Who knew? Manolo the wonderful Shoeblogger – I mean, the blogger-emperor – has also now got a blog called Manolo’s Food Blog, which seems to be written by someone delightful called Mr Henry. Really! No relation to John Berryman’s Henry, I suppose, but the first post I see has a poetic reference to both poetry and rivers. It seems fitting to link to this from Baroque on this of all days.
In this post Mr Henry is in London, and loving it:
“’Mind the gap!’ exhorted the Underground conductor. Inside the car, a placard quoted John Milton’s description of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden:
They hand in hand, with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way
Paradise Lost. Book xii. Line 645
‘Way Out’ read the exit sign.”
Read the rest of his post here. Of course, I am exiting a Garden of Eden of sorts, the Garden of the Uncollected, the land where the people you have to please have definite names and faces… I have eaten of the fruit of the tree of writing, and today it finally, forever, kicks in: I’ve done something irrevocable, that can’t be taken back, no matter what I even think of it from now on. From now on it will be the book, not me, that will be doing the pleasing or otherwise; tonight we send it on its solitary way. Maybe I take picture of Milton with me? To cheer us along, I mean…
1 Comment
July 9, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Save for the at times unbearable heat, I enjoyed your book launch party in London’s premier pagan bookshop. Thanks for inviting me. And thanks also for the words you wrote in my copy of Me and the Dead: “I am not a witch!!”. There is, as far as I know, only one definitive test of the veracity of this statement, but in this case I think we can take the word of a friend.