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”

Borborygmus

. . . believing in his existence was rather like still seeing certain stars although they ceased to exist thousands of years ago.

—Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (1930), on Franz Joseph I, Austrian emperor and king of Hungary (1830–1916)

Enormity’s its own just desert; it

Pays a parting price: digested by Time's

Anaconda, History, celebrity's Great

Become microbiota in the dark realm

Where deceased lobbyists best fit;

Perhaps from the gut a final rumble—

Borborygmus's last advice;

It rejected, they vanish in a trice,

Expelled to Tartarus, Hell's deep in ancient lay,

Where their tergiversating spirits bumble,

And their features fade like morning mist,

Lacking the wherewithal for any further stay.

His office, Vice-president Garner told LBJ,

Warn’t “worth a bucket of warm piss.”

Sunday, July 13, 2025

Intimations, or, Imitations (cont'd)

Flowers and branches of the Boswellia sacra tree

Frankincense

Boswellia serrata is one of the things

I take to stave off the fulminations of old age;

It’s olibanum—frankincense, gift of the Three Kings.

But does it work? Who ever knows,

Comprehends body’s instinctual rage?

Saturday, July 12, 2025