literary passport

binary Bill

Happy 434th birthday, Willy Shakespeare! If the man were around today, Sonnet 110 might look very different:

poets' corner

As the final moldering place of many a dead poet, it's only fitting that Westminster Abbey's tourist brochures and information panels should feature some beautiful (accidental?) poetry — I love this small caption alerting visitors to the images depicted on the Abbey's retable:

Christ holds a globe showing fishermen, the land with a big bird walking, animals and trees. A bird flies upwards and a sky with a gold crescent amongst the clouds is visible. There are red stars just before the blue sky turns dark.

the end is nigher than you think

I like to start the day with a strong cup of cocoa and a visit to the Rapture Index:

You could say the Rapture Index is a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end-time activity, but I think it would be better if you viewed it as a prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we're moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture.

Apocalyptic nasties tracked by the site include false Christs, global turmoil, volcanoes, apostasy, plagues, and the mark of the Beast (i.e. barcodes). A rapture rating of between 130 and 160 signals heavy prophetic activity; last week we were at 157, about to tip over into what the site calls "fasten your seatbelts" territory.

the problem with your MFA program

James Joyce turns up at the writers' workshop with the last sentence of The Dead:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Nathan reckons the alliteration is way over the top, and tells James to tone it down a little. No, make that a lot. Everyone agrees, except for Mark, who likes alliteration, but no one ever listens to Mark because mostly he just talks about William S. Burroughs. Beverly (hip, ironic Beverly; not your aunt of the same name) asks if it isn't a little popular fiction to talk of souls swooning? Claire S. agrees, and wants to know, what does it even mean, his soul swooned? Paul Merritt Jnr. says James is a slave to the rhythm — "You're writing prose, man, not poetry" — and Meek Ruth (that's what they call her behind her back) wonders, quietly, if she's the only one who doesn't really get the bit about the descent of their last end? Rebecca says she doesn't really get it either, and that the word slowly is, like, totally redundant, because swooning already implies slowness. (Mark isn't sure about that.) Paul Merritt Jnr. agrees with Rebecca, and adds that the repetition of falling and faintly is pretty uncalled for. "Why not just, snow fell in the churchyard?" he asks, and Meek Ruth bites her lip.