Last Bender

Paracelsus on the letter:
 
“The book in which the letters of the mysteries are written visibly, discernibly, tangibly, and legibly, so that everything one desires to know can best be found in this self-same book, inscribed by the finger of God; the book compared with which, if it is correctly read, all other books are nothing [...]

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
          There’s no straight road from Spartan Co. to Guernsey. You can take the Cross Island to the Crane Bridge and pick up the Cyrus Van for a mile north before cutting west on Rt. 6, which links up with the Hart Parkway just outside of Brill. You wanna avoid downtown Brill if possible; [...]

 
Imagine that we ate an orange
and spit the seeds into our hands
drinking a cup of coffee
 
But instead of hair you wear fire
and joke about the ghosts and planets
you aspire to, inhabit or conflate.
 
I watch the flames grow dense
and spiral away in the dark;
a spark, a flicker and then nothing.

CHAPTER TWENTY
          But first I had to check the files. My violation of their lives would be routine and methodical. Packets of letters opened. Bills examined. Searching for the private journals. I went back to the office and sat down in the soft rolling chair behind the desk, breathing in the faint devotional odor.
          A [...]

This is from Under the Volcano, which i am reading now (incredibly) for the first time. I actually wanted to post this on my wall at farcebook but couldn’t figure out how to do it! I just wanted really to counterbalance the endemic cheerfulness there. I guess people don’t haunt the halls of farcebook in [...]

A link to The Man Who Can’t Die is now on the blog Finding Free E-Books, which I’ve put in my links. Already it has generated some traffic for this site, and a few downloads of the PDF file, for which I am grateful. If you are looking for more free E-Books, please go to the [...]

CHAPTER NINETEEN
          Finding an address in Spartan County is like trying to pick fleas off a schnauzer. Just when you think you’ve found your white ranch on Dylan Court you discover it’s a grey shingled two-story on Dylan Place you want, which is three miles that way taking a different battery of one-ways to the [...]

THE VERMILLION BIRD
 
T’ANG IMAGES OF THE SOUTH
 
By Edward H. Schafer
 
University of California Press
Berkely and Los Angeles, California
Cambridge University Press
London, England
Copyright, 1967 by
The Regents of the University of California
 
 
 
INTRODUCTION
 
“Although we know that high cultures were possible long ago in the dry hot lands of Egypt and Mesopotamia—partly because so many well-preserved museum specimens have been [...]

Mind and Body: The Anatomy of Melancholy
It is natural, at this time of year, with a fire burning and snow through the night and Saturnine skies, to turn to Burton for solace and delight. I love him for his style, for the poetry of his lists (in lists he is second to none, not Joyce, [...]

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
          Peter Lafferty still didn’t answer his phone. He and David Watts lived about fifty miles apart, Watts in Guernsey, Lafferty in Spartan County, both swank suburbs where upper management types rear litters of mallrats. They lie like barbells on either side of the city. Dead center is Five Joints, named for the neck, [...]