Mad mother matriarch stomps around and tromps around planting angry fists of books into unwilling, ungrateful shelves and hefting her haughty purgatory through passageways and door frames and behind large hard desks to uneventful, benevolent pedestals for her portly mass to be displayed from.
Constipated look in eyes, glasses in hand, "Don't attack my person (you small, threatening male)!" Visibly nudged -nearly budged from her rotten Roman dock of obese inner-snarling, she pretended to help (thinks she's helping) by pointing out symbols to show she did something.
Lumpy greyish hairfroth in tangled overflowing mass of steelwool scrubbiness tumbling down her tortured headpride -a mummified reassurance to coffins and dusty shadowsplotches.
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Hello hello!
This well-descripted librarian characterization is, I feel, the best thing I have read by you in many weeks. Nice. It was even nicer to hear it.
I do feel for her though. It is palpable from your telling about her that she probably needs a friend or two.
Do you remember meeting Tomohiro? When he played at Makaroni last Saturday, although I have heard him play fifty thousand times (no less), he amazed me; he was like a Jimi of the harp, with a little boxcar down-home perfect timing southern style thrown in there.
May I share some Auden with you? It's a bit long, but I think a really good poem (not the very very best of the best, but...anyway the stanza I find most striking begins with A ragged urchin. I've known only that stanza for a few years, so I finally looked for the rest of the poem.) 'nkay:
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down
Yet, congregated on its blankness stood
An unintelligible multitude
A million eyes, a million boots in line
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties
White flower-garlanded heifers
Libation and sacrifice
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot
A crowd of ordinary folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came,
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst one could wish, they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone
Loitered about that vacancy, a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone.
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept
Or one could weep because another wept.
I know this poem has a bit of fatalism in its essence, but I like it even in its regular rhyming because it fits well with the postpostpostmodern or whatever it shall be called tendency to raze the field of meaning; it points to tragedy of the more-than-jaded.
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