The Loch Ness Monster’s Song by Edwin Morgan.

You can hear Edwin Morgan read the poem himself here.

A note from the Museum of Hoaxes:

According to a Rice University webpage, in 1991 the poem was reprinted in 100 Poems on the Underground, and had this explanation appended to it:

“The author explained in conversation that the lonely monster rises from the loch and looks round for the companions of his youth — prehistoric reptiles — and, finding nobody he knows, he descends again to the depths after a brief swearing session. This was confirmed by a nine-year-old boy in a workshop, who said the monster was ‘looking for a diplodocus’. When asked how he knew that, he said, ‘It says so.’ It does.”

Sure enough, if you read the poem closely, you can tell that the monster is looking for a diplodocus, and does then start swearing.

Sylvia Plath, Insomniac (1961)

aseaofquotes:

 Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Harry Mathews, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium

magnificentruin:

Geoff Dyer
The Ongoing Moment 

fresherhells:

trumpetstrumpet:

Evelyn Waugh wouldn’t be caught dead at your dinner party.

Waugh, one of my favorite misanthropic bastards in literary history, put a lot of effort into putting as much distance between himself & the rest of humanity as possible. To that end, he went to the trouble of printing up these all-purpose “Mr. Evelyn Waugh is not interested in your petty invitations and cordially invites you to fuck off” cards, which he would hand out to people who made demands on him (e.g. aspiring writers seeking critiques of their manuscripts, friends requesting his presence at dinner parties, his children asking him to stop publicly referring to them as “physically inept, monotonous, defective adults who fill me with depression”)

I like this convenient, good-for-all-occasions way of rebuffing unwanted requests and am considering printing my own set of “Miss Fresherhells greatly regrets that she cannot do what you so kindly suggest” cards. Just reviewing this morning’s events, I can think of several people to whom I could’ve given a card. For example, my boss, who stated, “I expect you to take this seriously” regarding analyzing a script which features a wise-cracking cat who freebases cocaine & has AIDS as the male lead, to the gentleman who lives on the 42nd St. subway platform and likes to greet me with a joyous, “Hey, Bootylicious! Swing it! Swing what your momma gave you!”

“The Soldier”, Rupert Brooke

Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller

(via vertebrale)

Micheline Aharonian Marcom, The Mirror in the Well

Harry Mathews, Singular Pleasures