Notebook

A found poem at the National Gallery in London. The above are two sides of an altarpiece by Cranach the Elder, painted in 1506. Here is the caption to the painting; only the line breaks are mine.




















St Genevieve of Paris holds a candle
which she miraculously relit
when the Devil blew it out.
St Appollonia, next to her, holds the pincers
with which her teeth
were extracted under torture.
St Christina stands on a millstone.
The stone miraculously refloated
after she had been tied to it
and then thrown into a lake.
On her left is St Ottilia of Alsace,
a Benedictine nun. She displays
a pair of eyes, a reference
to her miraculous cure from blindess.

* * * * *

Marjorie Perloff in The TLS on Martin Amis's book of essays, The Second Plane:
'The war against cliché has a curious way of morphing into the cliché against war. Consider the following, from a passage praising secularism as the only reasonable alternative for the twenty-first century: “Secularism contains no warrant for action. One can afford to be crude about this. When Islamists crash passenger planes into buildings, or hack off the heads of hostages, they shout, ‘God is great!’ When secularists do that kind of thing, what do they shout?” The question is meant to be rhetorical. But there’s a simple answer: they shout “Heil Hitler!”'

* * * * *

Me 'n' Peter Carey, somewhere in the West Village... read the interview here. Cheerful photo by Adam Nadel.

* * * * *

* * * * *