XTT Part 5: Diminuendo, and the Future

all semicolons and parentheses

“‘He has got no good red blood in his body,’ said Sir James.
    ‘No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses,’ said Mrs Cadwallader.”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

It takes a singular creature to write the word ‘Blood’ in a Bible

“I knew that Edward’s Bible held a secret as soon as I opened it and seen the word ‘Blood’ spilled on the first page, just ’neath the headpiece. It takes a singular creature to write the word ‘Blood’ in a Bible, and mind you to write it in crimson.”

—Edward Chupak, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, 2008.

Billy Bones

“Nothing that I might scrawl on the parchment would give a suitable accounting of Billy Bones. This parchment has pallor and so does not bring out the red in Bones’s face. The plume does not caper nearly as cleverly as Bones. Bones was a drunkard, but a sound rover, and maybe one of the best rovers that ever crooked a sword into a liver. I would need a torrent of quills to relate his rascality.”

—Edward Chupak, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, 2008.

Chuck Close / Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg: Cardbird 1

the moon come first

“I say that the moon come first. The moon come before the stars. The moon come even before the sun, I say. And before that the world was bleak, my hearty. The world was dark. The lions slept next to the lambs because the lions could not see their supper. Men bumped about in their Sunday clothing with nowhere to go and the world was filled with confusion. Women wore long dresses and carried parasols for no good reason so far as they could see. All was bewilderment.”

—Edward Chupak, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, 2008.

Gold is gold

“Gold is gold. Even the flames from the candles on board the ship sputter as the night draws to an end. There is no permanence to flame. Gold lasts forever. I looked in the bag. There was more than gold in that bag, my hearty. There was silver. There were jewels. Coins. There were precious stones of every colour. There was a dagger in the bag with red stones on its handle. I fancied that dagger as soon as I saw it. There were pewter forks and knives. There were plates. Fine ones, they were. There were pistols in the bag, and one of the pistols was so small that it fit into the palm of my hand.”

—Edward Chupak, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, 2008.

Albemarle County

“I smelled the Carolinas before I saw it. The stench of that country filled my nostrils. I would tell you that the country smelled like old fish, but that would be a libel on cod. They say that there are smells that can raise the dead, but this was a smell that could send a corpse back into the clay. Aye, the perished would leap back into the loam to flee this stench. When I remarked on the affliction, Mary said, ‘We are in the low country.’
    ‘We are in perdition,’ I replied. ‘Tom told me it would smell like this.’
    ‘No,’ Evangeline said. ‘It is just Albemarle County.’”

—Edward Chupak, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, 2008.

Vernacular Baton Rouge: TIGERS EAT SEAFOOD