Mikarrhea

My heart, the blue kangaroo dives on you in fire
I feel bad to have disappointed(see his Tuesday, August 26, 2003) the really very kind Jean Gier (i hope that's right), apparently by alluding to H. P. Lovecraft and then not paying off. My exiguous defense: if you were flipping through the pages of your brain for a literarily allusive heading to a passage about scientists pronouncing the color of the universe, would you really have proceeded farther? I did read the Lovecraft story, admittedly many years ago, during a Lovecraft period, when a long-lost friend and I burned through as many as we could find (& the midget's fistful of assorted critical & biographical material available then). I can still produce, wherever in god's name it is you produce such ghostliness in your brain, Greg's voice saying "Charles Dexter Ward." The allusion (like most) was a wink. A crumb by way of some remuneration: did you know that for many years (& maybe still for all I know) Harvard's Widener library (if memory serves, a repository according to Arkham legend of one of the few extant copies) actually had a card in its catalogue saying "Al-Hazred, Abdul. Necronomicon. [now, i don't remember what if anything else it said except] FORBIDDEN"?

This same card catalogue, by the way, owing to some sub-sub-sub-librarian's OCD compulsion to begin an important heading in a fresh drawer, was obliged to endure on one drawer the label "LIBRARY to LITERATURD," which seems to capture something enduring about the belletristic trajectory (or maybe has it backwards).

i'm grateful to Jean's Blue Kangaroo site for leading me to Nick Piombino's where (Tuesday, August 26) repose the following two quotations on the topic of conversation—or I guess I should say "on the topic of 'conversation.'"


"...to listen attentively, and to answer precisely,
is the greatest perfection of conversation."

Francois de la Rochefoucould


"A gossip is one who talks to you about
others; a bore is one who talks to you
about himself; and a brilliant conversationalist
is one who talks to you about yourself."

Liza Kirk

I would simply supplement:

"The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting."

Fran "Melmoth" Leibowitz