A worm dropped in snow---
the robin's consternation:
hop, hop, hop, hop, hop.

Yet the most intriguing of Groucho’s letters with regard to Eliot is not one that he sent to the poet, but a description of the dinner that finally did take place. Groucho wrote up an account of it for his brother Gummo.

Groucho writes that the week before the dinner, “I read ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ twice; ‘The Waste Land’ three times, and just in case of a conversational bottleneck, I brushed up on ‘King Lear’.” They begin with cocktails. A lull in the conversation prompts Groucho to “toss” in a quotation from ‘The Waste Land’.” Eliot “smiled faintly.” Feeling perhaps slighted by this uber-goy, Groucho writes that he “took a whack at ‘King Lear’," arguing that the king was “an incredibly foolish old man”. But Eliot, whether annoyed or nonplussed, perhaps passive-aggressively ignores Groucho’s invitation to ponder “Lear”, preferring instead to discuss “Animal Crackers” and “A Night at the Opera”. “Now,” recounts Groucho triumphantly, “it was my turn to smile faintly.” Suddenly they are like two characters in a play co-written by Samuel Beckett and Neil Simon.

Beowulf on Steorarume [Beowulf in Cyberspace]: Bilingual Edition (OE text & translation)

Abbottabad (poem) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Abbottabad" is a poem by Major James Abbott who wrote the work about his experience of living in the area before leaving it. He was impressed by beauty of the area. The Pakistani city Abbottabad, whi…

Open Source Shakespeare: search Shakespeare's works, read the texts Other Shakespeare-related sites…

Haiku of Kobayashi Issa Kobayashi Issa was one of Japan's most prolific poets (learn more). He left in his journals over twenty thousand one-breath poems—then called haikai but today known as haiku. This website presen…

Myths RETOLD

Kalevala : the Epic Poem of Finland — Complete by Lönnrot and Crawford - Project Gutenberg If you scan this code with your mobile phone and appropriate software installed, it will open the phone browser to the mobile version of this page.…

Wind throws fallen leaves
against my bedroom window.
Alarm clock: be still!

Knight of the white elephant by Anthony Daniels - The New Criterion

Metamorphoses This text may be freely distributed, subject to the following restrictions:…

I've always like "A Supermarket in California", although my liking of the poem is tied up tightly with hearing Ginsberg read it aloud. I always hear it in my head in Ginsberg's voice.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I was reminded of the line while reading Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"—a poem for which I have never had any particular fondness, but today, for some reason, it came alive to me.

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Espalier Es*pal"ier, n. [F. espalier, fr. It. spalliera, fr. spalla shoulder, the same word as F. ['e]paule. See Epaulet.] (Hort.) A railing or trellis upon which fruit trees or shrubs are trained, as upon a wall; a tree or row of trees so trained. [1913 Webster]

And figs from standard and espalier join. --Pope. [1913 Webster]

I came across the word today in Tennyson's The Blackbird:

The espaliers and the standards all
Are thine; the range of lawn and park;

• Police should trust the wisdom of the crowds
• Bitter end
• Etiquette by Emily Post
• DNA not the same throughout body?
• Track of the Moonbeast

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Saturday sushi links:

• Pedant
• The impact of contemporary theoretical physics on the prescriptive grammar of Victorian England
• Asparagus by G.K. Chesterton
• Grammatical shibboleths

Links from Sunday:

• The simile — implied
• Spammers solving AI problems
• Pam Braun Pens
• Stoeger coach gun
• Christopher Fowler's Bryant & May mysteries
• Doctor Who: City of Death
• Banrock Station Shiraz 2007
• Polished concrete floors
• Catholic indugences
• Don't sleep, there are snakes