dennis scharnberg

“Poor Alfred. He had to tell the whole thing. From the beginning. Again.”

J. Pinkerton, Captain Karl’s Bluff. (1935)

Analysis is destruction.

Gilbert Ravening, The Phantom of Mechanical Consistency.

The material world is a solid realm, for as long as it exists. But it only barely does exist, from one moment to the next.

Gilbert Ravening, The Phantom of Mechanical Consistency.

Something shone and glittered from a high limb. And up the wobbly old ladder went Dad Rawlings, until before him lay a small gold coin resting on the ragged bark. And two others alongside it, of silver. “This shouldn’t be,” he said, quite aloud.

Miles Bantry, ed., Mr. Roode’s Rustic Tales.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” whispered Mr. Tomlin. To himself.

Dickinson Holmes, The Book of Shoes.

“Now that is someone who really cared.”

“Who? Who cared, dear? Who really cared?”

“Dr. Sigmund Freud. That’s who.”

Adrian Caliban, The Magnificent Egglestons.

World: a pretext for having mass media.

Nathaniel Bumppo, The Final Word.

In a degenerate society, blackmail encounters a problem. Simply stated, the society reaches a point in degradation where nothing—no particular act—is revolting enough to offer blackmail value.

Desmond Urquhart, The Unsocial Sciences.

“But how did Palmer come to be the one who knows? How did that happen? Was he born that way? Born already knowing?”

Dickinson Holmes, The Book of Shoes.

I hunted for edges

The pond gathered rain

Worlds are strange when wet

Ann Sensabaugh, The Faulty Haiku.