“Come on, ordinary man with that large big nonobli head, and that blanko berbecked fischial ekksprezzion Machinsky Scapolopolos, Duzinascu or other. Your machelar’s mutton leg’s getting musclebound from being too pulled. Noah Beery weighed stone thousand one when Hazel was a hen. Now her fat’s falling fast. Therefore, chatbags, why not yours? There are 29 sweet reasons why blossomtime’s the best. Elders fall for green almonds when they’re raised on bruised stone root ginger though it winters on their heads as if auctumned round their waistbands. If you’d had pains in your hairs you wouldn’t look so orgibald. You’d have Colley Macaires on your lump of lead. Now listen, Mr Leer! And stow that sweatyfunnyadams Simper! Take an old geeser who calls on his skirt. Note his sleek hair, so elegant, tableau vivant. He vows her to be his own honeylamb, swears they will be papa pals, by Sam, and share good times way down west in a guaranteed happy lovenest when May moon she shines and they twit twinkle all the night, combing the comet’s tail up right and shooting popguns at the stars. Creampuffs all to dime! Every nice, missymackenzies! For dear old grumpapar, he’s gone on the razzledar, through gazing and crazing and blazing at the stars. Compree! She wants her wardrobe to hear from above by return with cash so as she can buy her Peter Robinson trousseau and cut a dash with Arty, Bert or possibly Charley Chance (who knows?) so tolloll Mr Hunker you’re too dada for me to dance (so off she goes!) and that’s how half the gels in town has got their bottom drars while grumpapar he’s trying to hitch his braces on to his trars. But old grum he’s not so clean dippy between sweet you and yum (not on your life, boy! not in those trousers! not by a large jugful!) for someplace on the sly,where Furphy he isn’t by, old grum has his gel number two (bravevow, our Grum!) and he would like to canoodle her too some part of the time for he is downright fond of his number one but O he’s fair mashed on peaches number two so that if he could only canoodle the two, chivee chivoo, all three would feel genuinely happy, it’s as simple as A. B. C., the two mixers, we mean, with their cherrybum chappy (for he is simply shamming dippy) if they all were afloat in a dreamlifeboat, hugging two by two in his zoo-doo-you-doo, a tofftoff for thee, missymissy for me and howcameyou-e’enso for Farber, in his tippy, upindown dippy, tiptoptippy canoodle, can you? Finny.”

(Finnegans Wake, pp. 64–65.)

“ ‘Pliny’s outline’—Pliny said the invention of painting occurred when a Corinthian maiden drew the outline of her lover after he went away to war, so she could remember what he looked like.”

(note on p. 95 of Charles Wright’s Chickamauga.)

“During the war, Pound tried to persuade a number of bureaucrats in Italy that the cultivation of peanuts would solve Italy’s food shortages – just as he later had syrup-producing American maples planted near Brunnenburg Castle in the South Tyrol, but in the process only managed to introduce poison ivy into the region.”

(note to Canto 74.812 (“and the wops do not use maple syrup”) in Richard Sieburth’s edition of Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, p. 130.)

“In tangerine-orange subtle differences between red and yellow are so difficult to perceive as a single color that one eye seems to see red while the other sees yellow. A person walking for too long on a tangerine hued carpet eventually begins to stagger because his eyes can’t any longer decide where to put his feet.”

(Malcolm de Chazal, Sens-plastique, trans. Irving Weiss, p. 247.)

(Busby Berkeley, from Gold Diggers of 1933.)

“I would have liked very much to explore certain of these parallel fictional universes, and I had proposed to my Publisher, in spite of the enormous amount of additional work it would have imposed upon me, to furnish him with an absolute forest of multiple diverging and reconverging tales, with approved spatio-temporal travel maps, and a guide provided for the tourists of the fiction. The same unchangeable book would not have been stupidly printed for everyone but, rediscovering good old thirteenth-century customs (it was only yesterday), during the age of manuscripts, each reader would have his own personalized book. The book would not be available in stores. Or rather, in good bookstores, you would have had the chance to choose: either the standard edition, everybody’s book . . . or else you would have placed an order for your edition, chosen according to a “menu” of possible forkings in the course of the tale. This copy would not yet have been printed. By pressing here and there on a keyboard, the bookstore clerk would have transmitted to the computer-printer the specifications of the novel and at once, thanks to modern typesetting/composition processes, vroom, vroom, the book would be on its way; and it would arrive in no time.”

(Jacques Roubaud, Hortense is Abducted (1989), quoted in Dominic Di Bernardi’s afterword to The Great Fire of London, pp. 321–2.)

“(And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”

(Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 18; cited in Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London.)

“The clouds drew closer and gusts of wind ruffled the surface of the brown water. Drops of rain struck the windows. I left my stool and moved across the room for a better look at things, taking a table next to the American woman. Four pelicans in a column were gliding over the water, almost touching it. Behind them came two more. These two were flapping their heavy wings and they were climbing up to the misty edges of the cloud. A shaft of lightning struck the second bird and he contracted into a ball and fell like a rock. The other one took no notice, missing not a beat with his wings.

I was astonished. I knew I would tell this pelican story over and over again and that it would be met with widespread disbelief but I thought I might as well get started and so I turned to the woman and the boy and told them what I had seen. I pointed out the floating brown lump.

She said, ‘It looks like a piece of wood.’

‘That’s a dead pelican.’

‘I heard the thunder but I didn’t see anything.’

‘I saw the whole thing.’

‘I love storms.’ ”

(pp. 159–160.)

“I told them about the pelican that was struck by lightning. They didn’t believe it. I tried to tell them about Symes and Webster and Spann and Karl and their attention wandered. I saw then that I would have to write it down, present it all in an orderly fashion, and this I have done.”

(p. 243 of Charles Portis, The Dog of the South.)