Byron: "Where is the world of eight years past?"

'Where is the world?' cries Young at eighty.  'Where
The world in which a man was born?' Alas!
Where is the world of eight years past? 'Twas there--
I look for it -- 'tis gone, a globe of glass,
Cracked, shivered, vanished, scarcely gazed on, ere
A silent change dissolves the glittering mass.
Statesmen, chiefs, orators, queens, patriots, kings,
And dandies, all are gone on the wind's wings.

--Lord Byron
Don Juan Canto 11, stanza 76.

Reprise: Reading Fritz Leiber . . . .

Fritz Leiber and his The Swords of Lankhmar (1968) proved to be my boon companion during my recent European vacation.  I'd packed a stack of books, carefully chosen, from Lord Byron to Julius Caesar to Steven Erikson for the long flights, train rides, and potential deluges, but a last-minute snatch of Leiber's novel from a stack in my study as I was headed out the door proved the best choice of all.  I read around in Byron for Venice and for the Rhine, read around in Caesar for my Germans and Celts, read around in guide books and historical studies of Hadrian's Wall and such, but a slow passage by passage working through with Fafhrd, the Gray Mouser, and the diabolical rats of Lankhmar was the most satisfying of all.  Leiber's wit, his sense of humor and of rascally honor, his characters and characterization, and the plotting--this one early novel of Newhon, remember--all that, each element, stirred and teased me and pleased me as never before.  This is a novel I've read and enjoyed at least twenty times before, but The Swords of Lankhmar had never truly impressed me until this particular slow reading.

And the reading was slow, for I was busy traveling and sight-seeing, walking and paddling, the cobbled streets and crowded canals of a handful of European cities and towns--Venice, Munich, Bacharach, Edinburgh, York--as well as palaces and castles and pubs.  All of those places fit with the images of Newhon and Lankhmar, with Leiber's fantasy world and its mix of Hellenistic, Medieval, and Renaissance qualities in manners, clothing, and architecture.  (So easy to picture the two heroes ambling down the back street of a town on the Rhine or even a Scottish close off the Royal Mile.)  As a normally quite fast reader, I was reminded to slow down, to savor the sentences and phrases, to note the particular wittiness of a line or the tactical wisdom of a portion of a plot pattern.  And, since rats are a particular menace in The Swords of Lankhmar, I even welcomed my one actual rat sighting in a canal of Venice, though we did have to back-paddle to make sure the little fellow didn't climb upon any of our kayaks.  (He pulled himself out of the water and into a crack in some foundation.)

I also followed a hint from Ian Rankin, author of the Inspector Rebus novels, and picked up a novel by Scottish author Muriel Spark: The Girls of Slender Means (1963).  A very different sort of book than Leiber's, but equally witty, equally bound by action and circumstance and character, Spark's novel is a valuable find for me.  Leiber works far more broadly, of course, and with entertainment his main goal, while Spark delves more deeply, for all her light touches of manner and speech, and leaves her reader in a literary place beyond expectation; at least, she did that to me, for me.  A wonderful juxtaposition, a fortuitous pairing.

[This is an old post from 2016, but I've been listening to the audiobook for The Swords of Lankhmar and that reminded me of the joy I rediscovered in 2016.  Some books, even some popular pulp-fiction books, go deep.)

Feeling Crabby

Normally, feeling "crabby" would be a negative thing, but isn't that a beauty?
Vintage shot.

Kennelly: "Bread"

BREAD

Someone else cut off my head
In a golden field.
Now I am re-created
By her fingers. This
Moulding is more delicate
Than a first kiss,
More deliberate than her own
Rising up
And lying down.
Even at my weakest, I am
Finer than anything
In this legendary garden.
Yet I am nothing till
She runs her fingers through me
And shapes me with her skill.

--Brendan Kennelly

Don Paterson: "The Lie"

THE LIE

As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour
before the house had woken to make sure
that everything was in order with The Lie,
his drip changed and his shackles all secure.

I was by then so practiced in this chore
I’d counted maybe thirteen years or more
since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye.
Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.

I was at full stretch to test some ligature
when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore
his gag away; though as he made no cry,
I kept on with my checking as before.

Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore:
it was a child’s voice. I looked up from the floor.
The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky
and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.

He was a boy of maybe three or four.
His straps and chains were all the things he wore.
Knowing I could make him no reply
I took the gag before he could say more

and put it back as tight as it would tie
and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door

--Don Paterson

Guilty Pleasure

(I feel guilty about liking that Gor novel, but it made an impression when I was 13 and so I keep rereading it.)

Murky Day

Sometimes, that's Monterey diving.

Feb. 18th.