dennis scharnberg

“But what kind of woman was she, Hudson?”

“Dishonest.  She was a dishonest woman.”

Michael Longmire,  Puzzled to Death.

“Well, you know, he was playing the 78s again.  All the old platters.  When I walked in, it was something about the ‘low and lonesome sea.’  I believe it was the Carter Family.”

Kiefer Sythe,  Detective Club.

A criterion is window-dressing.

Godfrey Tooke,  Collected Aphorisms.

“It’s not that they lie, Jack.  It’s that lying becomes a way of life.”

Mark Anthony,  The Tale of the Mirror.

“I can tell you with abundant clarity that I’ve had it.  I have had it with them all!” Here it must be noted that Leopold was speaking to no one in particular.  Was speaking to the cold night air, as it were.

Quentin Drabb,  Ebenezer’s Untold Tales.

“But consider this, Ellen.  If you bruise his ego, the results will usually be spectacular.”

Devona Twilly,  Shallowness, a Novel.

Pretending to be indifferent was never William’s strong suit.

Christina Rubb,  The Awful Puzzle.

Where’s the uncertainty?

Godfrey Tooke,  Collected Aphorisms.

As a concept, modernist art is fascinating.  But the material reality of it brings us to the likes of Kandinsky and Dubuffet.  To Robert Motherwell!

Christopher Jayne,  A Critique of Sincerity.

Palestrina’s masses summarize all the preceding years of polyphony.  And they haunt all subsequent western music—right up through Wagner.  They tap this music on the shoulder, to remind it:  “This is where you came from.”

Baldwin Tavinger,  Toward a Rhetoric of Number.