Tuesday, December 16, 2008

When I sang a song about a honky-tonk... it was time to leave

The other morningI realized how much my life has changed: I reached into my jackey pocket for my house keys. I produced the said keys, an unused pooped bag and a handful of loose kibbel. As Dave has commented, I might as well change the focus of this blog to my dog.


On another, non-Oliver, note, I've just finished reading Ron Hansen's fantastic novel Exiles, which tells of English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins's attempt to honour the memories of five German nuns who died when The Deutschland sank off the coast of England in 1875. Hansen weaves the stories of the nuns, who were leaving Germany following the Falk laws and Bismarck's persecution of Catholics, and Hopkins, whose conversion to Catholicism and membership in the Society of Jesus isolated him from his Oxford tutors, his friends and his family and whose poetic experiments (Hopkins is called the most modern Victorian poet and the most Victorian modern poet) isolated him from the literary world.

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