A Magical Time

After heavy rainfalls the field here used to flood and become a two acre marshland. For days, or even weeks, flocks of egrets, ibises, cranes and Killdeers (Charadrius vociferus, named for their distinctive call) trolled the waters. Depending upon the time of year, the edges of the marsh (until recently, on the north edge, there was a 5+ acre woodland bounded by thick low brush) might be purled with yellow bellied sapsuckers and various types of migrating sparrow, nuthatch, and warbler. Each morning, from near its nest, in a high elm at the northwest corner of the property, the resident Cardinal would regale all who would take the time to listen.

At dusk the wood thrust sang its plaintive song from deep within the woods across the street. I used to play cassette tapes I had of various birdsongs and the wood thrush would always answer when it heard its song played.

Of course, the Blue Jay and the Starling were constant residents, marsh or no. Near the powerlines that paralleled the woodland on the northeast a Grey Jay occasionally stopped in for a visit.

It was a magical time.

To check out my book, Henry David
Thoreau and Two Other Autistic
Lives, click here!

After Hurricane Irene, which flooded the crumbling little cottage that I was kindly being put up in at the time, the county installed flood drains along the road. That was the end of the marsh and its visitors. Not long after, the woodland was divided into housing lots. Only a thin strip remains now, consisting almost entirely of Australian Pines, and newly enacted state laws require it be cleared within the year. The migrating birds, then, stopped coming as well, a little at a time, the last of them appearingg about three years ago. Only the starlings and ring doves and the occasional jay remain.

The reader may imagine my surprise, then, when a Great Egret (Casmerodius albus) began frequenting the field last month. The only permanent nesting place, in this area, for the Great Egret is located in a patch of marsh nestled between sections of nearby Lake Osborne. The lake has also been considerably "redesigned" over the past several years and I can only suspect that the avian residents are forced to look ever farther afield to maintain themselves. The grass is not cut religiously, here, and the field is probably uniquely attractive for the fact.

Our guest has since stopped once or twice a week to slowly walk the field in search, it turns out, of grass snakes. The first I saw it dine I was impressed. It shook the snake into submission and then worked it down its throat. There was some sense of indigestion as the snake visibly struggled against its fate.

The second time I saw it dine the matter was not resolved quite so easily. In an ungaurded moment, the snake managed to get its tail around the crook in the egret's throat. The egret, then, had the snake's head in its beak and the snake had the egret by the neck. All snakes are powerful constrictors for their size and the egret found itself in a terrible fix. It tried again and again, hopping to prodigious heights with the effort, to pull the snake off of its throat, desperately resting between attempts. The snake only kept the egret's beak trapped against its neck probably quite aware that its own life depended upon the success of the venture. I wondered who would win.

After some 15 minutes of combat, my binoculars fixed on them checking every nuance, neither had made the least progress. I had things to do and could no longer put them off. When I returned from putting the binoculars away I noticed the egret working the snake down its muscular throat.

* * *

The difficulties of its recent dining experience did not prevent our guest from coming back. In fact, on the next occasion it brought a friend.

While I stood watching them a flurry of wings came around the corner and settled near my feet. A ring dove had landed and was trying desperately to burrow into a small stand of palmetto beside me. Just beyond it was a Swainson's Hawk (see previous post about Swainson's Hawk) also now on the ground. It was shocked to find itself only a few feet from a human being, and, there being no available updraft, it immediately lifted back off by main force, with a heavy urgency, in the opposite direction, its wingbeats slow and labored. I could hear the powerful woosh of air and snap of its wings for each beat.

That unusual experience was probably also the result of shrinking habitat. The Swainson's Hawk only rarely takes prey the size of a full-grown ring dove. It limits itself to prey that is small enough to fly away with in a pinch. Nor does it follow it to the ground around unknown corners. With more and more of the wild life in the area dying off or going elsewhere, and less and less unmolested land, the hawk may be more often forced to take whatever is available and on whatever terms. Squab, I suspect, is more often on the menu and the chances that go with it.

Cyber Punks, Street Punks and Ring Doves

I decided to go to the corner store, at about 10:30 Friday night, to pick up a couple of items. It's right around the corner, no big thing; I'd hop on the bike and be there and back in no time. As I crossed the field between my rooms and the street I noticed four young guys emerge from the cross street. They had to be thirteen or fourteen years old and seemed to have done their best to dress in similar black and orange clothing.

While I had to wonder, there seemed little reason for concern. As the boys walked the sidewalk in front of the property, the largest of the four saw me and lowered his head and walked toward me. The next largest boy followed at his shoulder. The two others hovered timidly behind. I continued to walk toward the sidewalk. The two continued to walk toward me clearly looking more menacing as they did so. As they nearly reached me, seeing that I was looking directly at them without blanching, they suddenly veered off and walked into the shadows beside a row of trees, just off the road, from where they stood taunting me with calls of "f--king white boy". I turned toward the store and rode on in silence.

They were Latinos. For all the years I've been part of the largely Latino community, here, I've probably sat down more than once for barbaqua with their parents or other relatives. Good solid peasant stock, likely enough. Salt of the earth.

* * *

It has been only a couple of weeks now since two guys in their mid-twenties -- one white, one Latino -- approached as I stood outside smoking a cigarette at about 3:00 AM. They nonchalantly turned off the side road and began to cross the field toward me. As they approached, the Latino guy pulled a razor-knife partially out of his pocket, opened it, and slid it back into his pocket again his hand casually over the top of it. With that I stepped back inside the door. They just as nonchalantly kept walking past. When I stepped out again behind them the white guy called over his shoulder: "Just passing through!"

* * *

Between these two joyous incidents, I spent several hours acting as go-between/counselor for a late-twenties couple with anger management problems, infidelity issues, and heroin/methadone (and prescription drug) issues. The intervention seemed to go gratifyingly well but it's not exactly the average idea of recreation or of getting some writing done. A few days later, another patron of the outreach programs for which I volunteer spent hours pounding with the butt of her fist on all of the doors and windows demanding mail-upon-demand, refusing to wait for Friday mail-call. When the sheriffs arrived she got her mail, notice of her being removed from the mail program forthwith, and notice that she would be would be arrested should she return. Again, no writing.

* * *

Last but not least, a couple of individual Wikipedia "Users" took umbrage over my posting material to the site's new Claudia Emerson page. (A Claudia Emerson poem, provided to VGS per agreement with the American Life in Poetry series, and the Palm Beaches Review's own Claudia Emerson Page.) "Hot" pages bring out the worst in Wikiterritorialism. One of the Users has made himself personal dictator over a number of pages and has removed my (targetted, high content) links before. Having been absorbed into Wikiculture, he blithely blew off all of the supposed Wikiethics of public editing and left an order not to post links at Wikipedia any more in the future. It's absolutely light-years beyond any authority provided to any User (or Administrator, for that matter) and I mentioned that he lived sufficiently nearby that legal papers could be served. He and some half-dozen other Wikipedians immediately and publically began "tracking" me, wolf-pack fashion, via Wikipedia's record of my IP adresses, looking for avenues of personal attack.

I've told the outlines of the story at the article Is Wikipedia Handing Out Your Browsing Information to Thousands? You can find it, and much more on the subject, at VGS's new Wiki Watchdog blog. I'd been planning to start a new blog on computer security issues and this incident fleshed out my plans quite well.

* * *

With all of this for atmosphere, I have sat watching a ring dove (almost certainly a variation of Zenaidura macroura we have here which displays the neck ring) build its nest nearby. It has chosen a drooping branch that must be approached through a kind of passageway of intertwined pine needles and spends its days swooping down to the ground for a beak full of nest-weaving materials. Then back up to the passageway for a short walk to the accumulating nest.

One day there was a loud report from the property next door. The dove was at the door of its bower and was shaken enough out of its thoughts of nest building to stop and take a long look around. While the shock of the sound would have passed soon enough, he (she?) spied another ring dove on the horizontal arm of a lamp post some twenty yeards away. He flew to the top of the lamp post, above the interloper, and began repeatedly to stamp his feet. Once didn't do it and fully three sessions of furious foot stamping and feinting in the direction of the unwelcome guest were required before it flew off to a more acceptable distance. After taking a moment to calm down it returned to its nest building.

Related Stories:

• Man-Boy Love Advocate Accused of Using Wikipedia to Troll for Interested Parties (March 4, 2007). Rookie Revolyob, Clayboy, Zanthalon, et al: Why is Wikpedia a Pedophile Haven?

Musings on Computers, Nature and Stuff.

I'm plodding today. Building Virtual Grub Street's family of blogs is oppresive at times. Wrestling with the various computer equipment involved (all of it in pretty marginal condition, to begin with) is regularly disheartening. Between designed obsolescence and poor product design it verges on the miraculous when one manages to get anything done.

Of course, without computers an undertaking like VGS (or, for that matter, freelance writing at large) would be impossible. Each new dilemma adds just a bit more to a skill package which one's friends can call upon one to provide (along with however many hours) for free. Well, you get the idea.

One source of respite is nature. When I first came to the Lake Worth, Florida, area, some eleven years ago, there were perhaps as many as a dozen Swainson's Hawks (Buteo swainsoni) within a ten mile radius -- generally two mating pairs in the immediate neighborhood. The last of the hawks retreated several years ago, the local woodlands having given way before the walled communities that are constantly being constructed in the area.

To check out my book, Henry David
Thoreau and Two Other Autistic
Lives, click here!

It was a surprise, then, when I saw a fine, large specimen, in the rufus stage, alight, in the tiny remaining swatch of woodland nextdoor, two weeks ago now. I do occasionally hear the cry of the Swainson's, in the distance, when the noise of passing traffic is momentarily stilled (although, it is difficult to be sure whether a single cry has come from the far more vocal Osprey or from the Swainson's) and suspect that there may be a mating pair as close as a mile or two inland.

Several years ago, I noticed a young Swainson's swoop from a tree, at the corner of Lake Worth and Kirk Roads, and take a Starling in flight. He flew with it into a nearby fenced yard. Generally there is an aggresive dog in the yard, but, apparently, the hawk knew its schedule, and, when I did not hear the dog chase off the hawk, I peered over the fence to see the prey clasped securely and pinned to the ground. The hawk, however, noticed me, after a time, and chose to fly off in order to prepare his meal in privacy. When I turned around to leave, I noticed myself being glowered at very intently by a gentleman who had stopped perhaps twenty feet behind me, in his pick-up truck, to ask why I was staring over other people's fences into their private yards. I explained that a Swainson's Hawk had taken his prey into the yard which explanation was lost upon him.

Other Nature Topics:

• Observations on Leiocephalus carinatus armouri and Other Stuff
• Bartram Wakes to the Call of the Wild Turkey William Bartram explores the St. John's River, just south of St. Augustine, Florida, in April of 1774. Here he gives us...
• Burroughs Observes a Gourmet Robin
• Burroughs' Receives Intelligence About the High Hole. Here the naturalist John Burroughs publishes the account of a young correspondent who has tamed a high-hole (a.k.a. yellow flicker, northern flicker, Colaptes auratus).

Observations on Leiocephalus carinatus armouri and Other Stuff

I am not sure whether it is because of the drought of recent years, from which Florida has yet to completely emerge, or human intervention, but the Northern Curly-Tail lizard (Leiocephalus carinatus armouri) just isn't what it used to be. I saw an unusually large specimen, just the other day, and it was half the size of the behemoths of several years ago.



The Curly-Tail is an import from the Bahamas, intentionally released into Florida during the 1940s. (No one seems to remember just why.) It is a sand lizard, rarely seen around the omnipresent Palm Beach County canals, ponds or lakes. Only a few years ago, it was everywhere else in the landscape. It is much less common since. It is rare, now, to see a specimen as much as eight inches long from nose to extended tail.

It is quite possible that steps have been taken to reduce the population. Eradicating aggressive imported species of flora and fauna has been on the state's agenda in recent years, and the rise of the Curly-Tail has been paralleled by a precipitous drop in the populations of the green and brown Anole (also imports).

The Anole receives better press than do other imports. They are much more interesting to watch. (The Curly-Tail is a blunt fellow with little personality.) During mating season, the males extend a bright orange pouch, beneath their chin, and do push-ups to show the ladies that they have what it takes. Combat is frequently the outcome of these displays. They are also pseudo-chameleons: always a favorite party-trick.

I've posted a number of extracts, recently, from well-known naturalists and intend soon to gather them together onto theme pages. Most will appear in the pages of the Treasure Coast Review, as have the following:

• Audubon Observes Florida Sea-Turtles. During an 1832 trip to Florida and the Tortugas, the naturalist James Audubon had the opportunity to study the region's large Turtles...
• Bartram Seeks News of the Creeks and Seminoles. About to ascend the St. John's River, in April of 1774, Wiliam Bartram seeks information about a recent incident between the local settlers and Indians.
• Bartram Wakes to the Call of the Wild Turkey. William Bartram explores the St. John's River, just south of St. Augustine, Florida, in April of 1774. Here he gives us...
• Bartram on the Live Oak and Florida Forest. William Bartram explores the St. John's River, just south of St. Augustine, Florida, in April of 1774. Here he gives us a description of the trees...
• Burroughs Observes a Gourmet Robin.

Florida locales will figure prominently in line with the TCR's regional slant.

Prior to the nature/naturalist pages, I'd set to work on pages of extracts relating to the Romantic poets. One such page is here on the main blog and the remainder are posted at the TCR. The first pages are on John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley:

• Trelawny Recovers Shelley's Body. I told my fears to Hunt, and then went upstairs to Byron. When I told him, his lip quivered, and his voice faltered...
• Trelawny Burns Shelley's Body. Three white wands had been stuck in the sand to mark the Poet's grave,...
• Keats Biography in Chamber's Cyclopedia (1863). His passions were always violent, and his sensibility most keen....
• The Last Letter of John Keats. My dear Brown -- Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter....

Edward John Trelawny was a personal friend of Shelley and Byron and his extracts are drawn from the edition of Recollections of the Last days of Shelley and Byron published in 1858.

The Treasure Coast Review has also gained indexes of Virtual Grub Street's poetry and book reviews over the past week. On the computer side, the Computer Archive's "How to Remove ISearchTech.SideFind" page has been updated. The Archive has become a hit in a little over two weeks time.

Eudamus Proteus and Blogging Insanity.

This morning I saw a Long-Tailed Skipper (Eudamus proteus a.k.a Urbanus proteus) out sampling the verbena again. It was early enough that the plants were still in the shade, being on the south side of the building, and only a single bee was interested itself in sipping. The verbena (verbena horata) beside the main door is a deeper purple than seemed to be common, almost a dark blue. It's the bees' favorite flower here. Each evening the half-dozen or so tiny flowers of the day fall off of the spike. Each morning new, nectar laden flowers emerge from another spot along the length of it. The spikes are probably four inches long and slightly curled with their own weight.

As pleasant as the beginning of the day may have been, the rest of it was busy and frustrating. During the last couple of months, I've been able to post little more than the weekly American Life in Poetry column (and that not always on time). I've otherwise spent the time trying to overcome serious fluctiuations in search engine ratings for several of my top pages. During its first four months, VGS's search engine ratings were a model of statistical consistency, but, beginning in June, the correspondence between page-traffic and search rating became a thing of the past. Several of VGS's best pages disappeared from the engines altogether. Search engine traffic, which had been climbing in leaps and bounds, suddenly and understandably plummetted.

At the same time as I was watching the aforementioned fiasco I was building two new blogs. The 300 page limit on editing Blogspot postings was clearly going to be troublesome for a blog growing at the pace of VGS and the evolution of the blog into a combined computer, arts and literature blog was presenting logistical problems. The Virtual Grub Street Front Page blog was created in order to provide a portal into politcal and news content and the Treasure Coast Review to provide an arts and literature portal. Because the search-engine problem continues to be serious, I have spent the past week creating a fourth VGS blog, the Virtual Grub Street Computer Archive, on the MyBlogSite server, and will be transfering content, that disappears or is suddenly driven deep into the pages for its respective key-words, on to it as the need arises.

While there will soon be one more blog, today I begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel. The Computer Archive now has four pages posted and has already had its first 40 hit day. I've managed to get my Friday postings up on the base blog (here) and I've added a new posting - Trelawny Burns Shelley's Body - to the Treasure Coast Review. A news and commentary piece should soon be posted on the Front Page portal. All that remains to do is to post regularly, create specialty pages and build one more category blog! A piece of cake! Aaaaaaaaah!

More from the Mailbag: David Eisenman and Terry Walton.

David Eisenman, Director of The Fred S. Bailey Scholarship Fund, and somehow member of The Finial Press, saw VGS's Guy Davenport's Memorial Service Was Held This Morning and posted a comment part of which I import to the "From the Mailbag" feature:

Mr. Purdy-- The memorial service came off beautifully. Perfect weather -- 70 degrees and a breeze. For 90 minutes, people famous and obscure spoke of Guy's erudition (a word once or twice pronounced correctly) but primarily of Guy's kindnesses. His prodigious letter writing, to hundreds of correspondents, was alluded to often. Highlights for this attendee were (1) Paul Prather's piece from the Lexington paper, written at the time of Davenport's death, read in his absence (a death in his family kept him away) by Bonnie Jean Cox. It's a beautiful piece centering on how Guy saw promise in the young Prather, and gave him the sort of encouragement that lasts a lifetime; and (2) Nikky Finney's eloquent poem about preparing to live in Guy's house, a case of a poet feeling the presence of her poet predecessor in these digs. It was perfect; look for it to be published somewhere.

Kenneth Haynes, presently of Brown University, also attended the service and read Greek and Latin passages from the classics. The Fessor was highly complimentary of Haynes's classical scholarship. Following his compliments, he would sometimes add, with a tone indicating the profoundest irony, that Haynes was a Baptist!

The Fessor was not at all pleased with the cuts to the story "Wo es War, Soll ich Werden" that he had been called upon to provide for The Death of Picasso : New & Selected Writing (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003). The Finial Press, manned by aficionados Eisenman and A. Doyle Moore, offered to do a handmade limited edition of the original version of the story. The book was finished shortly before his death. Copies may still be available.


The following arrived in one of my e-mail boxes from another friend of some eight or nine years, Terry Walton. We have shared crying towels after each of the previous two presidential elections. Actually, we spent election night of 2000 simultaneously surfing the channels of two televisions and following the Internet coverage at Terry and Kathy's house. Terry and his wife Kathy moved up to Gainsville, Florida, several years ago now.

Terry has a dedicated mailing list which he keeps informed and entertained -- most recently, as follows:

We certainly learned a lesson from 9/11 -- right?

The following was excerpted from the Washington Post blog:

That's an image that isn't easy to forget: As official Washington bugged out Wednesday in the face of a possible terrorist attack, President Bush was on a bike ride and wasn't told a thing. See yesterday's column for background. John Roberts reports on the CBS Evening News: "The fact no one informed him that the first lady had been whisked to a bunker, the vice president moved and the government's emergency plan launched, would seem extraordinary. The White House insists the president didn't need to know."

FROM TERRY:

Possible reasons they did not tell Bush:

(1) They were worried he would fly out to Omaha again.
(2) Without "My Pet Goat," this president cannot cope with a crisis.
(3) In case of national emergency, only essential personnel should be informed.
(4) Bush had gotten so used to manipulating the alert status of this country for cynical political purposes that he had forgotten that there might be a real threat.
(5) Bush and Rove don't worry because "the more damage done to the country,the more chances for us to seize control."
(6) Bush was busy interviewing his top choices for the next seat on the Supreme Court, John Bolton and Kenneth Lay, and did not want to be disturbed.
(7) Condy Rice decided that the warning of imminent attack was an "historical document."
(8) Dick Cheney is the most arrogant president we've ever had.
(9) They thought Bush would demand that we invade another country -- probably France, because it's so close.
(10) They figured God would tell him.

He is, of course, a moderate Democrat.



Also See:

• Guy Davenport's Memorial Service Was Held This Morning. "The Fessor, for his part, seemed to be fascinated by my marginal, clapped-together existence and entertained by my etymologies and observations on colorful locals."
• Het Nieuve Wereldbeeld: the Magical World of Guy Davenport. "There is not a Puritan molecule in this perpetual universe that isn't instantly and gloriously made at least curious."

Guy Davenport's Memorial Service Was Held This Morning.

Presumably, a memorial service was held this morning, as planned, from 10 AM to noon, at the University of Kentucky Arboretum, for Guy Davenport.

One day, during Upstate New York's delightful Indian summer, in 1992, while I was looking through the stacks at Dan Wedge's Dove and Hudson Books, in Albany, Dan called me over in order to point out a row of books on a shelf near the cash register. They had been written by someone named Guy Davenport.

The books, Dan informed me, were totally impenetrable, not at all popular prose, for which reason he

thought I might be interested. The only possible downside, he averred, was that Davenport was still living and breathing. By reputation, I uniformly found those traits disqualifying. My purchases, over the years, at Dove and Hudson had apparently done nothing to convince him otherwise.

I went away with Eclogues and Every Force Evolves a Form that day and periodicaly returned to buy one or two more Davenport titles. My time in the Capitol District was clearly coming to its end in yet another of a seemingly endless concatenation of meltdowns from out of Colin Wilson's The Outsiders or a literature of Asperger's Syndrome that was then still some years away from being written. It was only a matter of time. I spent the autumn reading and rereading Eclogues, in particular, and reams of Guy Davenport pages in general, and bathing in the glorious late-empire golden light that infused the Dutch-English architecture surrounding the Capitol Plaza.

Some two years later, a Paracelcean journey brought me to Lake Worth, Florida. Once I was settled enough to do so, I wrote Guy Davenport a garbled letter of appreciation, liberally daubed with white-out, on a Smith-Corona word-processor. (Those who've owned that demonic collection of misconceived transistors and programs know my pain.) A reply arrived within a few days. His reply to a second letter directed me henceforth to call him "Fessor". Almost everyone did, he said. The friendship which ensued, maintained largely through letters, lasted nine years until his death this past January.

The Fessor, for his part, seemed to be fascinated by my marginal, clapped-together existence and entertained by my etymologies and observations on colorful locals. Every few weeks I posted letters headed with derivations of "Ods Bodkins" and "Gadzooks," selections from the manuscripts of John Aubrey, and the like. In return, I received back warm and crotchety letters (somehow they were both at the same time) filled with stories of Beeminster the Opossum, various favorite cats each of which, in their turn, "went to Pasht," invasive plumbers, Kentucky snowfalls and plenty of shop-talk

When I wrote Het nieuve wereldbeeld, shortly after escaping yet another near-meltdown, by judiciously moving to St. Augustine, Florida, where I spent a particularly delightful summer watching Shakespeare in the Park and pouring over the Flagler College library stacks, the Fesser was more than usually pleased. Upon returning to Lake Worth, where matters had resolved themselves somewhat, I'd sent him a copy of the Elimae text. He very generously replied that there weren't a half-dozen people who knew his work well enough to have written the piece.

Het Nieuve Wereldbeeld: the Magical World of Guy Davenport

**Gilbert Wesley Purdy**

Castor and Pollux walking naked, side by side, past Kafka; Emerson, gone blind and lame, seeking health hoeing vegetables at a Protestant yeshiva; Levy-Bruhl and Pastor Leenhardt out for a daily walk while nearby it is decided that boys smell like oranges, girls like lemons. This is the stuff of which proses are made: the proses of Guy Davenport, anyway. Nearly thirty years (and nine volumes) ago, a new idea in prose arrived and a new character who lives in a way which thrills the reader:

The Dutch philosopher Adriaan Floris van Hovendaal was arranging the objects on his table, a pinecone to remind him of Fibonacci, a snail's shell to remind him of Ruskin, a drachma to remind him of Crete.

He inhabits a new Erewhon at once both real and imagined. It is a Holland through which he and myriads of perfect children go discovering themselves and the strange and wonderful world into which they have been thrust.

For thirty years they will weave in and out of a dozen stories. They will have various names and always be wrestling or tenting or biking or reading Lucretius or peeling off their clothing to admire themselves and each other.

In between, various adults, themselves as remarkable as Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Maman, and Uncle Jaques, live with us for a few precious pages. The details are unfailingly perfect. [Read entire essay]

Over the last several years, I have managed, once again, to stay settled and out of the way of this troubled world for long enough to place my own work in a scattering of journals. My letters to the Fessor had grown sporadic, as a result. In the summer of last year, I began especially to feel the lack and sent several at the old pace. There was the possibility that I might be presented an opportunity to return to Lexington for another visit. I looked forward to picking up where we had more-or-less left off.

I had been describing the Internet, and his popularity on it, to him when the correspondence had grown sparse. In the first letter, I returned to the subject in the wake of his obituary for Hugh Kenner. A reply came promptly back:

I don't know what the phrase "search-engine listing" means (that my HK obit went to the top of). I've been busy writing introductions, blurbs, and reviews. A review of a new bio of Borges (12 pages) went off to Harper's this afternoon, via FedEx. I doubt they will print it.

I received no reply to the others. Of course, I learned, in January, the reason I had not heard back. It not being possible to attend the memorial service, I offer these few words and a deep respect and affection.




Also See:

• More from the Mailbag: David Eisenman and Terry Walton. "Kenneth Haynes, presently of Brown University, also attended the service and read ..."
• Het Nieuve Wereldbeeld: the Magical World of Guy Davenport. "There is not a Puritan molecule in this perpetual universe that isn't instantly and gloriously made at least curious."

Busy! Busy! Busy!

Ben Regenspan has sent an e-missive to let me know that some of the changes on my wish-list for the Online Bibliography have been loaded-up and another is on the way pending discussion of the details. Not only does this remind me to mention Ben's Catalyst News Editor's Blog, but it reminds me just how much there is to do in order to get the Bibliography and Obiter Dicta operating at some meaningful fraction of their potential. It is going to be a busy week and the blog entries are likely to be on the functional side.

For today, I will pass along some further GWP links:

Most recent article: "Where the Strange Worlds of Fundamentalism and Homelessness Meet." The Catalyzer Journal.
Most Recent Review: "The Citizen Strikes Back." The Catalyzer Journal.
Present Number 1 Google Listing: "A T'Ang Canon". Quarterly Literary Review Singapore.

For a slew of new links to interesting and/or practical sites, check out the Bibliography's spiffy new sidebar. I will be mulling over Obiter Dicta's "linking philosophy" as I grapple with its technical aspects.