by Austin Clarke

When the black herds of the rain were grazing,
In the gap of the pure cold wind
And the watery hazes of the hazel
Brought her into my mind,
I thought of the last honey by the water
That no hive can find.

Brightness was drenching through the branches
When she wandered again,
Turning sliver out of dark grasses
Where the skylark had lain,
And her voice coming softly over the meadow
Was the mist becoming rain.

A funny little urban myth I hadn't previously heard is described in today's Irish Times in a particularly eclectic Ticket supplement. Supposedly, the Apple Computers logo is a tribute to Alan Turing, referencing his death after eating part of an apple laced with cyanide.

Jim: This better not be like the time I found that Magic Staple in my coleslaw!
Peter: It wasn't magic, Jim. The waiter just said that to shut you up.

Otherwise everything just dribbles manically away like sand through a cattlegrid.

An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians' stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path.

It's a tale of madness and misunderstanding, alienation and hatred; and of forbidden love and mutual destruction. All wrapped up in such delicate style and intoxicating imagery. The story of the love between a girl and her exorcist is a good start by me. I devoured it like a dog eating dropped ice-cream.

The man who finds his country sweet is only a raw beginner; the man for whom each country is as his own is already strong; but only the man for whom the whole world is a foreign country is perfect.
- Erich Auerbach

There is something vaguely pleasurable in the agony of self-abasement that is drafting job applications... Will the phrase pilfered from the tenth page of a tentative google be the coin under my tongue to get me an interview?

Better luck this time...

The woman and the man dreamed that God was dreaming about them.

A blistering account of the colonisation of the Americas by Europeans, Genesis is a resounding chorus of vignettes describing the greed, lust and destruction at the heart of the New World as we know it, and a crushing record of the innocence destroyed in its shaping.

It's mildly entertaining how the expressions of random housewives with shopping trolleys change when your face is bashed and bruised. Gone is the detached eye-contact avoidance and vaguely impersonal suffering of the hypochondriac martyr to humanity, replaced with an apparent intriguing cocktail of revulsion and fascination. Perhaps we are different people with faces that look like they've been in bar brawls.

I have a new beard. It is a tribute to Gonzalo Guerrero.