HUD HUDSON
This second installment in the Gormenghast novels must
contain one of the most
comically painful wooing scenes ever written -- the
encounter between
the aged Headmaster Bellgrove and the pathetic Irma
Prunesquallor.
Xerxes doesn't want to spoil any of the magic of those
romantic passages for you,
though, and thus her quote for this week is drawn from a
different part of the novel
describing Barquentine, the castle's crippled dwarfish
keeper of ceremonies and traditions.
"The fanaticism of his loyalty to the House of Groan had far
outstripped his interest or concern for
the living -- the members of the Line itself. The
Countess, Fuchsia and Titus were mere links to him
in the blood-red, the imperial chain -- nothing more. It was
the chain that mattered, not the links.
It was not the living metal, but the immeasurable iron with
its patina of sacred dust.
It was the idea that obsessed him and not the embodiment.
He moved in a hot sea of vindication, a lust of loyalty."
***
Any comments you might have for Xerxes
can be sent to Hud[dot]Hudson[at]wwu[dot]edu.
I will see to it that she receives them.
***
Last week Xerxes was reading Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan
The week before Xerxes was reading Walter de la Mare's
The Three Royal Monkeys
The week before Xerxes was reading John Collier's His Monkey Wife
The week before Xerxes was reading Lois Lowry's The Giver
The week before Xerxes was reading Rudyard Kipling's Mandalay
The week before Xerxes was reading Ralph Helfer's Modoc
The week before Xerxes was reading Stuart McLean's Home
From the Vinyl Cafe
The week before Xerxes was reading Ossie Davis's Purlie Victorious
The week before Xerxes was reading George MacDonald's The Portent
The week before Xerxes was reading Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz &
Guildenstern are Dead
The week before Xerxes was reading Michael Phillips's George MacDonald
- A Biography
The week before Xerxes was reading Christopher Moore's The Stupidest
Angel
The week before Xerxes was reading Gordon Lightfoot's Minstrel of the
Dawn
The week before Xerxes was reading Sun Tzu's The Art of War
The week before Xerxes was reading Robert Graves's I Claudius
The week before Xerxes was reading Philip Ardagh's A House Called
Awful End
The week before Xerxes was reading John Milton's Paradise Lost
The week before Xerxes was reading Mervyn Peake's Mr Pye
The week before Xerxes was reading J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows
The week before Xerxes was reading Riff Raff and Magenta's The Time
Warp
The week before Xerxes was reading William Shakespeare's Timon of
Athens
The week before Xerxes was reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion
The week before Xerxes was reading e.e. cummings's anyone lived in a
pretty how town
The week before Xerxes was reading Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici
The week before Xerxes was reading C.S. Lewis's A Preface to Paradise
Lost
The week before Xerxes was reading Stephanie Plowman's The Road
to Sardis
The week before Xerxes was reading Alexander Theroux's Darconville's
Cat
The week before Xerxes was reading Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective
The week before Xerxes was reading T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock
The week before Xerxes was reading Matthew Scully's Dominion
The week before Xerxes was reading Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian
Gray
The week before Xerxes was reading the Prologue in Heaven from
Goethe's Faust
The week before Xerxes was reading Christina Rossetti's Goblin
Market
