The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities One Dark Winter Night, Near the Beginning of The Present Century |
We have collected below portions of the most articulate, libelous, or merely insulting that have come our way in recent years, along with appropriate links to our pages so you can read for yourself the text of the review that inspired such ire.
abullitt@olympus.net
Congratulations. You have written the first negative review of my book. I'm so pleased you hated it so much, although I wish your criticisms weren't as lightweight (counting the I's on a page! In a memoir! How inventive!) as you believe my opinions are.
Sara Nelson
sara.nelson@smbslt.com
What kind of idiots do you have writing book reviews? In her report on my book, Ms L.A. Bloom admits she's slipping into senility. I think she's already there.
Ron Butler
In reference to your review of Stephen Budiansky's "The Truth About Dogs."
aka The Yellow Dog
It became clear to me that the reviewer was far more interested in her own cleverness and ability to dash off a few zingers than in forming a thoughtful, careful, and mature opinion of the poetry. I write regarding your review --- or rather your lack of a review --- of Miss Moffett's First Year. I expect that most people with pretty much a positive, compassionate outlook on life and the rest of humanity were uplifted rather than annoyed by this book. I can appreciate that many people may be unaffected by Reynold Price's writing style --- after all, arts hits (or doesn't) people in different ways and that's its beauty --- but your review struck me as personally offensive and nasty. Why be that way? The man's success among serious readers and scholars speaks for itself. A writer he is. I can cite you many gorgeous, lyrical, poetic passages that cut right to the heart of an issue large or small. If you don't like him, fine, but you took a great risk and revealed more about yourself than about him in your review.
why do you do that?
As for your self-satisfied observation that you are concerned with "greater issues" (i.e., that you are a humanitarian concerned with the plight of the world) I recommend that you review the statistics on eating disorders and the fatality rates. Anorexia and Bulimia are diseases, not tantrums or teenage rebellion and merit the concern and activism given to other issues of import. A certain paranoid grouchiness on the part of your editor leads me to suspect that this is a political/ This is why I was puzzled (if somewhat flattered as well) when I was singled out. I think you ought to pick somebody who deserves it, if you can find such a person among published American poets --- I suppose they exist, though I don't think anyone takes them very seriously. Anyway, best wishes & good luck. Poetry is written in solitude and discovered in solitude --- what else is there? I will not be buying this book because of your little political spill pushing it. If you like President Bush, why don't you leave. I am sure you would love Cuba.
Do you know something? Your evaluation of Cradle of Valor is pure crap, pure and simple crap! How fitting your email is poo. Read The Fountainhead some time. You are like that. I could not believe that review of the Mount Rushmore sculptor. What's wrong with you? you are weird ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwnies faget
lol lol lol RALPH:
I recommend you publish authors who have an inkling of their subject before they allowed to put ink to paper and certainly before you publish such mealy mouthed rubbish.
We talked for
an hour or so. He was a good conversationalist, with an interest in things
he was able to share. I liked him a lot. He was in his sixties and he was
still handsome.
So cut Lindy a little slack, will you?
For some reason, A House at the Edge of Tears made us think of The Painted Bird. In Jerzy Kosinsky's novel, a boy lives at the edge not of tears but Eastern European society driven mad by World War II --- holocaust and ruination of cities and countries, upheaval in which thousands and thousands of thousands were forced between camps of death and lands of the dying. Somehow, the boy survived, lived to go to the west and put his artful words down on paper so you and I could know his truth. It was all non-stop tragedy, but the tragedy was edged in a poetical language that made it possible for him (and us) to go on. When the civil war erupts in Beirut, he and all the others from the mad-house are dumped onto the streets, and he spends the last days of his life in what is left of the house in which he grew up, in bed, trying to explain his poetry to his father, the one who drove him looney. Too much awfulness, as I say, can drive the reader away (if not insane). But Khoury-Ghata and her translator have perfected a prose-poetry that takes off the edge, turns words back onto themselves. "Who does he like to read?" they ask of her brother when he is still a poet in Paris. "He admits to Rilke, after having juxtaposed the words orchard and asphalt, and books printed in Syrian and in Aramaic, because he does not know these two languages." "Questioning him about his life in Paris where he spent a year will leave you frustrated." The reflection of Youri is a reflection of what was once his neighborhood. "Half the city had set itself up as judges, the other half as the accused." Her brother is driven "by a hoarde of devils," and, for fiteen years, so is Beirut. It is not a singular madness. In infects all of Lebanon. One of the neighbors, Doña Isabella, "survived all her lovers, and died several times before doing so for good, during a night of heavy bombardment." Then toward the end of that year,
But on a windy evening at midnight,
His primary beefs are the usual ones: getting things tangled up (like extension-cords), dropping things, fretting over whether to buy butter rather than oleomargarine. There is as well a hint of anger over the most heinous sin of them all: being shoved off to the edge by a society that does not value our wisdom nor our years. There is, too, a note of dismissal in his writing, scorn for those of us who, because of age --- or disease, or both --- are partially or fully dependent on others. After an especially hard fall, Baldwin found himself in just such a place, but, he assures us, "the dependence was temporary." The word he uses for those of us who need help from others is "a burden." As in "I don't want to be a burden to you." Thus he sees us, his disabled brothers and sisters, as pitiable on our walkers and in our wheelchairs. He is certainly setting himself up for a sorrowful old age. Finally, the book shows an implicit prejudice against women who are free [photo included in the middle of book of older lady with mop], and an explicit fear of older women who have lost their husbands. Baldwin writes, reasonably, "I don't want to be the man Job described, who 'dies in bitterness of soul, never having enjoyed anything good...'" But then, in a peculiar twist, he adds: Bless me if I can figure out what to offer Baldwin for his pique. He's stuck with a bad deck of cards: women may forget him after he has popped off; the devil gets on his case nightly; and he can't even expect the extension cords to lie straight or people to get out of his way when he's shopping at the 7-11. His life is turning so sour that the only thing I can suggest is that he consider trading his shop-worn and obviously unserviceable religion in on another --- one that is more gentle, less onerous, less hag-ridden. Quakerism would be a good possibility: an hour or two a week of silent vigil in the meeting-house; enforced kindness (no battling the devil in this one); calling friends and strangers alike "thee" and "thou;" avoiding animal flesh (no struggle between butter and oleomargarine). Another possibility is Judaism. It utilizes the very same Bible (at least a major part of it) that he is so familiar with. There is an emphasis on ceremony and the one god. Most of all, it is a religion rich with tradition. If he sets his mind to it, he could --- over the next few years --- make an engrossing (not to say therapeutic) study of the Torah, the Mishna and the Kaddish. This would reward him with a vast new field of thought and discipline, if not personal comfort. He might even consider giving Buddhism a whirl. It's an intellectual religion which could help him rid himself of the ruinous expectations that plague all of us, young and old. It would also give him a solid foundation on which to build for dotage, utilizing the four verifiable truths: Life is a royal pain; pain has but one source; that source is desire; and there is a way beyond that self-destructive desire. Once he came to see truth of this, Baldwin could begin to free himself from the never-ending treadmill of birth and rebirth, could become part of a more forgiving faith --- one that has, at its terminus, a veritable jackpot: that he would never have to go through suffering, ageing, dying, death again. Moreover, he would never have to deal with tangled extension cords, hungry widows, and --- best of all --- would never ever have to fight Satan again. For, as the Buddhists have known for the last 2,500 years (but have scarcely discussed --- they don't like to talk bad about other religions), the fallen god that the Christians know as Satan does not lie without, he lives but within the depths of the human heart. For the real skinny about getting old, the essence of geezerhood (not the caramelized Hollywood version), one book stands out: The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary. It tells of Gulley Jimson, sixty-seven years old, a low-life, a scoundrel, a thief, and an unrepentant scam-artist. He is also a raconteur, a charmer, a master painter, and a kick-in-the-pants. The Horse's Mouth has recently been re-released by the New York Review of Books Classics. One other novel worth trying --- again, not namby-pamby stuff --- is Muriel Sparks' Memento Mori. New Directions brought out a new edition of it in 2000, and we believe it is still in print. For those who are fond of Middle English, there is always the "The Prologue" to the Wife of Bath's Tale. This luscious guide comes complete with photographs, history, passport information, sections on theatre, arts, and music, and current exchange rates --- dollars vs. strubls and qunts. Molvanīa is a singular destination, both because of its history, its people, its customs, and the simple facts of life in this amazing mountain land. For instance, this on electrical power, "which is available in all but the most outlying areas:" Under a photograph of a sizeable cactus: "The fzipdat of serrated thistle is the floral emblem of Molvanīa, a sharply thorned cactus, traditionally thrown at Molvanīan brides." And next to a picture of a very old sow,
There are many unusual historical and factual subsections on each page. Under "The Age of Discovery," we find a sketch of a bearded man in Renaissance dress: "Svetranj is noted for being the birthplace of Molvanīa's most famous explorer, the legendary Jolp Trubazbor. On 13 June, 1468, Trubazbor and his brave crew fled Lutenblag with three sailing ships." "Weeks of raping, pillaging and plundering then ensued until Trubazbor was eventually forced to close the ships Games Room ... Eventually he made it back home where he was given a traditional hero's welcome --- he was robbed."
In a box labeled Star Pupil:
"Lublova University's most famous son, Antonin Vllatvja, studied here from 1491 to 1495. A keen astronomer, he would gaze at the heavens through a long tubular device he called a tojlet rol." The drawings and photos are suitable to the text. Blurred out shots of rocky flatlands of stubble are, it is noted, "The Great Plains, recently granted UNESCO World Heritage status as a site of significant monotony."
Under a similar photograph (with goats): "Geographically, Molvanīa is a land of contrasts --- from its rocky, semi-barren hills to its rocky, semi-barren plains." All in all, Molvanīa may soon be the place to visit for Americans seeking adventure, unusual vistas, and terminal diseases. The guide book offers maps, sidebars of comments from frequent visitors, and this unusual advice about the national currency: The guide notes that Molvanīa is far from backwards. There is a singular shot of a woman gesturing to what could be mistaken for an oven for bread-baking: "A worker at the Sjereso nuclear power plant proudly demonstrates the central reactor core, safely protected by her lead-lined shawl."
Finally, for fun-seeking oral practitioners, the town of Vajana offers continuing lectures at the Museum of Medieval Dentistry. "One visitor reported it was..." And we almost forgot (we didn't want to distract you): The subtitle of the book is It shows a merry peasant with several of his molars missing, photographed against a background of desert and sheer rock.
I drove back to the airport still saturated with the penetrating eloquence of this scene. I have never taken offense at the thesis of the Roman Church that many men require a spiritual as well as a profane framework of law: a moral order, founded on an appreciation of the dilemmas of birth and death and of the requirements of social living --- together, a moral order drawn up by those who are wiser and more experienced than the great masses of humanity and are capable of channelling into the body of spiritual law the ponderous experience of millennia of human progress. For many people it is always better that there should be some moral law, even an imperfect or entirely arbitrary one, than that there should be none at all; for the human being who recognizes no moral restrictions and has no sense of humility is worse than the foulest and most savage beast.
Recently, one Michael Pickering, editor of the other RALPH, wrote to let us know that our namesake magazine had reached its 100th issue. Our thoughts at the time were on the order of those of Samuel F. B. Morse, e.g.: "What Hath God Wrought?"
Pickering explained that RALPH le hot "was aimed at young men interested in girls, parties, cars, etc..." We had already figured that one out from several strange e-mails that drifted into our box, looking for models with names like Imogen Bailey, Erin Normoyle or Nikki Visser ... whoever they may be.
Our response to Pickering was the following: Ralph: The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities is, too, seeking readers who are interested in girls ... girls who've grown up (like Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and the Brontės); parties (Whigs, Tories, Mugwumps); and cars (Cords, Pierce-Arrows, and Stanley Steamers).
We could in no way be selfish with our name, for the word "ralph" is a free-for-all. According to Richard A. Spears' Dictionary of American Slang,
We also recalled that old journalistic wheeze --- we don't care what you say about us, just be sure you spell our name right. And, I suspect, that includes a beer-in-the-cooler/girls-in-bikinis magazine that happens to share the same moniker.
What else can we do besides be jealous of RALPH's seven jillion hits vs. our paltry 10,000/day? Cry ruth?
Signed,
In all these, Liebling is there, plump, nearsighted, running across airfields, riding in jeeps, wandering down roads ... always in physical danger. Like his current reincarnation, Ryszard Kapuscinski, he knew that to report on the war, you had to be in the war ... even though, on the road to Paris, he can say: "By 1944, I no longer thought of myself as a man to lead a raid behind enemy lines, and our 1937-or-so Chevrolet was no armored division." It is Leibling's presence --- always seeming able to fit in with the men who were fighting, dying, getting wounded: it is this you-are-there that gives his writing such power, along with the facts, good and bad, about the soldier's life. This, on reaching the place in the Tunisian desert where a Messerschmitt 109 had just crashed: The "red threads." The "butcher's grinder." The "chopped steak." Liebling is writing about war; war is about killing and dying. Liebling, as a writer for the always discreet New Yorker, must be, and always is, discreet about the final component of a bitter war.
Liebling was a writer of the old school. His love of food had caused his first affair with Paris (and his considerable girth). One knew that his description of the soldier's food, the omnipresent K ration, was heartfelt: It is Liebling's tolerance, winsomeness, humanity and attention to detail that holds the reader. His French friend Léon has a strange way with the English language, duly reported: "Léon always referred to a telephone switchboard as a switching board, oil paper as oily paper, a pup tent as a puppy tent, and a bedding roll as a rolling bed." It is a sly humor, never seeming to miss anything, under the unsentimental gruffness that was expected of reporters back then. But even this coolness gives way when Liebling, on his way up the heart of France with another reporter, tells of what he is feeling, what he has felt, as they approach Paris:
"Harris said I encouraged him. I didn't encourage him. A dog like that don't want any encouragement. It's the natural, original sin that is born in him that makes him do things like that." There is in Jerome's writing a classical English Upper Class restraint. When Jay accidentally runs into a fishing boat, knocking the fishermen into "a general heap at the bottom of the boat," he reports that the men, while they "picked fish off themselves" seemed "vexed and discontented." Then he launches into what is the oldest shaggy-dog story-line, in this case, a report on the language aimed at J, Harris and George by these fisherfolk: Jerome's writing is a poetry of restraint, something that would not possibly be handled so gently, I believe, in our own age.
It has been many years since I have traveled up the Thames with Jerome K. Jerome, but I have never forgotten certain passages: the "200 horsepower cheeses;" why one should never take "paraffine oil" along on a boat-trip; the various ways of making Irish stew (to be found at www.ralphmag.org/DP/irish-stew.html). These are passages so classic that --- as with Perelman's story of going around the world in Westward Ha! or living in idyllic splendor in rural Pennsylvania in Acres and Pains --- one can read over them again and again and never weary of them, always remembering certain piquant phrases: Perelman's exotic meal that he calls "an eerie gumbo;" JKJ telling us that he cannot store a Liverpudlian cheese because his landlady does not want "to be put upon."
Somehow I had gotten the idea that Jerome was a Cambridge or Oxford man, but research tells us that it was not so. He lived in exasperating poverty as an itinerant journalist up to the time of his marriage in 1888. The famous journey up the Thames was not in the company of two other men (and a dog) but his new wife. He had vowed early on in his life to write a successful play, a successful book, and be a member of parliament (only the last he was unable to accomplish). He wrote many successful (albeit heavily Victorian) plays, and of his twelve books, one, at least --- this one --- made him rich and famous. For me, hearing Three Men in a Boat read aloud is a new experience. Martin Jarvis attacks the text with what I thought, at first, to be too much vigor, but it grows on one. He knows pacing; and he takes us many places we had forgotten. Especially asides. Like most good travel books, this one contains not only the story of a single journey, but dozens of memories of other equally silly journeys, in this case of George, Harris, and J, their friends and family, near relatives, distant cousins, strangers. There is, too, the constant, and enlightening introduction of historical facts: this is where Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn were courting (bringing on an extended exegesis on how dull it is to be around couples courting); that was the place where Edward II fell in battle; here is where Caesar crossed the Thames and camped. I had also forgotten the many excursions into Swinburnian prosody, a type of language that Perelman for one doted on mocking. Just before the collision with the fishermen, Jay tells us that "the red sunset threw a mystic light upon the waters, and tinged with fire the towering woods, and made a golden glory of the piled-up clouds. It was an hour of deep enchantment, of ecstatic hope and longing. The little sail stood out against the purple sky, the gloaming lay around us, wrapping the world in rainbow shadows; and, behind us, crept the night."
But then,
The key to Jerome's style is repetition, loving exaggeration, and the slow accretion of an idea, blowing it up till it bursts, scattering it all over the page. Consider the fuel used in those days for cooking and lighting, "paraffine oil" (what we know of as kerosene). What could you or I say about it that would extend over a sentence or two? Jerome, like a dog with a bone, refuses to let it go (and it goes everywhere with him):
And that oil oozed up and ruined the sunset; and as for the moonbeams, they positively reeked of paraffine.
We tried to get away from it at Marlow. We left the boat by the bridge, and took a walk through the town to escape it, but it followed us. The whole town was full of oil. We passed through the church-yard, and it seemed as if the people had been buried in oil. The High Street stunk of oil; we wondered how people could live in it. And we walked miles upon miles out Birmingham way; but it was no use, the country was steeped in oil.
At the end of that trip we met together at midnight in a lonely field, under a blasted oak, and took an awful oath (we had been swearing for a whole week about the thing in an ordinary, middle-class way, but this was a swell affair), an awful oath never to take paraffine oil with us in a boat again --- except, of course, in case of sickness.
Therefore, in the present instance, we confined ourselves to methylated spirit [denatured alcohol]. Even that is bad enough. You get methylated pie and methylated cake. But methylated spirit is more wholesome when taken into the system in large quantities than paraffine oil.
Department of English and American
Literature and Language
Harvard University
cournoy@fas.harvard.edu
cjr55.hotmail.com
filename="idiot.pif"
Subject: you are an idiot
general@tltd.com
franzwright@earthlink.net
Mike Johnston
Yomamacita1@wmconnect.com
finkenjk@highstream.net
logos64@comcast.net
Kevin.Hluch@montgomerycollege.edu
jkupetz@charter.net
hgg1932@aol.com
Peter Doyle
Edge of Tears
Vénus Khoury-Ghata
Marilyn Hacker, Translator
(Graywolf) He also loves trees. Not cedars, they are too old. He took to loathing them after he learned that behind the hill of cedars that overhangs his mother's village there was another, even higher hill, and then a mountain, and more mountains behind that.
He says he found there only words and expressions emptied of their sense. The Europeans want to go everywhere, do everything. Sometimes I say to myself that they ought to come here to learn to do nothing."
The cracked walls hold themselves back from falling. The same cracks in the mirror above the washbasin. Your face is divided in two, like your spirit.
Since she risked being surprised by death improperly attired, she slept fully dressed, in her last days, seated, her red wig lighting up as each shell exploded, her rubies reflecting all the fires.
Clowns Were Executed
in the wagons, chained together,
their oblong white faces peering
through the slats, eyebrows arched high
with bewilderment. All those joeys,
some were wearing cup-sized black
bowlers on their bald heads,
others topless top hats
resting on their ears, orange neckties
down to their knees. A few
blew on bubble pipes and pondered
the sky as the wagons bumped along.
One in baggy blue coat, a tin foil
star pinned to his chest, beat
the others repeatedly
with his billy club balloon.
looked real.
had disappeared into the mountains,
that was a bad time for all merchants
selling floppy chartreuse satin pajamas
with big ball buttons, tent-sized
trousers of tartan plaid and purple
stripes. The Squirting Plastic
Flower Company and the Six-Inch Bicycle
Factory had to close shop completely.
Fox terriers, trained to wear
bonnets and ride in baby buggies,
lost their jobs. Soon the youngest
children couldn't remember a shivaree,
the parade of stunts, midget cars
or prancing piglets, the "walk-around"
on the Hippodrome track.
visionaries began to appear, the first one
claiming to have seen the stiltman at dusk
striding in his gold metallic suit
through a copse of slender prairie
poplars in the shadowy evening sun,
another swearing to have witnessed
Petrolino himself wearing his pointed
hat topped with bells, ducking down
and popping up among the swaying
cattails, frightening all the blackbirds
in the most comical way. A third, watching
a distant field of autumn milkweed,
testified to seeing confetti
fly into the air from the old
empty-water-bucket gag.
Even a grandmother living alone
heard Grimaldi singing "An Oyster
Crossed in Love" beneath the scraping
branches outside her window
just before dawn.
when a whole party of laughing people
together saw one of their favorites
stumbling on the sidewalk in the bluster,
tripping up the curb, reeling
against a trash can, somersaulting
again headfirst, sprawling
and pitching, taking his pratfalls
down the street like a blowing tangle
of open newspaper, then no one dared
deny any longer the truths
of spirits and souls, that bold new
rumor of resurrection.
Selected Poems
Pattiann Rogers
©2005 Milkweed Editions
On My Way to Old Age
Life Changes After 50
Stanley C. Baldwin
(IVP)I can never retire from it [the battle], because Satan's minions won't let me. They are on the attack, and I have to be ready to fight back or I am at their mercy of which they have none.
For some people, it is the rest of their lives. That seems like one of the hardest scenarios I can imagine.
But neither do I want to forget that, as Paul wrote, "The widow who lives for pleasure is dead even while she lives." You see, a widow could take the attitude that she has served her time. Now with no husband to accommodate and children to rear, she can just have fun.
Santo Cilauro, et. al.
(Overlook Press
141 Wooster
New York City 10012)The electrical current is a rather unusual 37 volts ... [so] a transformer may be required.
Its leaves have an astringent, bitter taste, making it a popular ingredient in local dishes.
The pig is generally considered the symbol of Molvanīa. Believed to be sacred by many, these animals may only be slaughtered Monday to Saturday. Pigs are widely used throughout the country for meat, milk and --- in remote areas --- companionship.
It took them nearly a month to carry them over the mountains. But eventually they reached the Baltic Sea where they set off in search of the elusive East Indies. Inexplicably, they travelled north-east, ending up in Scandinavia where Trubazbvor put up a Molvanīan flag and declared that southern Sweden would henceforth be called Jotpland. Under a hail of arrows he and his crew retreated, sailing back across the Baltic Sea.
Vlatfvja has been widely acknowledged as the first scientists to hypothesize that, rather than the sun revolving around the earth, the earth in fact revolved around Neptune. ... [Later] he was called before a Papal inquiry in Rome where charges of heresy were dropped. He was, however, condemned to death as an idiot.
In time of war or economic crises garlic is often accepted as legal tender.
very informative but, at just over 150 minutes, perhaps a little too detailed, especially in the area of inflammatory gum disease.
Cuernavaca
George F. Kennan
©1989, Pantheon BooksRalph and Rolf --- intransitive --- to empty one's stomach; to vomit (Teens and collegiate. See also Cry Ruth.) "She went home and ralphed for an hour." "I think I am going to rolf."
Lolita Lark, Editor,
RALPH Pater Patriæ
Liebling
Classic Work by the Legendary
New Yorker Writer
(North Point Press)Flames were roaring above the portion deepest in the earth, which I judged was the engine. Screws, bolts, rings, and unidentifiable bits of metal were scattered over an area of at least seventy-five yards square. Intermingled with all this were widely scattered red threads, like the bits left in a butcher's grinder when he had finished preparing an order of chopped steak. "He never even tried to pull out," a soldier said.
Flat waxed-cardboard packages --- thirty-six to a case --- each containing the ready-to-eat components of a nourishing, harmless and gastronomically despicable meal, calculated, I always supposed, to discourage overindulgence. (Among troops actively engaged, a K ration beat nothing to eat, but it was a photo finish.)
How many times in his life does a man start out for what he is certain is going to be a phenomenally happy occasion? I don't think that Roach [his companion] who was in his middle twenties, had ever been in Paris, but that gave his anticipation a special quality. And for me, at forty, and with nearly half that many years of scattered memories of Paris behind me, it was like finding my Annabel Lee again. All the previous spring, in London, I had been reading clandestine newspapers smuggled out of France. I had cried over them. I do not regret my sentimentality; I wish I had something now that I could be so sentimental about.
(To Say Nothing of the Dog)
Jerome K. Jerome
Martin Jarvis, Reader
(Naxos AudioBooks)
He came and sat down on things, just when they were wanted to be packed; and he laboured under the fixed belief that, whenever Harris or George reached out their hand for anything, it was his cold, damp nose that they wanted. He put his leg into the jam, and he worried the teaspoons, and he pretended that the lemons were rats, and got into the hamper and killed three of them before Harris could land him with the frying-pan.
As they worked, they cursed us --- not with a common cursory curse, but with long, carefully-thought-out, comprehensive curses, that embraced the whole of our career, and went away into the distant future, and included all our relations, and covered everything connected with us --- good, substantial curses.
We seemed like knights of some old legend, sailing across some mystic lake into the unknown realm of twilight, unto the great land of the sunset.
We did not go into the realm of twilight; we went slap into that punt, where those three old men were fishing. We did not know what had happened at first, because the sail shut out the view, but from the nature of the language that rose up upon the evening air, we gathered that we had come into the neighbourhood of human beings, and that they were vexed and discontented.
We had taken up an oil-stove once, but "never again." It had been like living in an oil-shop that week. It oozed. I never saw such a thing as paraffine oil is to ooze. We kept it in the nose of the boat, and, from there, it oozed down to the rudder, impregnating the whole boat and everything in it on its way, and it oozed over the river, and saturated the scenery and spoilt the atmosphere. Sometimes a westerly oily wind blew, and at other times an easterly oily wind, and sometimes it blew a northerly oily wind, and maybe a southerly oily wind; but whether it came from the Arctic snows, or was raised in the waste of the desert sands, it came alike to us laden with the fragrance of paraffine oil.
