the right madness on Phraxos

We now know (see the comments on the previous post) that the paperweight most likely migrated to the film version of The Magus without stopping off at the novel en route.

Knowing that Richard Hugo told the tale of "the right madness on Skye" in a prose narrative as well as quoting it in isolation as the epigraph for The Right Madness on Skye, I am startled to find my own journal one of only two online references. His story gives the name of the labor radical (or more accurately, I suspect, anti-enclosure activist) of a bygone century who said to a lunatic being hauled away to the asylum, "Had you the right madness, bread would be secure."

utopyr, referring to...well, I bet you know this familiar phenomenon so I won't say, quipped that an alternative would be "Had you the right bread, madness would be secure."

Good to know who isn't reading the journal, albeit depressing to have it confirmed. Next post goes briefly into the issue of audience and audience response to easy but specifically targeted questions.

A World Like Our Own, Only Different

Some of you may recall my summary of Michel Butor’s Passing Time (actually, L’emploi du temps) in which a Frenchman, midway through his year of living in an English cathedral city, starts to write down his story, only to find that the new chapters of his life keep complicating his understanding of the old chapters, and frustrating his attempts to catch up.

In like fashion, O fortunate readers, my attempts to sum up my old thoughts more concisely keep getting interrupted by closely related new experiences.

In fact, last night’s predictably entertaining talk by the indefatigably chatty Thomas Cahill, flacking the paperback edition of Mysteries of the Middle Ages, raised more issues than you would want to read. So I am going to summarize them below and not return to them, while directing you to the duelling reviews on amazon.com for an adequate analysis of the book’s contents. I am going to remark on:

( this: )