Black Book

Hollywood gives us two plumbers: Rosscoe Arbuckle, plumber from Hell, plumber who should have stayed plumber, Lucifer-plumber, plumber who climbed too high & plumbed too deep; and Cluny Brown, lovely lively Jennifer Jones in elegant froth of Lubitsch's last film which is a distillate in spite of itself of all his good world, and she the best good plumber, the unstopper of drains, the angel of flush and of flow.

McGee: Espresso debuted at Paris Expo 1855. The pressure extracts & emulsifies oils making for velvet & foam of well-pulled shot. Pu-erh: "All of its Phenolic contents are converted into nonastringent thearubigens and brown complexes."

Wheeler saw featured as tool-of-the-month in Martha Stewart Living, Feb. 2001. Made by OESCO Inc., Conway Mass; first made in Belchertown ca. 1945

Webster: "NINE, noun. The number composed of eight and one; or the number less by a unit than ten; three times three."

Ojibwa and Potawatami bands from around Great Lakes deployed 1200 warriors against New York and New England during the War of the Austrian Succession, 1744-48.

It is through la pauvreté, l'échec, et la mort that we draw near to God.

Emily Dickinson. The Johnson numbers come easily to us; we to whom come easily also her common meter and hymnic register, we living residues of the psalming system that was her template.

Gypsy slot filled for Eurofolk on Mount Desert by Wabanaki with baskets & fortune-telling.

Bruce in Dedham reading comic book while riding bike, got in a terrible accident: hit from behind, a hit & run! Left me for dead! Kid found me brought me home, I said to my sister, "Don't tell Mother!"

Max Hastings on Patrick Leigh Fermor: "Wearing his literacy light as wings, brimming over with laughter."

Elizabeth Coane Goodfellow arrived in Philadelphia 1806, credited w/inventing Lemon Meringue Pie.

Tide turned just before the Congo church struck two – boats moored at the river's mouth were bow-upstream; they moved slowly upriver, reached the resistance of their moorings, turned.

Jeanne d'Arc: "Pensez vous que nostre seigneur n'ait de quoy les vestir?"

In Milton's cardboard heaven: Transpose theological reality into time, i.e. into "Greek Mythology".

Bruce: Alice and I were just barefooted kids, in our twenties – invited to a party at Domenico's tower – we walked around the tower, and Domenico is there with this most beautiful woman – Alice was so impressed – and we could hear them softly speaking Italian – (stopped by quiet tears)

Frank Speck: the "bush economy" of long hunting trips provides a space for the survival of pre-contact material culture.

Perch, flounder, smelt, skate, dab, plaice, pout, scup.

"In prayer he did not stop at the frontiers of his knowledge and his reasoning. He adored God and God's mysteries as they are in themselves and not as he understood them."

"Charles Quincy Goodhue (1835-1910) spent the last twenty years of his life sketching Portland as it had looked before the fire of 1866."

Bruce: "Jones is a Welsh name, know what it means? Smith."

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby hangs out his shingle in Belfast, Maine, 1847: "Clockmaker, Mesmerist, Healer, Daguerrian Artist."

Mother Ann: "Sweep clean."

Peter Benes's crazy science: Plymouth County "geometric" designs represent embryonic angels; late-century explicit angel facialization is post-resurrection imaging of same "after their translation into time-resistant celestial beings".

Moose are like whales.