Jean Lagace: Just finished watching Downton Abbey, season one. Superb. Can't see anything better on T.V. Did it at the same time I was reading THE PASSING BELL, the first book of the Phillip Rock World War One series of three. Both stories of a world imploding looks the same as I persisted mixing up the scenes from one into the other. I am not much into poetry. Yet, I couldn't get over those few lines found in the novel:

On marching men, on
To the gates of death, with song.
Sow your gladness for earth' reaping,
So you may be glad, though sleeping.
Strew your gladness on earth's bed.
So be merry, so be dead.

- Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1905)


Jean Lagace: Once, Churchill was asked to cut art funding in favor of the war effort. He simply respond: then what are we fighting for?


Jean Lagace: Walking home, Harriet said: "Why didn't you tell me you'd never been baptised?"
"I didn't think of it. But you knew I was a rationalist."
"But no one is born a rationalist."
"In a way, I was. My father would not let me be baptised."
"This means when we dies, we'll be in differents places. You'll be in limbo."
Laughing, Guy said:"I don't think so. We will be in the same place, don't worry. A hundred years from now, we shall be exactly where we were a hundred years ago - which is nowhere at all."
But Harriet was not satisfied. She brooded over their post-obitum separation all during tea, then suddenly, when Yakimov had gone off to have a bath, she lifted the tea pot and poured cold tea over Guy's head. While he sat stolidly acceptant of her follies, she said: "I baptise thee, Guy, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holly Ghost," which was all she knew of the baptismal service.
Extract from The Balkan Trilogy. Olivia Manning


Jean Lagace: I am actually reading The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning. How come this great book has pass under my radar for all those years? The same thing has happened last year when I devoured The Forsight Saga by Nobel Prize winner John Galsworthy. I am still undecided about the Hawthorne masterpiece Moby Dick. There is this anecdote of some guy who picks that book at his local library and the attendant there says to him: "But Bob, our record here shows that we have loan you this novel twenty times before now." And he answered: "And I started the damn thing twenty times. Never made it farther than page 30 though. Still I promised myself that I would read it through before dying."
    DIS-illusioned: Like my sweet granny used to say--and may her frolicking soul keep jamming in heaven (or wherever)--if at first you don't succeed, try and try again--that you might fail, again and again. (I so miss Granny). -
    Benny Beeharry: I would be so obliged if you could comment on my last poem the desert flower.

    Thank you.

    Benny Beeharry -