The Tallahatchie Bridge
And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas
“Well, Billy Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please.
There’s five more acres in the lower forty I’ve got to plow.”
And Mama said it was shame about Billy Joe, anyhow
Seems like nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge
And now Billy Joe MacAllister’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.
The Bridge collapsed in 1972:
But on the evidence of this song, Bobbie Gentry was quite a writer.
An Ode from Horace
Ah, Ligurinus, Still cruel and swaggering with the gifts of Venus, The day’s not far When, stealing unawares, a beard will mar That debonair Insouciance; that shoulder-rippling hair Fall; and the skin Now pinker than the pinkest petal in A bed of roses Suffer a rude and bristling metamorphosis. You’ll say, ‘Alas’ (Seeing the changed [...]
The Sea by John Banville
“When I speak of style, I mean the style Henry James spoke of when he wrote that in literature, we move through a blessed world, in which we know nothing except through style, and in which everything is redeemed by style.” John Banville. Not all the time, but often enough, he writes the kind of [...]
Michaelmas Kippers
Coming towards the end of September we were plunged into an Indian summer and it seemed like everyone in town hit the streets or the parks. Women and girls gave one last outing to their summer dresses and the men fell back into shorts. The temperature kept on climbing. Lunch time I was sitting at [...]
