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”

What the Butler Saw

"The whole trouble with Western society

Today," you said, "is the lack of anything worth Concealing." Ah, Joe, how wrong you were!

A few weeks later, your “longtime companion” Ken beat your brains out with a hammer while You slept, nine blows "struck in a frenzy."

(Or might it have been a deliberate count?)

Washing down two dozen Nembutals

With grapefruit juice, he left a note to say:

“If you read his diary all will be explained.”

Now there was something worth concealing!

What the Butler Saw still has me in stitches.**

(Your comic masterpiece—you'd just finished Writing it—didn’t premiere till two years later.)

What we really lack aren’t secrets worth Revealing, but listeners who’ll accept them:

"Something sensational to read on the plane"

And somewhere worth going while you read.

I once revealed a thing or two myself—

But that was in a different frame of brain.

*Joe Orton, June 24, 1967, in The Orton Diaries, edited by John Lahr (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 11.

**Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw, https://youtube.com/watch?v=a5Q8btlQLfE

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

Amor fati: Letter to an Unknown Friend

I am allergic to my lovely fate—

Which is to say, its trouble and strife.

In neither case are they to blame;

I can well alleviate the pain

And flinching live, once more, this life,

For I'm a nonesuch, doing "great,"

Who gets from work a bit of gain,

But wants inputs—perhaps a wife?

I write, as I always said I would.

We met sometime, but who knows when?

It must have happened, somehow good,

Though truth to tell, your face grows dim.

We never spoke—although we should

Have done so, dear, were now but then.

Wednesday, May 27, 2026