double dactyls.

Wikipedia.

fig 1: King John.

Higgledy-piggledy
young Philip Faulconbridge,
son of his father he
wasn't at all—
learning his getting was
extracurricular
gave Phil a reason at
last to stand tall.

fig 2: Doctor Faustus.

Higgledy-piggledy
Faustus of Wittenberg
autodidactically
summoned from Hell
one whom the adjective
Mephistophelian
fit like a glove (i.e.
really quite well).

fig 3: Le petit prince.

Higgledy-piggledy
A. Saint-Exupéry,
flyer of planes and a
writer of books,
once drew a picture whose
idiosyncrasies
made it look hat-like and
earned him odd looks.

fig 4: Ninety-Five Theses

Higgledy-piggledy
Martin of Wittenberg
wrote out some theses and
stuck them on high:
reading this treatise most
multisyllabical,
many good Germans bid
Rome a good-bye.

a small seasonal sonnet.

Or, lines written on the back of an order of service.

It's ordinary time that fills our lives,
not feast or fast but only keeping on,
a time of laundry, homework, butter knives,
of fitful nights that yield to weary dawn.
Green robes, library fines, week after week
(this season's so much longer than the rest)
till we've forgotten what we meant to seek,
that strange far thing we thought might be our quest.
But festive seasons still mark other times,
echoes of joy throughout the sullen year
to teach that truth that animates our rhymes:
this world is Christ's. We're meant to seek him here,
in striving to unpick each tangled thread,
in ordinary life, in wine, in bread.

poetry friday: notes on sonnet-making.

The Spanish proverb informs me, that he is a fool which cannot make one sonnet, and he is mad which makes two.

—John Donne

I.

At the beginning of this school year, I decided to write a sonnet every week. This is the last day of midterms, and I'm pleased to announce I've only missed one week since records began. When I tell people about all this they're usually impressed, and because I've got a congenital malformation of my compliment-acceptance gland this makes me panic. My genuine knee-jerk reaction, which I usually manage not to say out loud, is "But Ezra Pound wrote a sonnet every day!"

Which, okay. A of all, no one is comparing me to Ezra Pound, literally no one would ever do that; second of b, Ezra Pound was literally a fascist. This is not role model material! Being like Ezra Pound is not anyone's standard for me—including, if I think about it sensibly, my own. Depressive realism is not all it's cracked up to be, kids.

Another friend I told about it said, with very flattering enthusiasm, "Are you blogging it?" I'm not, for several reasons. Some of my sonnets are part of longer sequences that I want to finish before I do anything with any of the component parts. Some of the best ones I'm keeping under my hat because I've got pretentions to publication. (The college lit journal has one of those under consideration at the moment!) Some of the others I keep to myself because they're not all that good. However, even if I'm not sharing (m)any of the sonnets themselves, it occurs to me that the project itself might interest people.

II.

Why sonnets? Several reasons.

They're easy. Or, rather, they're in a sweet spot of difficulty: hard enough to be a challenge, easy enough to be a realistic challenge. They're not limericks; they're also not sestinas. (If you're writing a sestina every week I pity you—I do earnestly pity you.) They aren't all that long. And they're flexible. There are lots of variations on the sonnet form, really too many if I'm honest, and you can write them about really truly anything at all.

One of the most important things, though, is that I know what a good sonnet looks like. Many of my favorite poems are sonnets. I have lots of them memorized; most if not all of my favorite poets wrote or have written them. This is a container I can put my thoughts into. They fit.

III.

So. The facts are these. My sonnets go in my planner. It's a pocket-sized Moleskine (other artsy notebooks are available), and every spread is laid out with the days of the week on the verso and a blank lined page on the recto. Every week, I draw a line fourteen lines up from the bottom of the recto: that's the sonnet block. It's a rule of mine that only final drafts go there; rough drafts get written on my phone/laptop/class notes/dining hall napkins, and then the poem is transferred into my planner once I'm reasonably happy with it. I provide a diagram below.

Midterms! (I took this photo about a week ago.)

The nice thing about this, besides meaning that I have all the sonnets in one place, is that it provides me with a space that I feel obliged to fill. I'm literally making space for poetry in my week. I don't sit down at a given time and say, right, got to do my poem now—but every week I go out into the world with the intention of thinking in a sonnet way, and having a blank space marked out helps with that. Making space in my planner leads me to make space in my mind.

That's what a lot of my poetic practices (the most pretentious phrase I've ever written, I'm genuinely sorry) are fundamentally about: making space. Another example is that I've almost entirely stopped using my earbuds out of doors. I use them so I can listen to music in the library while I work, or watch Flying Circus in bed without bothering my roommate, but I've stopped using them to listen to things while I'm walking around campus or around town. This means that I've fallen behind on my podcasts—except for The Hidden Almanac, which is the podcast of my heart and soul—but it's worth it. I'm making a point of paying attention to what I see and hear around me when I go walking, and of making time to be bored and think about nothing. This really is how poems happen. It's a way of organizing your mind. What am I seeing? What does it remind me of? What do I think about when I'm not thinking about anything? What happens when I let myself be bored?

Another thing I do to nurture poetic thought is read. Not just my academic reading, although obviously I keep up with my academic reading, but some of everything—feminist science fiction and weird comic books and my mother's favorite novels. I was talking to someone recently who said how much she respects people who manage to keep up with their non-academic reading during the school year, and as I talked about it with her what I realized is that I simply can't not. I think what I said then is that I don't feel in balance if I'm not in the middle of at least one book. It's one of those things I check if I'm feeling particularly rotten: am I hydrated? am I eating sensibly? have I called home recently? does my room need cleaning? and when was the last time I spent a decent chunk of time with a book?

Books are a vital ingredient to my mental health in a way that very few other things are, and they're also a vital ingredient to my health as a writer. You learn to write, or any way I have, by reading something and saying, I want to do that. I want to make someone else feel like this book makes me feel. And then you copy it, and then you keep copying it until your copies start turning into something that sounds like you. You never need to stop learning that way. I still want to be Diana Wynne Jones when I grow up.

IV.

What of the sonnets themselves?

They're all in iambic pentameter. I adore iambic pentameter. There's nothing in the world that's quite so fun. Sure, a ballad meter is nice, for a while, you can sing it and that's charming, and I have nothing against an anapest or a trochee now and again (dactyls are obviously right out), but fundamentally I was exposed to Shakespeare at too early an age and when my thoughts turn towards poetry they hum along in iambs. My meter sometimes stumbles, of course—even Homer nods, and part of my goal with this project was to develop my ear. I'm not as tin-eared as I might be, but I've got a long way to go. The sonnet writing has really helped, and I get into that frame of mind to the point where even my free verse sometimes comes out metrically.

As for rhyme scheme: sometimes it's Petrarchan, but usually it's Shakespearean. I think my Shakespearean sonnets are better, but I'm prouder of my Petrarchan sonnets. They really are bigger accomplishments; doing Italian rhyme schemes in English is hard. This week I wrote a blank verse sonnet, but that's only because of too much Wallace Stevens in my diet.

V.

Several Sundays ago I took a train into Chicago and spent the afternoon in the Art Institute. I love the Art Institute, and I've written several poems about things I've seen there. That time they were displaying lots of satyr statuary, and so I wrote a poem about that. I wrote the octet in my head walking around the exhibits, and then I went to the café and bought some tea and wrote it all down, and while I finished my tea—did you know that the Art Institute sells really good tea?—I wrote the sestet. Here it is, both halves. I don't think it's that bad.

pic ganked from Sotheby's.

Lines on a Statue of Pan at the Art Institute of Chicago

A woodland deity often worshiped in caves, Pan had dominion over flocks and herds and is associated with nature’s bounty. Here the brutish creature slings a pitcher of wine over his shoulder. The hole drilled into the vessel indicates that this sculpture was once part of a fountain in its owner’s garden.

“Was once part of a fountain,” says the sign.
Naff garden art, the neighbors must have thought.
A statue of a satyr pouring wine?
There goes the neighborhood. What bloody rot.
First century kitsch, a piece of Roman junk—
I see no reason it should have survived.
If anything its value should have sunk,
but here it stands, a miracle, revived.
We rescue the detritus of the past,
the flotsam of a world that used to be.
These are the things they never thought would last,
stuck on a plinth and labeled history.
Pan holds his jug, though there’s no water now.
Two thousand-odd years on, his chance to wow.

This week's poetry roundup is here.

poetry friday: wordsworth, sayers, & me.

The sonnet is beyond doubt my favorite poetic form; one of my more questionable skills is the ability to instantly identify fourteen-line blocks of text even in free verse, prose, and internet comments. Moving into my dorm this week, I was reminded of one of my very favorite sonnets, Wordsworth's "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room."

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

It's beautiful. On the most literal level I love it because I've always liked small rooms, enclosed spaces, a quiet place to focus on my work. I love it too as a defense of the sonnet (a Petrarchan sonnet at that, which in English is far more difficult than the Shakespearean sonnet), with all its constraint and freedom. And on this reading it reminded me of another sonnet about the contemplative life, Dorothy Sayers' from Gaudy Night. Within the novel Harriet Vane writes the first eight lines and then accidentally puts them in a bundle of papers that she gives to her suitor/detective partner Peter Wimsey. When she gets it back, he's completed her poem with a sestet.

Here then at home, by no more storms distrest,
Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west,
Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone in dizzying circles hurled
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

Lay on thy whips, O Love, that me upright,
Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed
May sleep, as tension at the verberant core
Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,
Staggering, we stoop, stopping, fall dumb and dead,
And, dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.

It's a gorgeous and terrifying tension, inaction as rest versus inaction as death, and it encapsulates the central tension of the novel, Harriet's internal battle over whether it's possible for an educated woman to have both a life of the mind and a life of the heart, whether Harriet herself can have her career as a novelist and love Peter. "What," in Harriet's words, "are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?" In Peter's sestet he offers her a picture of the dangers of contemplation, the idea that being still and contemplative, "poised on the perilous point," is acceptable only so long as we are kept upright by the whips of love. It's love, of course, that keeps us alive; it always was.

Thinking about these two Petrarchan sonnets, I wrote my own. I have perhaps prejudiced you against it by prefacing it with the works of two far superior sonneteers. Nevertheless, I'm pleased with it, and I enjoyed making it. It's about my freshman year at Wheaton, and about the consolations of study.

It wasn't quite a pensive citadel,
Those four white walls I shared with stranger soul.
I felt condemned to play a foreign role
And longed for peace, a silent monkish cell.
That was a loneliness I could not quell
When I was young and scared and far from whole.
And being far from home took its sure toll:
It was in exile Dante wrote his Hell.

But I was saved by friendship with the dead.
In their words comfort came and strength anew.
In study found I gifts from God above:
In Homer's wars, in Chaucer's pilgrim tread,
In thought, in word, in quest for something true,
In fourteen lines that sang an ancient love.

It's a poem for last year, inspired largely by observing the new freshmen, and I suppose this time next year you can expect a poem about sophomore year. Poems take time, even when you're not actively writing them; this morning in my English class I learned that the two-line "In a Station of the Metro" took Actual Fascist Ezra Pound a year and a half to write after the experience it describes, and all that time he was thinking how best to put it into words. (His first draft was thirty lines long.) "Emily Dickinson could have done it overnight," my professor said, "but most of us need time for our ideas to distill and ferment." (A paraphrase based on my notes, but she really did say that about Dickinson and it really is true; in 1862 she wrote 366 poems.)

It's only now that I have the perspective I need to write the above sonnet, and that's reflected in the fact that moving in this year has been incalculably easier than last year. I'm feeling a confidence and peace that would have been almost incomprehensible to me this time last year. Indeed the sheer number of conversations I've had today would have seemed absurd to me: a friend I ran into in the dining hall at breakfast, a professor from last year who told me I should drop by and talk to her, another friend on the way to lunch who proclaimed himself a faithful follower of this blog (hi)—and others. My sonnet's most grievous omission, which I can only explain with the phrase "scanty plot of ground," is that I've left out all my wonderful living friends and teachers. Fourteen lines, remember, and if there is one certainty in this life it is that there will always (always, always) be more poems.

Less importantly, I'm slightly troubled by the implication that we studied Wordsworth in my English classes last year; we did not, but I'm fond enough of the wording that I'm keeping it as it is.

I'm happy; I wasn't sure I would be, but I am. I'm writing a lot. It's good.

My building, feat. trees, fountain, and a bit of lamp post.

This is most of what I do in my dorm.

The roundup is here.

poetry friday: spine poems.

I've been reading a lot of Wodehouse lately—it seems to be about all I've been able to absorb, and there is after all a great deal to be said for the public domain. I mean to say there's something so civilized about free e-books. It does not, however, do much for my prose style; everything I've been trying to write has come out, when it comes out at all, frightfully Woosterish. This would of course be super if I wanted to write pastiche (and Wodehouse pastiche is a noble end provided you've got something interesting to say in it—see this or this) but under the circs it's rather less of a boon. In fact I've been dissatisfied with the progress of all my writing lately, which is part of the malaise that's driven me to these straits. In light of that I've decided to share some "writing" I'm not entirely displeased with: my spine poetry for the past few weeks.

Spine poetry is one of the three great book title games. The other two are the The Man Who Melted Jack Dann and "books that sound more interesting with the last letter of the title knocked off"; spine poetry is the easiest, and my favorite: it refers to the practice of making piles of books in such a way that the titles form a found poem. It's become a bit of a hobby of mine, though it's only an extension of my previous long-standing hobby of pottering around pulling books off of shelves. When you've got no words of your own, it's a delightful practice to make things out of other people's. I use almost exclusively books I've not read, since I don't want to be over-influenced by what I know of the contents. The only other thing is to note is that I apologize for the photo quality, which is—politely—inconsistent.

A closer walk

through gates of splendor,

through the wilderness of loneliness—

believing God,

waking the dead.

Silver on the tree—

everything is illuminated.

Little women

on wings of eagles:

fantastic voyage.

There is a land

before the fall.

School days,

plainsong,

infinite jest.

 

About grace?

Ordinary grace?

Sharp objects,

fates & furies,

flood of fire,

a brother's blood—

the culture of fear.

Life after life

among others.

Invisible cities,

fire and hemlock,

a stone for a pillow.

Comfort me with apples.

Here's the roundup.

writing update.

Music: Songs for As You Like It, the RSC & Laura Marling.

Tea (pictured): Hot Cinnamon Sunset, with milk and honey.

Word count: 3030.

&

Recently I've been writing in the living room, at my father's desk, working on the theory that more work gets done when I'm not in the same room as my bed. And, glory be, I've been making real progress. No, I'm not going to talk (much) here about the project, not at this stage anyway. I'm of the mind that it's possible to jinx a story by writing about it instead of using your energy to just write it. But I will say that it's a short story, it's about Greek mythology, and it's coming along better than anything I've written in ages.

In lieu of prose to share, here's a few literary limericks.

(I know. I spoil you.)

There was a cartoonist called Ware
Who set to all houseguests a dare:
"When you've finished my Corrigan
You'll have the floor again!
Till then it is I who'll declare."

A fellow called Mr. McCloud
Said, "Please dispel this great crowd.
When they've all gone away
I'll draw comics all day,
But with them here I'm terribly cowed."

There once was a Dansker called Søren
Whose reflections were frightfully borin'.
Though I'm reading his work
I still think he's a jerk—
It's just that the rain outside's pourin'.

A lively young person of Porlock,
Suspected of being a warlock,
Replied, “Nonsense, sir!
Such allure I abjure;
I can’t even open this door lock.”

There was a stout carl, one Geoff,
Who wrote poetry up till his death.
But then in his bed
A thought came to his head
And he wrote a prose retraction wherein he sought the mercy of God and repudiated all his vain and worldly verses, repenting of his sinful writing and begging Mary and the saints for grace.

&

Note 1: "Gershon Legman, who compiled the largest and most scholarly anthology, held that the true limerick as a folk form is always obscene, and cites similar opinions by Arnold Bennett and George Bernard Shaw,^[6] describing the clean limerick as a "periodic fad and object of magazine contests, rarely rising above mediocrity". From a folkloric point of view, the form is essentially transgressive; violation of taboo is part of its function." The Wikipedia page on limericks is a veritable garden of delights, though as far as I'm concerned the real point of limericks is showing off your rhyming chops. (And your rhythmic chops, to a lesser extent.)

Note 2: I am in fact exceedingly fond of Kierkegaard.

Note 3: Wendy Cope is the master of the limerick. Please enjoy also the OEDILF (Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form).

hron-rād.

Kennings are one of the most important parts of Anglo-Saxon poetry (she said, with all the novice's baseless confidence). A kind of metaphor and a kind of riddle, they consist of two words which serve to replace a more concrete single noun. Often they can take a moment to figure out, and to think about them at all is to enter into a peculiarly delightful puzzle-logic whereby the human body is a bone-house, a good king is a ring-giver, a snake is a valley-fish. The Anglo-Saxons loved riddles, and I submit that this is why they produced such great poetry.

To ken is to know. I've no idea if a genuine etymological connection exists (It does. Do your research.—Ed.) but still I wonder if a kenning is a knowing. I wonder if you can fit together metaphor without knowing intimately the thing you wish to describe, or if anyone can know anything without the poet's guidance. Certainly I wonder if I ever knew the sea until I knew it at last, with the Beowulf poet, as hron-rād: whale-road. This is among my happiest memories, as it happens. Two summers ago I was seventeen and scared stupid, and I spent a day riding shotgun as my dad drove through eastern Kentucky and told me about Beowulf. Just the two of us. My mother and brother were in another car, driven by the family friend whose cabin we were visiting. I gazed out the window and he explained kennings and caesurae and alliterative verse as we wound through and around those ancient sloping hills. I asked for a modern English example of caesura; we both stopped to think, and in a small-town grocery store we said "admit impediments. Love is not love" at almost precisely the same moment.

God as father, θεός ὁ πατήρ, pater noster, is a metaphor no less than the sea as a road, and I'm lucky beyond luck that my life has been such that I understand this metaphor as it is meant. If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

"Hron-rād" is one of the best gifts I've ever been given. It struck me at the time, and has ever since, with that kind of electric rightness you sometimes find in very great poetry, evoking both the cold Danish sea and the lovely wild Caribbean I knew already. Of course the sea is a road for the whales, and of course such a juxtaposition of the vast and the literally down-to-earth is the best way to name that homely threatening murderous nourishing expanse. Watch me now, piling up adjectives to try and recreate what an anonymous scop more than a millennium ago did in six letters and a hyphen. And like all great metaphors it works both ways: the word evokes the thing, and now when I stand by the sea the word is what comes to mind.

Pause for a tedious discourse on the signifier and the signified. Resume.

I recently read Lauren Winner's last-but-one book (her best yet, by my lights) Still. She claims it isn't a memoir. The author being dead and the text being right here before me, a memoir is just what it is, albeit rather an unusual and non-narrative one. Among its many treasures, it contains a brief passage on kennings, here in reference to the poetry of Emily Dickinson. I'm not certain that all of the two-word descriptors of God which Winner points to—gigantic sum, tender pioneer, brave beloved—are what you would technically refer to as kennings. Then again, this is because I am what you would technically refer to as a pedant. In any case literary analysis was scarcely the point of the exercise. Winner's point is that she sees in Dickinson's metaphor a deep knowing of God, a knowing she rather envies:

You have to know Jesus well, closely, to call him the giver of the Gigantic Sum. 
You must know him well to reach for him with words like Tender Pioneer. 
One day maybe I will know Jesus well enough to ken.

Metaphor arising from understanding. Understanding that grows from other people's metaphors. Dickinson's understanding transferred over time and space, in a poetry that makes the top come off your head. Dame Julian called Christ our "endless bliss," our "true mother," "the ground of our beseeching." Eliot called him "wounded surgeon," and Hopkins "thou Terrible." This is of course without the pictures that Scripture provides—God is a crooked judge, a friend you borrow bread from at midnight, a woman measuring out yeast. What is any of this but metaphor, puzzle, joke? What is a parable, if not a riddle?

Who borrows bread at midnight?

(Parables, says Frederick Buechner in his book Wishful Thinking, "are really jokes in their way, at least part of whose point seems to be that a silly question deserves a silly answer.")

This bit is important. I do not love metaphor and riddles and poetry because they are a way towards God. It could never work that way around and, while I'm an expert at the missionary parlor game of turning random images into sermon illustrations, I sincerely hope that this isn't what I'm doing here. Poetry for me is a way to God because I already love it, for itself, and because God in his mercy chooses to speak to me in the language I know best. God's not an American, you see; he speaks more than one language. (Joke. Don't write in.)

"The road to heaven," says Fr. Robert Capon in his magnificent cookbook The Supper of the Lamb, "does not run from the world but through it." Through reading poetry and kneading dough, through long walks and good talks. Through embracing thoroughly our humanity here and now. Through, heaven help us, Beowulf. Even Screwtape knew that "the deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting-point with which the Enemy has furnished him." Christ plays in ten thousand places, and "play" is just the word.

He's having (forgive me) a whale of a time.

(if you cast your gaze to the sidebar you'll notice I've installed an email feed. I've no idea how it works, but do give it a whirl if you're interested in keeping up with my writing here!)

"so help me I will turn this entire pilgrimage around": the Harry Bailey story.

no apologies, no explanations, just questionable fanfiction.

Geoff, riding near the back, idly surveys the company. The little groupings that have developed are very interesting; he’s beginning to think he ought to go into travel writing. The Clerk seems to have struck up a friendship with Parson wossname, probably on the basis that they are both enormous frickin nerds. (Geoff is also an enormous frickin nerd, but finds it expedient to keep this under wraps.) The Ploughman—Geoff has been privately thinking of him as Piers—is a timid sort, not much inclined to talk to anyone but his brother; even so he seems content to listen to the Clerk growing very animated about something or other. Aristotle, looks like. Nearby, the Knight is giving his Squire what looks to be a rather different sort of lecture; the kid’s squirming.

Most everyone else is listening to the Cook tell a story. They’re clustered in identifiable patterns—the women ride together, Robin and Oswald are as far apart as they can be and both still hear the Cook, no one wants to get too near the Summoner—but there’s not much conversation happening.

“So,” the Cook’s saying, “Perkin's friend's hot wife. She kept a store, like, for looks? But that’s definitely not how she made her actual living, if you know what I mean.” He leers at no one in particular.

Robin lets out a drunken cheer and nearly falls off his horse. One of the nuns, the one Geoff thinks of as the Other Nun, looks bemused, until Alison murmurs something in her ear and embarrassed comprehension dawns. Alison, for her part, rolls her eyes, then grabs the communal wine bottle from the Pardoner and takes an enormous swig.

Meanwhile Harry Bailey is nearer the back performing a rather half-hearted headcount and steadfastly ignoring the Cook. “Seven-and-twenty, eight-and-twenty. Nine-and-twenty. Yes?”

“You’re forgetting the Priests,” says Geoff, helpfully.

“God's bones,” says Harry. “Okay, shut up everyone. Shut up!” He waits for everyone to grow more or less quiet, and then says, “Has anyone seen the Priests?”

There is a general shaking of heads. “The Nuns ought to know,” says Alison sensibly.

The Nuns do not know. “They’re grown men,” Eglantine says. “We thought they could keep track of themselves. You can’t expect us to always know where they are.”

"Whatever," says the Squire, earning a rather disapproving look from his father. "Dad and I’d notice right away if our Yeoman went missing.”

The Yeoman, it transpires, has in fact gone missing. Also nobody knows what’s happened to the Franklin, and Geoff rather suspects that Harry counted the Monk at least twice.

“And besides that there were definitely more than twenty-nine of us to start with,” the Merchant says mildly, but no one listens to him, even though one might reasonably expect a merchant to be good with numbers. (If one didn’t know about the crippling debt; Geoff knows, but he’s fairly sure no one else does.) It doesn’t help that no one can reliably remember what his name is.

“So help me,” says Harry very loudly, “I will turn this entire pilgrimage around if I have to.”

(and of the hoost's tale was made namoore. it's rather a one-note joke which would collapse if I prolonged it any further, and also I'm working on a real project inspired by the Tales. I understand that manuscript fragments are where it's at anyway?)