("All Shall Be Well..." + "The Green Hat")

[fiefoe]

Tod Wodicka's novel's full title is "All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well". Note to self: I'm not that interested in stories of morose widowers.

• How easy it was to undress, I though. How simple to emigrate.
• From our departing Rudesheim bound bus, the Frankfurt skyline looked like New York City with eighty percent of its teeth punched out.
• The Germans - who had something of the sad silent delicacy of gorillas
• plastic pools on which the occasional beach ball floated like a doomed aria
• Medieval man believed that one was placed beyond the touch of time, and therefore aging, while attending Mass.
• Medieval Irish (sailing) monks who boarding a coracle, gave themselves to the ocean without the slightest of provisions, trusting God's will... History's weird soulful details.
• The eternal malleability of every intention of everything, both good and bad..
• During the flight the little girl had been inconsolable convinced that the turbulence was caused by the aircraft "running over angels".
• gently easing her plaque into its afterlife, smiling
• sprinkling that high giggle all over situations better left unadorned
• I coddled the memory.
• There was a constant worrying dialog going on between June and the image of June.

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Just maybe Michael Arlen's "The Green Hat" deserves its obscurity by now.

__ I have seen two butlers fighting in our lane.
__ I had been that evening to a party; for that is now the name that folks give to a dance - I am not sure why. In America, I believe, one doesn't even give a party, one just throws a party.
__ the very dungeons of gaiety
__ pests of the night, that are hearty with the weary and thirsty with the unwary
__ There was a tawny whisper .. seemed to dance, from beneath her hat, a very formal dance on her cheeks.