet Verdi Don Carlo Act 1

1 Cryptic Massage Company

Finest marble tables

Two floors below ground

Cool in both summer and winter

Gentle healing touch for dead skin

Eating Gouda Cheese

Verse 1

Sitting by the roadside on a summer's day

Chatting with my messmates, passing time away

Lying in the shadows underneath the trees

Goodness, how delicious, eating goober peas.

Chorus2x

Peas, peas, peas, peas

Eating goober peas

Goodness, how delicious,

Eating goober peas.

Verse 2

When a horse-man passes, the soldiers have a rule

To cry out their loudest, "Mister, here's your mule!"

But another custom, enchanting-er than these

Is wearing out your grinders, eating goober peas.

Verse 3

Just before the battle, the General hears a row

He says "The Yanks are coming, I hear their rifles now."

He turns around in wonder, and what d'ya think he sees?

The Georgia Militia, eating goober peas.

Verse 4

I think my song has lasted almost long enough.

The subject's pretty interesting, but rhymes are mighty rough.

I wish the war was over, so free from rags and fleas

We'd kiss our wives and sweethearts, and gobble goober peas.

slangist (12:17): just who i was thinking of!

Marla4pets (12:17): i will be with you in a little while i'm on the phone...

slangist (12:18): k

Marla4pets (13:36): are you still around?

slangist (13:36): yup

slangist (13:36): real round. fat.

Marla4pets (13:37): sorry, i disappeared 'cause paula called me. i met her here and now she is near you in bethesda. she is looking for envl law jobs -- know any connections???

Marla4pets (13:37): that is why you should be exercising!

slangist (13:37): nope no connections yep about exercise

slangist (13:37): guess what guess what?

slangist (13:37): i'm trying to do my taxes!

slangist (13:37): and i can't find the file yo sent me!

Marla4pets (13:37): what? you won the lottery and want to support me for the rest of my life?

slangist (13:37): got a copy?

Marla4pets (13:38): oh

Marla4pets (13:38): that

slangist (13:38): if i did i would

Marla4pets (13:38): yeah, somewhere_

Marla4pets (13:38): hold while i search this 'puter

slangist (13:38): thanx

slangist (13:38): you'd hafta go to paris with me if i supported you though

Marla4pets (13:39): oh. well there's that...and school. i believe your stuff to be on my laptop so it'll be a short while before it is up and running and on a floppy so that i may send to you -- i still have to finish your 2002 so far stuff...

slangist (13:39): it's too big to zip and email?

slangist (13:39): not worried about 2002

Marla4pets (13:40): nah, but i have to get it off the laptop, put it on a disk so it can come to the desktop so it can be sent

slangist (13:40): ah so

slangist (13:40): i locked myself in my apt today to do this

slangist (13:41): only not to find the file

slangist (13:41): sigh

slangist (13:41): it;s always something

slangist (13:41): how are you otherwise?

Marla4pets (13:41): i can send it to you. actually, somewhere it is already on floppy, but i'm not so organized as to be able to find it immediately. faster to recopy...things are OK. JD and i are thru, can't remember if i told you or not???

Marla4pets (13:42): as of almost exactly a week ago

slangist (13:42): yeah you told me, alas. sorry to hear it. mostly because of the pain, not the outcome.

Marla4pets (13:43): yeah. pain mostly all gone. that is what happens when an event that occurs is not unexpected.

Marla4pets (13:44): gotta run. donna just called. will be back shortly with your file...

slangist (13:44): well expectation doesn't always provide enough anaesthesia

> gods, I have to go through editing that, too...

far too much to dooooooooooooooo....

Marla plates dialog

didn't even notice

Slangwhanger-in-Chief

02:17

thats how well i domesticated them to my space they didnt even call out to you

marla4pets

02:19

that is wonderful!

Slangwhanger-in-Chief

02:20

yes they are quite happy, as i am sure they were before too, but they are now, insofar as now is more important than earlier, which is probably a question very few china or glass utensils have ever pondered...

marla4pets

02:20

that's funny

Slangwhanger-in-Chief

02:20

i like making you smile

02:21

makes me feel like a real man

02:23

i know i know "don't get carried away, you just might..."

Mr. Deal W. Hudson

Editor & Publisher

Crisis Magazine

PO Box 3000

Denville NJ 07834

Dear Mr. Hudson:

I am infinitely relieved that it will be unnecessary for me to take up your offer to contribute to the right wing of the Church.

First of all there are, of course, plenty of official Catholics and other supporters of the Opus Dei cardinalate who will do their consciences ease by financing your limited view of the Church’s duties and obligations to God’s people on earth.

Secondly, such Catholic information needs as I have are amply satisfied by the admirable work of the National Catholic Reporter as well as the magazines put out respectively by Catholics for a Free Choice and the Benedictine nuns of St. Joseph, MN. These publications, in general, refrain from castigating civil society for its evils and from fostering a Catholic ghetto mentality, while carrying the message of God’s forgiveness for all his creatures. I heartily commend the former discipline, and the latter indulgence, to you, your editors and writers.

Finally, having been in the same class as John Sage, I would note that his quotation of Jack Burke’s pronouncement to the Houston Basilians (that reason must be abandoned in the search for conscientious priests) shows only one of the ways the Basilian tradition has been degraded since 1960. In the first sixty years of its operation, St. Thomas High School was a suburban school, far on the edge of town, dedicated to Catholic education of boys regardless of their social class or linguistic background. My grandmother helped found the St. Thomas Mothers Club. My father wrote the essay that resulted in the eagle becoming the school mascot in the 1930s. One of my uncles, two of my brothers, and two of my nephews, all graduated from St. Thomas. Of late, however, the struggle in the Basilians between the jock priests who value rigidity and athletics and the scholar priests who value curiosity and intellectual rigor has apparently been decisively determined in favor of the jocks.

That this sad state of affairs will never be lamented in your pages with the same fervor you deplore feminism is a sufficient additional reason not to subscribe.

Faithfully yours,

James McCarty Yeager

cc: Mr. Leo Linbeck, Jr.

Mr. John Sage, St. Thomas High Class of 66

Fr. Ronald Schwenzer

is this a potential plot point or what?

HOME > THE IRISH TIMES > OPINION

Tuesday, August 24, 1999

You Wouldn't Recognise The Place!

Abuse in NY convent ruled by 'crazy coot'

-------------------------------------------

The abuse meted out in some religious institutions was not confined to the children there. Young members of congregations were themselves victims of the tyranny of superiors. Siobhán Purcell recalls an experience from her days as a nun in the US and poses some pertinent questions

There was an ice storm howling outside the convent chapel windows while inside heating, electricity and running water were frozen up. Snowbanks were over 6 ft high in this very northern part of New York state, 300 miles from the Big Apple.

Marooned in this tiny convent were two young nuns and their sister superior whom I had decided early on was as crazy as a coot. On this miserable evening, sister superior was in one of her fits. (These fits could last anywhere from a few hours to a week and you never knew what brought them on or why.)

She accused the other nun, Sister J., of something or other and ordered her to get down on her knees and confess. Sister J. obediently got on her knees but sincerely could not recall any wrong-doing during that day.

In a fury, the superior went to the kitchen, returned with a bag of apples and ordered Ireland's Sister J. to eat six of them "right now. Yes, now!" Still on her knees, Sister J. struggled through three of the Red Mackintosh (or were they Pippin?) before she began to choke.

Fury was building up in the superior and I really thought she would ram the remaining apples down Sister J.'s throat. But no. For her disobedience Sister J. was ordered to spend the entire night, freezing as it was, on her knees in front of the Blessed Sacrament.

And believe me, if Jesus wept that night, he had company.

Next morning, it was up to the altar for Holy Communion as though nothing had happened.

Another morning she scratched my face so badly I was too upset to go up to communion. Later, she commented on this, which I believe was against Canon Law, as was, I think, physically attacking a sister in Christ.

So much misery and hypocrisy existed in this small, insignificant convent - and I might add, this sister superior was one of the most popular nuns in the parish, loved and admired by priest and people alike.

When she was finally transferred, I took my courage in my hands and went to the mother general of the order with my story. After three years of hell under this woman I felt I owed it to other young and old nuns . . . maybe to save them from the same fate. How naive of me. Mother general was appalled, stunned. So was I, for I subsequently learned that this crazy sister superior was assigned to the same role in a new convent elsewhere in the States, and by the aforementioned mother general.

You are probably thinking that, compared to the horrors of Goldenbridge, Artane and others, my experience is just peanuts, and you are right, but the question remains the same. What kind of system is it that allows its members to get away with such crimes? Not only lets them get off but, incredibly, rewards them with continued trust and support.

Their spiritual leader, the Pope, said he was "saddened" over reports of abuses in the Irish Church. Saddened. I believe the Pope, his cardinals and bishops, are more saddened and concerned about what women do with their reproductive systems than they are with the sexual, physical and mental abuse committed by members of their church on little innocent children.

Of course they will strenuously deny this is the case, but any woman in Clondalkin, Cork or Monkstown, knows the difference. As they say they are wise to the church now. The ones who still care about it, that is.

But back to the system. What is wrong with it? Do the ordinary decent nuns and priests of Ireland ever ask themselves the $100 question? How did the bad ones get away with their crimes for such a long time? Is the system rotten and, if so, should it be changed or dissolved?

Are the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience passé? Are the good and decent men and women of the church indifferent, uncaring, lackadaisical, brainwashed or blinded?

Once in the system, does it become inconceivable for them to see evil in their brothers and sisters in Christ? Is this beyond their comprehension? Can they be that naive, or is there another element intrinsic to the system? Is there a clue somewhere which would give us some insight?

My mother general, a truly good woman, was appalled by my account of the behaviour of one of her nuns in authority. Yet what did she do? More or less reward a woman who was probably mentally unbalanced. A crazy woman who, at the very least, should never be in a position of authority.

It didn't then nor does it now, 25 years on, make any sense, but there was something the mother general said which may be some sort of a clue as to why she did what she did. "You know, dear sister, that suffering makes you strong and brings you closer to God," she said to me.

Apparently Mother Teresa of Calcutta, amid all the poverty and suffering of Calcutta, was of the same mind. And obviously the Pope is too, for Mother Teresa is on the list for speedy canonisation.

Is there a contradiction in the notion that suffering brings you closer to God? That misery is good for you, is a good thing? You may not be an admirer of Nietzsche but let me quote him. "There is a great ladder of religious cruelty with many rungs: but three of them are the most important. At one time one sacrificed human beings to one's God. Then, in the moral epoch of mankind, one sacrificed to God the strongest instincts one possessed, one's nature. And finally, did one not have to sacrifice God himself and out of cruelty against oneself worship stone, stupidity, gravity, faith, nothingness?"

Siobhán Purcell, who lives in Dublin, was a nun in the US for 14 years before leaving the religious life. She would like other nuns or former nuns with similar abusive experiences to contact her. They may do so in confidence c/o Rite and Reason, The Irish Times, D'Olier Street, Dublin 2.

This Is Dedicated To The Ones I Love

The Immediate Ancestors

none of whom I knew, all of whom were loved by some I knew:

Josie Dunn McCarty, Jim McCarty, Mary Grace Gannon McCarty, Veatus Cantious McCarty, Molly Harrop Yeager, James Nicholas Yeager

The Professoriat at the Universitate Vivendi

(in rough chronological order of encounter)

whose enthusiasm, skill and spirit

allowed me to want to learn from them:

Laymen and women:

Eileen McCarty Yeager, Francis Scott Yeager, Michael T. Yeager, Mary-o Yeager, F. Scott Yeager, Jr., Nicholas Gannon Yeager, Delia Arleen Yeager, Clement Rutledge Yeager, James Harrop Yeager, John Glenn Yeager, Christine Young Yeager, Emerson Merton Hynes, Arleen McCarty Hynes, Jimmie MacDonald, Mary Hynes-Berry, Marjorie McQuorquodale, Marjorie Weeks, Andy Anderson, James B. Hughes, Jr., Charlie Pratt, Jimmy Ribbeck, Bob Samohyl, Eugene Patrick Ryan, Joseph Stone Bleakie, Bill Hershey, Joe Pumilia, The Gonzales Brothers, Bill Patterson, Thomas Robert McCanne, Lydia Tuffly Johnson, Jean Ann Goldie Weisinger, Paul Nicholas Yeager, Allen Williams, Peggy Hogan Merrill, Laura Lou Blackburn, Francoise Crispin, Linda Shackleford, Charles S. Krohn, Louis C. Swilley, Douglas Mitchell, Domenique deMenil, Kathleen Alford Fambrough Kurtz Lyon Rodosevich, Annie Laurie Kurtz England Lyon, Eugene Allen Kurtz, Kevin Christopher Ryan, Michael Lang Dodd, Sandra Leigh Mary Margaret Rhodes Ryan Jones, Mark Biggio Ryan, Liz Sauer, Theresa Farge, B. J. Walter, Aileen Weaver, Anne Jorjorian, Gloria P. Coryell, Susan Chimene Hartley, Kevin Smith, Maura Sullivan, Martha Hirsch, Mary Hirsch, Paul Surgi Speck, Kevin Cooney, Theresa Nelson Cooney, Cathy Zeis, Barbara Carr, Colleen Kitowski, Martha Wing, Katy Walter, Mayo J. Thompson, Ed Cogburn, Nicholas Acocella, Joan Ross Acocella, Gene Pokorny, Fred T. Flahiff, Elizabeth M. Moeslein, John Meagher, Ian Montagnes, E. E. Rose, Christopher Edward McGee, Marion Frances O’Connor, Dan Mack, Nick Power, Rick Hayward, Alice Elizabeth Kelley, Carmen Guild, Brigid Hynes-Cherin, Louis H. Stern, Annette J. Mitchell, Janice Lindley Yeager, Nathan Fain, Jody Blazek, David Crossley, Edward A. Mallett, Larry Lee, Don Gardner, Marc & Pepe Grossberg, Kaye Northcott, Molly Ivins, Kathy Church, Anne Ragsdale Kirlin-Kelly, Donnie & Marsha Gochnauer, Karen Hughes, Ruth Grubb, Pat Bohning, Steve Barthelme, Richard Kostelanetz, James Korn, Patrick Benedict Hynes, Bernard J. Cherin, Hilary Mark Hynes, Theresa Weinheimer Hynes, Jerome N. Eller, Hon. Eugene Joseph McCarthy, Missy Willette, Keith Burris, Karen Gibson, Mary Meehan, Ron Xoxome, Mary Monroe, David Farrelly, Mary Beth Hughes Hynes, Sarah Gross, Christina Waples Fleps, Susan Sumners Yeager, Virginia A. Daley, Joe White, Judith Watkins Tarte, Geoff Belisle, Cynthia S. Warren, Christiana Smith Hays, Frederick C. Hays, Karen S. Miller, Kristin Willette, Margaret Veerhoff, Susan Belisle, Terrence Robert Flaherty, David Anthony Passafaro, Martin P. Paone, Andrew Wigglesworth, Janet G. St. Amand, Louise Kristin Cox, Lynn Garson, Jackie Potter, Christopher Leo Hynes, George Mozingo, Caroline W. Casey, Dr. Susie Costello, Jane Stewart-Yeager, Arline Leesch Stewart, Anne Tyler, Mark J. Freihage, Christopher Kobler, Margaret Jones Kobler, Paul Hibschman, Art Purvis, David Altholz, Justin Stewart Yeager, Joshua Breihan Yeager, Maurice Rosenblatt, T. More Hynes, Mary Carroll Hynes, John F. Boynton, Alan McNiff, Ellen Fitzgerald, Julie Magee, Carlton Iddings, Hon. Brian Frosh, Paul Albers, Barbara Stott McCoy, Marla B. Rosenthal, Varale Goodman, David Cooney, David Beauchemin, Doug Ustig, Carole Cones, Kaye Pomaranc White, Tracy Schulze, Babette Wise, Jim Cullen, Griffith Murray, Patrick Arcand, Caitlin McNamara, Vicki deAngelis, Margo Tercy, Alison Levy, Pooneh Kalantar, Anna Oneal, Michael Dunn, G. Craig Murray, Missy Cochrane, David Lynn Grimes, Lisa Jones, Lori Katherine Seaton, Lynne Iadrola, Jon Lossos, Jonathan Munroe, Joel F. Nagourney, Jeanmarie Davis, Duncan White, Peter Malawista, Barb J. Holder, David Lynn Grimes, Helen Walter-Swan, Michael Swan, Rosemary Yeager, Sarah Sharp, Geb Berry, Daniel Berry, Nico Berry, Sarah Frisch, Kevin Lamont “Sketch” Walton, Lewis Remick, Bart Brown, Tony Crowley, Vanessa Quick, Leslie A. Wilson, Channing Elizabeth Johnston, Ajie Velasquez, Michael Horsley, Patricia Jean Griffin, Bob & Betsy O’Brien, Scott VanNote, Alex Wild, Mary Grigonis, Abbi Reynolds, Kerry Abelson, Ted Watts, Andrew Large, Justin Brown

Religious

(Congregation of St. Basil [CSB] unless otherwise noted)

Sr. Ada (OP), Nunzio E. Venza, James K. Farge, Dave Power, [F.X.] Bader, Denis Andrews, [Donald] Schafer, Donald T. Cooper, [J.] Vermillion, James Wilson, Wilfred Riley, Carl Allnoch, Francis Monaghan, E. J. Farge (Diocesan), Steve Horn (Diocesan), Jim Blocher (Diocesan), John Kelly (Diocesan), John Bradshaw, Bob Faucheaux, John Attinasi, Dan Stead, Rock Romano, Bert Edmundson, Sean Murray, Mike Goodwin, Steve LaCroix, Edward Gregory Lee, Vincent J. Guinan, Richard Schiefen, David Belyea, Joseph Myers, Raphael O’Loughlin, Claude Arnold, Sam Femiano, Larry Lee (Diocesan), Msgr. E. A. Synan, Msgr. Joaquin Bazan (Diocesan), David Ray (C. S. Sp.) Msgr. William J. Kane (Diocesan), Msgr. Raymond G. East (Diocesan)

1 Literary

The Psalmist(s), Job, Isaiah(s), Homer(s), Aristotle, Aeschulus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes, John the Evangelist, The Beowulf Poet, The Pearl Poet, William Langland, Erasmus, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, Moliere, Lawrence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Herman Melville, Mr. Mark Twain, Gogol, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, George Bernard Shaw, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.E. Lawrence, Philip Guedalla, Samuel Beckett, Jaroslav Hasek, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, James Stephens, e.e. cummings, Jorge Luis Borges, Evelyn Waugh, Vera Brittain, George Dangerfield, William Faulkner, Bertolt Brecht, Brian O’Nolan, J. D. Salinger, J. F. Powers, Harold Pinter, Saul Bellow, Mordecai Richler, Penelope Gilliat, Josef Skvorecky, Bohumil Hrabal, Vladimir Voinovich, Wilfrid Sheed, Shirley Hazzard, Luis Rafael Sanchez, T.R. Pearson, Nicholson Baker, Art Spiegleman, A.N. Wilson, Julian Barnes, Michael Frayn, Martin Amis

2 Clowns, Jongleurs, Tregetours

Charles Dickens, Georges Feydeau, Gilbert & Sullivan, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Finley Peter Dunne, Rudyard Kipling, Jerome K. Jerome, P. G. Wodehouse, H.H. Munro, E. W. Hornug, Charlie Chaplin, Winsor McCay, Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, George Herriman, Don Marquis, Leonard Arthur Julius Herbert & Milton, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Nathaniel Benchley, S.J. Perleman, Fred Allen, Milligan Sellers Secombe & Bentine, Walt Kelly, Brother Dave Gardner, Homer & Jethro, Ernie Kovaks, George Gobel, Joseph Heller, Flanders & Swann, Cook Moore Miller & Bennett, Tom Lehrer, Jean Shepherd, Lenny Bruce, Bob & Ray, Rowan & Martin, Smothers Brothers, Bob Newhart (three times), Jay Ward, Jonathan Winters, Nichols & May, Cleese Chapman Jones Idle & Gilliam, Fry & Laurie, John Barth, Calvin Trillin, Sjowall & Wahloo, John D. MacDonald, Peter deVries, Nicolas Freeling, Jan-Willem van de Wetering, Patrick O’Brian, John Mortimer, Sara Caudwell, Mark Alan Stamaty, Gary Larsen, Bill Watterson, Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Garry Trudeau, Bill Griffin, julius knipl, Matt Groning, Nicole Hollander, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Garrison Keillor, Andrea Camilleri, Michael Dibdin, French & Saunders

3 Zeitgeististical Collocation

Seven Musical Prophet/Poets of My Generation

Chuck Berry, The Beatles, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix and Joni Mitchell

4 And a Tip o’ th’ Fiduciary Fedora to

Brigid Hynes-Cherin JD, Patrick Hynes & Hon. Mary Beth Hughes Hynes, Dr. H. Catherine Walter PhD, Alyssa Henry, Dr. Christopher E. McGee PhD & Dr. Donna Penrose PhD, Peggy Hogan Merrill, Queen of Peace Arlington Federal Credit Union (Dan Morrissey, Treas.), Jane Stewart-Yeager, Michael T. Yeager, Mary-o Yeager, Scott Yeager & Dr. Susan Sumners Yeager DDS, Nicholas G. Yeager, Delia A. Yeager, Kevin Lamont “Sketch” Walton; Jon Lossos, Lynn Kunkel & Eva Kunkel-Lossos and Axiom Alliances; Mahmoud Ghavami; Caroline W. Casey; the government and citizens of the District of Columbia; and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Democratic Party and Social Security

2 magnificat

Magnificat anima mea Dominum;

I got me a pretty good feeling about God

Et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo,

When I think about God, baby, I feel REAL good.

Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae;

Because, you know, I ain’t much, but he done treated me right.

ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes.

So one day, people gonna look back and say, wow, man, SHE WAS OK!

Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est,

Like, he is the Man, and he has sent a shitload of good stuff my way.

et sanctum nomen ejus,

You just gotta respect that dude.

Et misericordia ejus a progenie in progenies timentibus eum.

The deal is, you stay with him, he gonna look out for you and your kids, guaranteed.

Fecit potentiam brachio suo;

That man got muscle like you never seen.

Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui.

The chill dudes, they think they something, he done sent them running.

Deposuit potentes de sede,

The top honchos in the thousand dollar suits, he done fired ever last one,

et exaltavit humiles.

and he promoted us no-accounts to run the show.

Esurientes implevit bonis,

The hungry people, he sit them down at the Ritz, eight courses and cognac to finish,

et divites dimisit inanes.

while all the rich guys, they doing the trashcans, looking for a crust.

Suscepit Israel, puerum suum, recordatus misericordiae suae,

He don’t never forget! He say he give you a hand up, he give you a hand up, you just ask his man Israel.

Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semeni ejus in saecula.

Like he told the old guys, Abraham and the whole damn family, he ain’t never gonna forget, you better believe it.

Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto.

He is the Man, and his kid is the Man, and the pigeon is the Man too.

Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

Like it always been, and ain’t never gonna be no different. Amen.

Michael Swan

November 2004



(With help from Jamie Yeager)

ezra’s linguistic conceit is that aramaic is an uncouth dialect to a roman, like a yorkshireman’s or scotsman’s to a londoner, and that the reader is therefore in some measure also to be considered a roman (so we are led by the poet to avoid the too-easy identification with christ, and are forced to consider ourselves among his oppressors, as is more historically accurate…)

Ballad of the Goodly Fere

by Ezra Pound (1917)

(Simon Zelotes speaketh it somewhile after the Crucifixion.)

Ha’ we lost the goodliest fere o’ all

For the priests and the gallows tree?

Aye lover he was of brawny men,

O’ ships and the open sea.

When they came wi’ a host to take Our Man

His smile was good to see,

“First let these go!” quo’ our Goodly Fere,

“Or I’ll see ye damned,” says he.

Aye he sent us out through the crossed high spears

And the scorn of his laugh rang free,

“Why took ye not me when I walked about

Alone in the town?” says he.

Oh we drank his “Hale” in the good red wine

When we last made company.

No capon priest was the Goodly Fere,

But a man o’ men was he.

I ha’ seen him drive a hundred men

Wi’ a bundle o’ cords swung free,

That they took the high and holy house

For their pawn and treasury.

They’ll no’ get him a’ in a book, I think,

Though they write it cunningly;

No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere

But aye loved the open sea.

If they think they ha’ snared our Goodly Fere

They are fools to the last degree.

“I’ll go to the feast,” quo’ our Goodly Fere,

“Though I go to the gallows tree.”

“Ye ha’ seen me heal the lame and blind,

And wake the dead,” says he.

“Ye shall see one thing to master all:

’Tis how a brave man dies on the tree.”

A son of God was the Goodly Fere

That bade us his brothers be.

I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men.

I have seen him upon the tree.

He cried no cry when they drave the nails

And the blood gushed hot and free.

The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue,

But never a cry cried he.

I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men

On the hills o’ Galilee.

They whined as he walked out calm between,

Wi’ his eyes like the gray o’ the sea.

Like the sea that brooks no voyaging,

With the winds unleashed and free,

Like the sea that he cowed at Genseret

Wi’ twey words spoke suddently.

A master of men was the Goodly Fere,

A mate of the wind and sea.

If they think they ha’ slain our Goodly Fere

They are fools eternally.

I ha’ seen him eat o’ the honey-comb

Sin’ they nailed him to the tree.

[pic]

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