You say, as well: “Brits are so enviably adept w/ “quite” and “darling”.”

I must’ve adopted Britspeak, then. Wow—-now I’m truly chuffed!

I’ve been obsessed about your working on the Growing Up Christian book [ok, can't remember the title; mea culpa]. Keep wanting to write you about it. Now you’ve given me the opp, right here in public.

I loved what you wrote about it so far, hope you’re screeching thru the keyboard with it even as we speak. P’raps bcuz Christianity’s a near-taboo subject now in the USA, I wonder how the subject’s met by the book-reading public. Your piece spotlighted the youth groups….the creative ways to Not Have Sex. Loved i!

I stumbled into teaching a girls’ high school little group at my then Quaker Meeting some years ago, and out of sheer laziness pretty much just gossiped with the girls for the hour, only varying our fare when a Quaker woman appeared, and I’d say: “Jesus said….” so I wouldn’t be busted out of the position. Eventually decided that the girls would write a little play to be performed at Meeting. I totally did not help them write it, and only briefly advised them on delivering the lines. After their Firstday performance, the Meeting tore up completely with applause—-only time I’ve ever heard applause at a “silent” Meeting! Such unique, brilliant, creative power in those young women. Please let me know how your book’s coming, and/or how you’re moving along with ideas, “angles”, threads, subjects, frustrations.

Keep me tutored, oh wordsmithy!

Judy flying orf to L.A., that land of TNB, of treasures and hidden mysteries, of tales and morphing creativities…….[!!!]

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd, that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O’erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.

I wrote:

“I marvel at Shakespeare’s sport of mounting the peak of aestheticism, and thence blasting his ribald swiss horn over the valleys. Eliot’s is a neat imitation in “The Fire Sermon”, but he doesn’t dare, as Shakespeare, to mix sacred (Athena, Aphrodite and Erato) and profane.”

Regardless of motive, it’s, as you say, the art of fixing words in the head of the listener. Who else but Yeats?

“How can those terrified vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs?”

Or Dylan?

“And I am dumb to tell the lovers’ tomb how at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.”

There’s no drink to match the initiation draught of the fanatical order of syllable.

“Ha Ha, Give me to drink Mandragora” indeedy!

Ave, sister!

Wonderful interview. Welcome to TNB.