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 [...]

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 [...]

  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, [...]

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. [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]