Last House on the Left

Another candidate for thriller/crime novel cover art?

Kirkwall Ruins

Viking Remnants

Thorfinn was here.

The Brough of Birsay, Orkney.

Abbey Vista

Jedburgh Abbey.

Arthur's Seat and Such

Edinburgh--on a blustery day.

"Oh Malachi Malarkey" (Poetry)

OH MALACHI MALARKEY

When the ropes of reason slacken
When the veils of prudence thin
Then intuition beckons
Then souls fit skin to skin

Hope can be so brittle
Clay not fired to the core
Well-thrown bowls roughly handled
Scattered shells along the shore

Now there's a measure in the offing
Now the surges swell with pride
Say, is this canny craft a coffin?
Say, may your reach not fall too shy

Oh, Malachi Malarkey
Oh, Sophia Sophrosyne
Heed the reefs not yet charted
Seek that green isle beyond design

--MD



(the latest attempt to play with verse and not just savor, not just quote)


If I manage to compose enough poems for a collection, I'm thinking of calling it "Shore Leave," as this post was originally entitled.

GRAB-BAG: What Resonates

"Nights, I made fires from the wood you did not chop."
          --old poem

"What is the most beautiful music in the world?  The music of what happens."
           --Finn mac Cumhail, ancient Irish hero and king

"The body contains the life story just as much as the brain."
          --Edna O'Brien

"There's life on the page. You read it, and it's not your experience, but it expands your experience."
          --Nancy Packer

"The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage."
          --Thucydides

The spiral:
my favorite shape,
my favorite motion,
my favorite plot-line.
           --

"The head understands what the heart won't. Which is wiser?"
          --old poem

"The truth is born as lightning strikes."
          --Archilochos

"The cure for anything is salt water -- sweat, tears, or the sea."
          ~ Isak Dinesen

"The law of gravity becomes complex under water, but it is not beyond our comprehension."
          --Honor Frost, Under the Mediterranean

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
          --Mark Twain

"Whole sight; or all the rest is desolaton."
          --John Fowles, Daniel Martin

"Mr. Jones wishes he was a little more funky.
When everybody loves you,
that's about as funky as you can be."
          --Counting Crows

"He suffered the most intense pang of the most terrible of all human deprivations; which is not of possession, but of knowledge. What she said; what she felt; what she thought."
          --John Fowles, "The Ebony Tower"

"Verde que te quiero verde."
          --Lorca

"I've looked on Ida With a Trojan's eye."
          --Lord Byron

"Up the slopes and at them!"
          Howard? de Camp and Carter?  Conan the Wanderer?

"I was born with luck as a twin," roared Fafhrd jovially, leaping up so swiftly that the cranky sloop rocked a little in spite of its outriggers. "I catch a fish in the middle of the ocean. I rip up its belly. And look, little man, what I find!"
          --Fritz Leiber, in "The Sunken Land"

"Stay thirsty, my friends."
            --The Most Interesting Man in the World (Silly commercials, but worthy attitude)


"Was there any comfort, he wondered, in seeing the outlines of life?"
          --Martin Cruz Smith, of his investigator Arkady Renko, from one of his novels . . . Havana Bay or Red Square?


In Anglo-Saxon, garsecg is a kenning for the sea. It means "the spear-man."

Memory's Echo

Amazon: sculpture mix; cobalt carbonate oxide.