In Lieu of an Introduction

. . . he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work properly secured from damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death-beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends, who in their turn were to send down the tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation; and thus . . . the knowledge that here and there the truth lay buried . . . and was to rise again in some distant age . . . —this knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to generation.

—Thomas De Quincey, “Walking Stewart”

Livius Andronicus: An Odyssey is peregrinatory, and an Iliad, no doubt, genocidal, but an Idyssey is gestational as regards idiosyncrasy--or oddness.

Dr Johnson: Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.

Mrs Thatcher: There is no such thing as a womb with a view.

Ben Jonson: By G—, ’tis good, and if you like’t, you may!

—Petrus Tornarius, Imaginary Conversations

Snatched from the great gulf, like oysters by bibliomaniac pearl divers, . . . they first rot, then what was pearl . . . may be seen as such, and continue as such.

—Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, ch. 5, “The Fourth Estate”

Many Happy Returns, Max!

Variations on Coco Chanel's little black dress, or LBD, "Chanel: The Legend" exhibition, Kunstmuseum, The Hague, 2014

Today you share a birthday with Janis Joplin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Dōgen,

Founder of the Sōtō school of Zen,

And likewise with Robert E. Lee and Dolly Parton.

You knew all that when you were ten!

But take another look at those partyers (some men):

• The Lord never bought Janis a Mercedes-Benz;

• Coco Chanel claimed Dolly (no LBD!!) lacked fashion sense;

• Lee's great victory at Chancellorsville was a debacle;

• The House of Usher, unfortunately, fell;

• And Dōgen lost his bucket down a well.

Such were the ragtag rewards of Fame

For birthday girls and boys in all but name.

If she thus treats her chosen few

What are the rest of us to do?*

There's little consolation in this sample;

Your birthmates set a bad example!

Don't do what Dōgen recommended

And meditate on nothing, but on self,

To which the cosmos lies extended

In all its cockamamie wealth!

*Cf. Samuel Hoffenstein:

"Well, if such as these could be

So foredoomed to misery,

And Fate despise her own elect—

What the deuce do you expect?"

Monday, January 19, 2026

In tenebris lux

This is the way the world ends 

Not with a bang but a whimper.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

—John 1:5

A bad poem, the source of those much-quoted lines

Worlds after all end uncounted times

And bangs and whimpers serve to furnish rhymes

Impossible to tell what future a fate mimes

The higher one gets the faster one climbs

Our allergies prevent reading all the latest signs

No telling on what flesh a final human dines

(washed down doubtless with the choicest wines)

We live today in a kind of prequel

Whose burden is a heart that rends

Yes, this may be the way this world ends

But after just deserts, there’s a sequel . . .

Sunday, January 18, 2026