wjsullivan.net

Overloading the Machine

Postcard (Boulder to Boston)

A boy had common eons
Of transparent time
Independent of rotating
Cantos. It was a hot, black
Blustery night. I stole through
Palace attendants, each
Its armed parasite, drinking
Canto Three. Your ruby ring
Made life and laid the law,
The rum of an old footman,
Liberties with commendable
Alacrity, relations at first touching
The shrubbery at the rear of the house.

I thought music. Never shall I forget
How elated I was upon learning
(A note my reader shall find
Within a suburban house). It came out
In a skimpy liter of Pale Fire, in
Heroic couplets, of nine hundred-ninety,
"The middle fellow, a tall priest I knew."

The Least Successful Collector Betsy Baker played a central role in the history of collecting. She was employed as a servant in the house of John Warburton (1682-1759) who had amassed a fine collection of 58 first edition plays, including most of the works of Shakespeare. One day Warburton returned home to find 55 of them charred beyond legibility. Betsy had either burned them or used them as pie bottoms. The remaining three folios are now in the British Museum. The only comparable literary figure was the maid who in 1835 burned the manuscript of the first volume of Thomas Carlyle's "The Hisory of the French Revolution", thinking it was wastepaper.

-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"

This page was last modified on 2011 December 20. "Postcard (Boulder to Boston)" by John Sullivan is Copyright ©2003 - 2011, and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.