Publishing poetry is like tossing a rose in the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo, they say - but a blurb is like an echo heard before you let go! What echo? The kind words of the wonderful poet, translator, editor, and scholar, 👑 @BorisDralyuk for Kingdom of the Clock!

In September 1969, Elizabeth Taylor acquired a full set of the Everyman Library (1,000 volumes) as a gift for Richard Burton. He would later write, “I shall browse in that place for the rest of my life. They will take up one wall of the room … a fantastic reference library with the index in my head.”

You've just been put in charge of coming up with a popcorn bucket for a classic film. GO. I'll start. Goodfellas Cadillac trunk.

The Scots are assimilating well to American culture.

Alberta is the only large, human-inhabited place on Earth that is completely rat-free. This Canadian province kept rats at bay before they had a chance to spread, in the 1950s. They took the task of keeping themselves rat-free so seriously, that they literally established a rat control zone at the time. Alberta also introduced a law so that  ‘every person and municipality’ was obliged to destroy rats they found. Alberta continues to be rat-free through the persistence of inhabitants who are committed to preserve what they inherited!

Love this poem--so musical, and one I have by heart:

Yesterday marked 25 years since this moment. Thanks to @DappledThings1 for sharing the story.

I’m delighted by David Bentley Hart’s fondness for otters. 🦦

Samuel Johnson translating Horace: tinyurl.com/5yd86xsh

A new one in @TwinBirdReview twinbirdreview.com/41---p---…

Alas, no. “The Lord of the Rings seems to be inflated, overwritten, tendentious, and moralistic in the extreme. Is it not a giant Period Piece? … But there is still the burden of Tolkien’s style: stiff, false archaic, overwrought, and finally a real hindrance in Volume III, The Return of the King, which I have had trouble rereading. At seventy-seven, I may just be too old, but here is The Return of the King, opened pretty much at random: ‘At the doors of the Houses many were already gathered to see Aragorn, and they followed after him; and when at last he had supped, men came and prayed that he would heal their kinsmen or their friends whose lives were in peril through hurt or wound, or who lay under the Black Shadow. And Aragorn arose and went out, and he sent for the sons of Elrond, and together they labored far into the night. And word went through the city: “The King is come again indeed.” And they named him Elfstone, because of the green stone that he wore, and so the name which it was foretold at his birth that he should bear was chosen for him by his own people.’ I am not able to understand how a skilled and mature reader can absorb about fifteen hundred pages of this quaint stuff. Why ‘hurt or wound’; are they not the same? What justifies the heavy King James Bible influence upon this style? Sometimes, reading Tolkien, I am reminded of the Book of Mormon. Tolkien met a need, particularly in the early days of the counterculture in the later 1960s. Whether he is an author for the duration of the twenty-first century seems to me open to some doubt.” —Harold Bloom, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings