Patrick: Lagniappe

'There are only two great feelings left in the late twentieth century.  Two great feelings that have eaten up all the other, little feelings like love, loyalty, exaltation, anger and alienation; as surely as if they were krill being sucked into the maw of a whale.  Immanence and imminence, immanence and imminence.  Everyone is convinced that something is going to happen, but they don't know what it is.  Some people suspect that whatever it is will be some implosion of numen, some great exposure of the transcendent.  The rest don't know . . . yet.  But they will, they will.'

'Jim, we were going to have lunch, and you promised to cut down on the ranting.'

--Waiting from The Quantity Theory of Insanity by Will Self

Patrick: Lagniappe

"God listened and didn't say yes or no," her father said.  He was squatting at the river and now looked back at her, his chin creasing.  The back of his shirt was wet.  "If I could read Him right it was something like this--that I was caught in myself and them money people caught in themselves and God Himself caught in what He was and so couldn't be anything else.  Then I never thought about God again.

--By The River from Marriages and Infidelities by Joyce Carol Oates

Patrick: Lagniappe

As we became better acquainted, mealtime conversation takes on more range, and I am beginning to acquire some insight into the affluent mind.  F. Scott Fitzgerald is supposed to have said, "The rich are different from us," and Ernest Hemingway to have answered, "Yes, they have more money."  One wonders.

There is the lady from Florida who has six darling poodles at home.  She couldn't bear to leave all of them for two whole weeks, so she brought her favorite one and a maid to look after it, rented an apartment for them in Phoenix, and visits twice daily.  Today, at lunch, she swiped a piece of steak to take to Doggie.  This set us talking about bowser bags.  Another lady at our table complained about a queer thing that happens at her parties: guests bring along bowser bags, and behind her back get the servants to fill them up with food--but she know the food isn't really for their dogs, they take it home and eat it.  I was startled into saying that I must say nothing like that has ever happened to me when I give a party; she said, "My dear, check with your butler, I'm sure he'll admit to you that it goes on all the time."  There is the lady whose husband sends her fresh flowers every day, flown here from Honolulu.  Another has just returned from Portugal where she took her eight grandchildren for a little treat--and allowed each to bring a friend along for company, so they wouldn't fight.  Yet another sometimes flies from New York to London for the day, to see the races--her race horse lives in England with its trainer.

--Maine Chance Diary from Poison Penmanship by Jessica Mitford

[N.B.:  The truly shocking aspect of these anecdotes is that the author thought they were truly shocking when first published (circa 1966) but nowadays they elicit little more than a polite yawn as we learn of the latest billionaire building a yacht the size of a pocket battleship while another is in zero-gravity weight training for his vacation in space.  Ho-hum.  In other news, everyone else is up to their eyeballs in debt and is about to be thrown out of their house.  How sad.  Perhaps they can line up at the local bakery and receive a slice of day-old cake to eat.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Then said Mrs Hauskbee too me--she looked a trifle faded and jaded in the lamplight--'Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.'

--Three and-an Extra from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling

Patrick: Lagniappe

Those in the know (the old-timers) tell me that by Wednesday one is for some reason at one's lowest ebb.  I can see why: the miraculous shedding of weight has slowed down (I only lost half a pound today), the novelty of the day's routine has worn off, and there are still three days left until Sunday.

Perhaps reflecting the Wednesday slump, lunchtime talk today turned from food to liquor: how many calories in a whiskey sour?  In an ounce of bourbon?  The duenna smilingly instructed us in these matters, and added that if one must drink, plain scotch and water is better than martinis.

--Maine Chance Diary from Poison Penmanship by Jessica Mitford

Patrick: Lagniappe

At dinnertime I got my first look at the main house.  It is a riot of elegance, or a profusion of magnificence.  This is where the Aubusson carpets are, and the marble floors.  It is like a small embassy: a large and splendid drawing room, another room called "the library" (in honor of a set of the Waverley Novels and the English Cyclopedia).  There is a visitors' book in the library going back to 1958, which gives many a clue to the sources of income of the patrons of Maine Chance.  The signatures read in part like a grocery shopping list (I found a popular ketchup, a famous cake flour, a brand of canned soup, a yeast, and a coffee), in part like a roster of the Republican National Committee.  Mamie Eisenhower's large round hand appears over and over.

--Maine Chance Diary from Poison Penmanship by Jessica Mitford

Patrick: Lagniappe

This woman, Sarah Bernhardt, lived for thirty-five years at the center of scandal and publicity; she was denounced for her love affairs and extravagances and lauded by others as the greatest genius of her time.

After eight years with the Comédie-Française she resigned in a quarrel with the director and made the first of eight triumphant tours in America.  She dragged with her across the country, in addition to her score of pets, the famous gold-fixtured coffin which an admirer had given her at her request.  After having been photographed in it to spite her director, she kept it at the foot of her bed wherever she went.  In the United States dozens of pamphlets circulated in her path, with titles like The Amours of Sarah.  The Bishop of Chicago thundered so eloquently from his pulpit against the corrupting influence of the French actress that her agent sent him a polite note: "Monseigneur: I make it a practice to spend $400 on publicity when I come to your city.  But since you have done the job for me, I am sending you $200 for your needy."  Every fortune Sarah amassed on her world-wide tours she proceeded to lose during the next season or two in Paris, even though she was idolized by all classes.  One after the other, three major Paris theaters passed through her hands; each had to be sold to cover her mounting depts.  When an injury to her leg first caused talk of amputation (which finally became necessary in 1915), P. T. Barnum approached her with an offer of $10,000 for the severed limb and the right to exhibit it.  In 1896 a municipal Journée Sarah Bernhardt brought the whole of Paris to her feet.  It began with a banquet for six hundred at the Grand Hotel.  The guests marveled at the undiminished youth of the fifty-two-year-old beauty whose son was already over thirty and managing her affairs.  A procession of two hundred carriages followed hers to her own Théâtre de la Renaissance.  After her performance of the third act of Phèdre, half a dozen poets, including François Coppée and her new lover, Edmond Rostand (shortly to write two hits, Cyrano de Bergerac and L'aiglon), recited versed to her on a stage banked with flowers.  Four years later she attempted her most ambitious performance: Hamlet, en travesti, in Marcel Schwob's fastidious prose translation.  For twelve days running she rehearsed from noon until six in the morning and finally staged a passionate, sometimes sentimental version in which she whispered "To be or not to be" almost in secreto.  Colette described her in the performance as having "a face sculpted in white powder."  Paris loved it; London, despite her previous successes there, refused it in outrage; the festival at Stratford-on-Avon was entranced.  She went on acting for fifteen years, short one leg at the end but never out of voice.  Sarah Bernhardt's was the most highly charged temperament of the era and one of its greatest talents.  Neither Caruso nor Nijinsky had such a career of enduring public adulation, somersaulting business ventures, and tumultuous private life.  Only an actress could replace the colossus of Victor Hugo, take Paris for her private stage, and become what the French have called ever since a monstre sacré.

--The Banquet Years by Roger Shattuck

Patrick: Lagniappe

But if you really want the best of modern fiction, you must read Henry James.  Here I do give my unqualified admiration.  I 'discovered' him only about a year ago, but since then I have read him almost continuously and have never tired and have a feeling that I never shall.  His is a blending of the finest style with the subtlest psychology.  One feels that not one of his characters is false: and the only possible criticism I can make is that he is far too indifferent to the 'problems' of life: he is purely an observer.  But this, from an aesthetic point of view, is an advantage.

--Entry for July 31, 1916 from A War Diary by Herbert Read from The Contrary Experience

Patrick: Lagniappe

The basis of their marriage was mutual respect, enduring love, and "a common sense of values."  There were certain things that were wrong absolutely, and so long as they agreed on what those things were, it did not matter much if in other ways they behaved differently or even (in the eyes of the world) outrageously.  When we were children, they divided misdemeanours into "crimes" and "sins," and applied the same rule to themselves.  Crimes were naughtinesses, for which we were punished.  (My mother was not very good at that.  When I broke the greenhouse windows, she decided to spank me on the bottom with her hairbrush, but never having done such a thing before, she used the brush bristle-side downwards, and the bristles were very soft.)  Sins were so dreadful that for them we were never punished at all: their very exposure was enough.  There were only three sins: cruelty, dishonesty and indolence.  Vita herself had been guilty of the first in 1919-20; never again.  Harold was innocent of them all.  Their morality can be summed up as consideration for other people, particularly for each other, and the development of their natural talents to the full.  It was an amalgam of the Christian virtues and the eighteenth-century concept of the civilized life.

--Portrait of a Marriage (V. Sackville-West & Harold Nicolson) by Nigel Nicolson

Patrick: Lagniappe

I walked all the way to Sotheby's, holding my tummy in nearly the whole time, terribly good for one.  There was a picture belonging to me in the sale, a tiny canvas of a Venetian nobleman's barge with livened gondoliers and a wonderfully blue sky.  I had bought it months before, hoping to persuade myself that it was by Longhi, but my efforts had been in vain so I had put it into Sotheby's, who had austerely called it 'Venetian School, XVIII Century.'  I ran it up to the figure I had paid for it, then left it to its own devices.  To my delight it ran for another three hundred and fifty before being knocked down to a man I detest.  It is probably in a Duke Street window this moment, labelled Marieschi or some such nonsense.  I stayed another ten minutes and spent my profit on a doubtful but splendidly naughty Bartolomaeus Spränger showing Mars diddling Venus with his helmet on--such manners!  On my way out of the Rooms I telephoned a rich turkey farmer in Suffolk and sold him the Spränger, sight unseen, for what is known as an undisclosed sum, and toddled righteously away towards Piccadilly.  There's nothing like a little dealing to buck one up.

--Don't Point that Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli

Patrick: Lagniappe

HYMN TO THE BELLY

Room! Room! make room for the bouncing Belly,

First father of the sauce and deviser of jelly;

Prime master of arts and the giver of wit,

That found out the excellent engine of spit,

The plough and the flail, the mill and the hopper,

The hutch and the boulter, the furnace and copp

The oven, the bavin, the mawkin, the peel

The hearth and the range, the dog and the whee

He, the first invented the hogshead and tun,

The gimlet and vice too, and taught 'em to run;

And since, with the funnel and hippocras bag,

He's made of himself that now he cries swag;

Which shows, though the pleasure be but of four inches,

Yet he is a weasel, the gullet that pinches

Of any delight, and not spares from his back

Whatever to make of the belly a sack.

Hail, hail, plump paunch! O the founder of taste,

For fresh meats or powdered, or pickle or paste!

Devourer of broiled, baked, roasted or sod!

And emptier of cups, be they even or odd!

All which have now made thee so wide i' the waist,

As scarce with no pudding thou art to be laced;

But eating and drinking, until thou dost nod,

Thou break'st all thy girdles and break'st forth a god.

--Ben Jonson (collected in The Wordly Muse (ed. A.J.M. Smith))

Patrick: Lagniappe

All those years of making, then losing, money, I hadn't noticed that music had disappeared from my life any more than I had noticed that friends, movies, ethics, sex, and Snickers bars had vanished as well.  When had a Snickers bar from the freezer stopped being a treat?  When had all my friends mutated into connections who slowly, then swiftly, dropped me after the divorce?

--How Perfect Is That ? by Sarah Bird

Patrick: Lagniappe

PHILOSOPHY

Nothing

Will

Come

Of

Anything.

--Alkaios (from Pure Pagan (tr. Burton Raffel))

Patrick: Lagniappe

But on the clearest days the Blue Ridge is not visible here even as a mirage, a high tossed smoky line penciled on the west.  Only within me can I hear the song of a waterfall--not the obliterating crash of a Niagra, but an airy cascade, spilling water from tilted ledges.  Water poured so fine that it shatters on the air and drifts, as a smoke, as a lightly laden breeze, amongst the filmy leaves of the sweet Appalachian flora.  There the maidenhair and the foam of the mountain bluets, deep gentian blue in tiny forests of threadfine stems, are spangled with spray.  And over the gleaming rocks creep the mosses--the deep black moss, the frail Jungermannias sending out green fingers everywhere--and the flat liverworts sprawl fast under the overhanging ledges, translucent emerald green, like seaweeds, or gray-green and nubbly, like a lizard's skin.  There the gentle wood frog lives, and in the wet moss the little red triton runs, perpetually grinning, a slippery living bit of coral.  Who, of a burning day upon the plain, cannot feel the coolness, the repose, of recurring phrases in the dryest of botany books, "in rich mountain woods," "in wet moss," "on dripping rocks," "in cold springs"?

--An Almanac for Moderns by Donald Culross Peattie (entry for July 20th)

Patrick: Lagniappe

I never hear the thrush now, without wondering if it will be the last time this season that he sings.  After each burning day I feel sure that, like a flower of the field, the song will be wilted in the heat.  All too soon the thrush will molt.  He will be here hopping about silently in the woods and thickets, but he will not sing.  Then indeed the dead of summer will be upon us; breathless heat and heavy-hearted silence will settle on the spots where now he still takes up his evening station to refresh the hour when the soul can breathe in quiet, the brief, brief moments between the fiery setting of the sun and the falling of the heavy-leaved darkness.

--An Almanac for Moderns by Donald Culross Peattie (entry for July 17th)

Patrick: Lagniappe

He stood alone on the stones, his mess-tin spilled at his feet.  Out of the vortex, rifling the air it came--bright, brass-shod, Pandoran; with all-filling screaming the howling crescendo's up-piling snapt.  The universal world, breath held, one half second, a bludgeoned stillness.  Then the pent violence released a consummation of all burstings out; all sudden up-renderings and rivings-through--all taking-out of vents--all barrier-breaking--all unmaking.  Pernitric begetting--the dissolving and splitting of solid things.  In which unearthing aftermath, John Ball picked up his mess-tin and hurried within; ashen, huddled, waited in the dismal straw. 

--In Parenthesis by David Jones

Patrick: Lagniappe

His chill fingers clumsy at full trouser pocket, scattered on the stones: one flattened candle-end, two centime pieces, palled silver sixpence, a length of pink Orderly Room tape, a latch-key.  The two young men together glanced where it lay incongruous, bright between the sets.  Keys of Stondon Park.  His father has its twin in his office in Knightryder Street.  Keys of Stondon Park in French farmyard.  Stupid Ball, it's no use here, so far from its complying lock.  Locks for shining doors for plaster porches, gentlemen of the 6.18, each with a shining key, like this strayed one in the wilderness.

--In Parenthesis by David Jones

Patrick: Lagniappe

You bunch together before a tarred door.  Chalk scrawls on its planking--initials, numbers, monograms, signs, hasty, half-erased, of many regiments.  Scratched outdates measuring the distance back to antique beginnings.

Dragoons--one troop.

4th Hussars--'D' Squadron No. 3 Troop.

Numerals crossed slanting indecipherable allocations earlier still.

More clear, and very newly chalked, you read the title of your entering, and feel confident, as one who reads his own name in a church pew.  '2 platoons, B Company', in large, ill-formed calligraphy, countermanding the shadowy ciphering of the previous occupants.  Lance-Corporal Lewis pushed open the door--and you file in.

The straw was grey and used and not so plentiful as the heaped-up hay of their morning's rising.

--In Parenthesis by David Jones

Patrick: Lagniappe

A man with his puttees fastened at the ankle, without tunic, his cap at a tilt, emerged upon the landscape and took water in a flexible green canvas bucket from the ditch, where a newly painted board, bearing a map reference, marked the direction of a gun position.  Tall uprights at regular intervals, to the north-east side of this path were hung with a sagging netting--in its meshes painted bits of rag, bleached with rain and very torn, having all the desolation peculiar to things that functioned in the immediate past but which are now no longer serviceable, either by neglect or by some movement of events.

--In Parenthesis by David Jones

Patrick: Lagniappe

Even in his boyhood Augustus had studied rhetoric with great eagerness and industry, and during the Mutina campaign, busy though he was, is said to have read, written, and declaimed daily.  He kept up his interest by carefully drafting every address intended for delivery to the Senate, the popular Assembly, or the troops; though gifted with quite a talent for extempore speech.  What is more, he avoided the embarrassment of forgetting his words, or the drudgery of memorizing them, by always reading from a manuscript.  All important statements made to individuals, and even to his wife Livia, were first committed to notebooks and then repeated aloud; he was haunted by a fear of saying either too much or too little if he spoke off-hand.  His articulation of words, constantly pracitsed under an elocution teacher, was pleasant and rather unusual; but sometimes, when his voice proved inadequate for addressing a large crowd, he called a herald.

--The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (tr. Robert Graves)

[N.B.:  And there, in one terse paragraph, is the Platonic Form of our modern politicians' communications--teleprompter and all.  If only Bill Clinton had scripted out everything he would have had to say to his wife, who knows, maybe he could have avoided a thrown lamp or two . . . or not.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

English boarding schools have much to recommend them.  If boys are going to be adolescent, and science has failed to come up with a way of stopping them, then much better to herd them together and let them get on with it in private.  Six hundred suits of skin oozing with pustules, six hundred scalps weeping oil, twelve hundred armpits shooting out hair, twelve hundred inner thighs exploding with fungus and six hundred minds filling themselves with suicidal drivel: the world is best protected from this.

--The Liar by Stephen Fry

Patrick: Lagniappe

Precision and arbitrariness were the twin hallmarks of Conceptualist activity.  On the morning that inaugurated their "Gestures," as they called them, fifteen lowly civil servants were found scalped in their beds.  They were all sewage-disposal civil servants.  A political organization?  Fifteen days later a random selection of doctors, health inspectors, social workers, charity secretaries and Salvation Army officials had their Achilles' tendons severed in a lightning wave of synchronized attacks.  On the first day of the following month the newspapers reported that thirty hardware shop owners, in various parts of the country, had had their left eyes spooned out.  Four weeks later stolen helicopters showered over key cities a bizarre confetti of pornographic postcards, atrocity photographs, suppressed medical reproductions, vetoed X-ray plates, and blacklisted urinalyses.  (The police were not so much worried, by this time, as utterly hysterical).

--Dead Babies by Martin Amis

Patrick: Lagniappe

But this work has not changed the savage nature and austere beauty of the river itself.  Man draws near to it, fights it, uses it, loves it, but it remains remote, unaffected.  Between the fairy willows of the banks or the green slopes of the levees it moves unhurried and unpausing; building islands one year to eat them the next; gnawing the bank on one shore till the levee caves in and another must be built farther back, then veering wantonly and attacking with equal savagery the opposite bank; in spring, high and loud against the tops of the quaking levees; in summer, deep and silent in its own tawny bed; bearing eternally the waste and sewage of the continent to the cleansing wide-glittering Gulf.  A gaunt and terrible stream, but more beautiful and dear to its children then Thames or Tiber, the mountain brook or limpid estuary.  The gods on their thrones are shaken and changed, but it abides, aloof and unappeasable, with no heart except for its own task, under the unbroken and immense arch of the lighted sky where the sun, too, goes a lonely journey.

--Lanterns on the Levee by William Alexander Percy

Patrick: Lagniappe

Although Lao Pei's father had been a bannerman, Lao Pei himself was a generation removed from the tragedies of the 1911 revolution, and I felt that he was a cut above the typical foreigner's cook.  He knew some English, and was a superb cook, too, being a master of anything from shashlik to that work of patient love, Peking Dust--roasted chestnuts ground to a power, poured into a mold of glazed berries, and topped with spun sugar and whipped cream.  But soon after he came to me he began to do unpleasant things.  I found that he had been killing chickens by driving a long needle slowly through their brains.  He sometimes banged his head against the rockery in my garden until blood dripped from his hair.  He was overwhelmed, he explained, by the woes of China. 

--Peking Story by David Kidd

Patrick: Lagniappe

Among the compensations of advancing age is a wholesome pessimism, which, while it takes the fine edge off whatever triumphs may come to us, had the admirable effect of preventing Fate from working off on us any of those gold bricks, coins with strings attached, and unhatched chickens at which Ardent Youth snatches with such enthusiasm, to its subsequent disappointment.  As we emerge from the twenties we grow into a habit of mind which looks askance at Fate bearing gifts.  We miss, perhaps, the occasional prize, but we also avoid leaping light-heartedly into traps.

--Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse

Patrick: Lagniappe

Because the Devil--and God too--had always used comic people, futile people, little suburban natures and the maimed and warped to serve his purposes.  When God used them you talked emptily of Nobility and when the devil used them of Wickedness, but the material was only dull shabby human mediocrity in either case.

--The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

Patrick: Lagniappe

BEGGAR'S SERENADE

I'm a peevish old man with a penny-whistle

Blowing under your window this blessed evening

But pause a moment and hear the tune I'm playing

I never was handsome and my limbs aren't straight

But I raise my finger and the girls all follow me

And leave some of the spruce young fellows gaping

I had a painted girl whom none spoke well of

And I had a milkmaid who didn't know cow from bull

And a girl with green flesh out of a lucky hill

And I had a lady fine as fine and as proud as you

To follow me forty leagues and bed under a bush

And I left her weeping at the long lane's end

And are you sure where you will lie to-night, woman?

--John Heath Stubbs (from New British Poets: An Anthology)

Patrick: Lagniappe

A bus entered the square.  I went and ordered another mild from the landlord, who'd just come in rubbing his hands hard together.  He was a very well-dressed man with a carnation in his buttonhole and long, carefully brushed gray hair.  I thought it would be nice to exchange the pleasures of meditation for those of communion with my fellow creatures, and addressed him.  After a brisk left-right-left of platitude ("Good evening"--"Lovely drop of weather, what?"--"Marvelous, isn't it?") I at once went on to rehearse the nice-room-this gambit, the I-drew-up-the-plan-for-this-place-myself gambit, the of-course-television's-ruining-this-business gambit, the still-I-always-say-with-customers-you-can't-have-quantity-and-quality gambit, the how-do-you-like-these-titchy-bottles-I-only-got-them-just-for-silly gambit, and finally silence.  His smiles, however, grew more and more intimate as the talk petered out.

--That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis

Patrick: Lagniappe

Ennis was seeing, projected on to the bare staves of his manuscript paper, Concepcion in a cold England, shivering over the fireless grate, jaundiced-looking against the snow, Concepcion in the fish queue, the "bloody foreigner" in the English village, the "touch of the tar brush" from the tweeded gentry.  He foresaw the ex-prisoner-of -war Luftwaffe pilot, flaxen, thick-spoken, absorbed into the farming community, playing darts with the boys ("That were a bloody good one, Wilhelm"), Concepcion and himself in the cold smokeroom ("That foreigner that there Mr Ennis did marry").  Finally he saw Laurel meeting Concepcion, Laurel slim and patrician, sunny hair glowing under the floppy hat, over the flowered frock, at some garden party: "But she's terribly sweet; that accent is most attractive; such an unusual, such a perfectly fascinating biscuit-coloured complexion; I'm sure we shall be great friends."

--A Vision of Battlements by Anthony Burgess

Patrick: Lagniappe

Ashe noted as a curious fact that while the actual valet of any person under discussion spoke of him almost affectionately by his Christian name, the rest of the company used the greatest ceremony and gave him his title with all respect.  Lord Stockheath was Percy to Mr. Ferris, and the Hon. Frederick Threepwood was Freddie to Mr. Judson; but to Ferris Mr. Judson's Freddie was the Hon. Frederick, and to Judson Mr. Ferris' Percy was Lord Stockheath.  It was rather a pleasant form of etiquette, and struck Ashe as somehow vaguely feudal.

--Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse

Patrick: Lagniappe

When the final introduction had been made, conversation broke out again.  It dealt almost exclusively, as far as Ashe could follow it, with the idiosyncrasies of the employers of those present.  He took it that this happened all down the social scale below stairs.  Probably the lower servants in the Servants' Hall discussed the upper servants in the Steward's Room, and the still lower servants in the housemaids' sitting-room discussed their superiors of the Servants' Hall, and the still-room gossiped about the housemaids' sitting-room.  He wondered which was the bottom circle of all, and came to the conclusion that it was probably represented by the small respectful boy who had acted as his guide a short while before.  This boy, having nobody to discuss anybody with, presumably sat in solitary meditation, brooding on the odd-job man.

--Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse

Patrick: Lagniappe

"You must know," began Bishop Flanagan, "that our minds have recently been exercised by certain untoward happenings which gave rise to the conviction that there were sorcerers in the neighborhood.  For many nights King Cormac Silkenbeard had been deprived of his rest by the hideous caterwauling of a platoon of cats, who mustered on the roofs surrounding the royal dwelling, and there raised a clamor so uncouth and deformed that it was speedily doubted whether their behavior did not proceed from the operation of a powerful spell.  On the fourth night, King Cormac told me, he had drunken deeply of brown ale in an endeavor to forget his cares; and, enraged by the persistence of the persecution to which he was being subjected, he seized his sword and rushed out into the garden in his night attire.  To his horror he beheld several felines engaged in what appeared to be animated conversation, while on the wall sat a brindled tom of monstrous size with gleaming eyes and large white eyeballs, who grinned sarcastically at the King and waved his paw in derision.  There could be no further doubt but that these were enchanted cats; and on my advice, two conjurors and a ventriloquist who had come to the town for the annual fair, were immediately seized.  As they persisted obstinately in denial, they were put to the question."

"With favorable results?" asked the friar, whose professional interest was aroused.

"Yes," said the Bishop with satisfaction.  "After three days' application of the best available monkish tortures, they agreed to admit anything.  Further proof of their guilt was afforded by the fact that no sooner had they been apprehended by the King's men, than the enchanted cats ceased to trouble the royal repose."

Father Furiosus nodded approvingly.  "It's a well-known fact," he said, "attested by all the Fathers of the Church, that when the officers of justice lay their hands upon a sorcerer, he is at that moment bereft of his execrable powers."

"Unfortunately," said the Bishop, "the two conjurors and the ventriloquist, having been crippled in the course of the judicial examination, had to be carried to the stake.  The burning was a colorful ceremony, but I should have wished that they could have walked."

--The Unfortunate Fursey by Mervyn Wall

Patrick: Lagniappe

'A bewildering procession of the Unemployed,' the lady journalist remarked.  'More ominous than the last one.'

'Yes.  I don't know what is going to happen.  Processions are indelicate manifestations and are best discouraged by indifference.  But an idle curiosity sends everyone out into the streets to see what is happening and swells the ranks of the dissatisfied.  It is the same with revolutions.  Mankind is periodically beset by mass dissatisfaction when, at some obscure, unmeaning signal, men suddenly begin to air their private grievances in a mass--as though that could possibly help them; and then, growing hearty, and with that corporate look in their eyes, they are ready to track down the Evil in their life to any handy bogey--the capitalist, the Jew, the profiteer, the Bolshevik, or any foreigner.  It used to be religion--the Jesuit, the Pope, the Turk, or the Freemason--but that is now out of fashion.

--Doom by William Gerhardie

Patrick: Lagniappe

Charlotte immediately detected that something other than his concern for academic achievement was now seeping into that sincere expression of his.  She knew this was the moment to put a stop to it.  The thought of his starting to "hit on" her again was unpleasant and even frightening . . . and yet she didn't want to put a stop to it.  The present moment was much too early in her experience for her to have expressed it in a sentence, but she was enjoying the first stirrings, the first in her entire life, of the power that woman can hold over that creature who is as monomaniacally hormonocentric as the beasts of the field, Man.

--I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe

Patrick: Lagniappe

"Have you ever heard of sexiling?"

"Yeah . . ."

"Has it ever happened to you?"

"To me?  No, but it happens."