JUDY KRAVIS

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Tuesday 13 January 2015

Westward Haut by Edward Dorn
Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett
Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley

Beckett worms worstward in 16pt Bembo, uncoupling as he goes:
What were skull to go? As good as go.
Into what then black hole? From out
what then? What why of all? Better worse
so? No. Skull better worse. What left of
skull. Of soft. Worst why of all of all.
So skull not go. What left of skull not go.
Into it still the hole. Into what left of soft.
From out what little left.
 Ed Dorn sets off west on I-80, loquacious and choppy:
Well, I Was Dead for Nearly Five Years Once …
Yess, the First Year is Sheer Torment
One doesn't Know What To Do …
Loose Ends, you know,
Difficult to Get Acclimatized,
But After That, When the Full Freedom
Of Your Non-entity Soaks in
It's the sheerest Joy Imaginable.
Charles Kingsley, in 1855, thanks his novel's dedicatees:
That type of English virtue, at once manful and godly, practical and enthusiastic, prudent and self-sacrificing, which he has tried to depict in these pages, they have exhibited in a form even purer and more heroic than that in which he has drest it, and than that in which it was exhibited by the worthies whom Elizabeth, without distinction of rank or age, gathered round her in the ever glorious wars of her great reign.

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