Andromeda
Now Time’s Andromeda on this rock rude,
With not her either beauty’s equal or
Her injury’s, looks off by both horns of shore,
Her flower, her piece of being, doomed dragon’s food.
Time past she has been attempted and pursued
By many blows and banes ; but now hears roar
A wilder beast from West than all were, more
Rife in her wrongs, more lawless, and more lewd.
Her Perseus linger and leave her tó her extremes ? —
Pillowy air he treads a time and hangs
His thoughts on her, forsaken that she seems,
All while her patience, morselled into pangs,
Mounts ; then to alight disarming, no one dreams,
With Gorgon’s gear and barebill, thongs and fangs.
from : Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poems (Oxford, 1918).
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— Raymond Chandler. Killer in the Rain. With an introduction by Philip Durham. [1964]. Ballantine Books, [1972].
This book collects eight early pulp stories Chandler which had refused to reprint in his lifetime, because he had “cannibalized” them and transformed the raw material into the substance of three novels : The Big Sleep ; Farewell, My Lovely ; and The Lady in the Lake. Reading it was an education and single dose corrective to prose excesses rooted in obsessive teenage readings of H. P. Lovecraft. This copy, bought for 50 cents at the State Street Book Mart, a paper back exchange shop in New Orleans, has stuck with me for many years.
After re-reading parts of MacShane’s Life of Chandler, I pulled down Killer in the Rain to look at some of the stories, and it will not survive this reading. I will save the browned flyleaf and title page for a bookmark in a copy of the original Houghton Mifflin printing I bought last month : so I still havea copy of Killer in the Rain ; and I will wait for a stormy day to say farewell to Killer in the Rain in the rain ; but the small gap on the paperback shelf will stay open for a time.
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from the Epigrammata of Martialis (Epigrams of Martial)
Lucanus
Sint quidam qui me dicunt non esse poetam :
Sed qui me vendit bibliopola putat.
Lucan
[Some say I am no poet : but the bibliopole* sells me as one]
* – bookseller, for you moderns, sez Old ‘Pole
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Sonnet 151 with initial L by Edward Johnston, in the Doves Press edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1909.
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‘Pardon this intrusion’
The first words the monster speaks, in vol. II of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Philadelphia : Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833.
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