Sonnet

H.L. Mencken once wrote,

Who knows, again, what [Shakespeare's] sonnets are about? Is the bard talking about the innkeeper's wife at Oxford, or about a love affair of a pathological, Y.M.C.A. character?

This one would have made it clear.

Thanx to wordweaverlynn and Making Light.

Essential?

What are they smoking over at Penguin? A rogue art department has given some books that deserve better a makeover. There's a certain amount of gratuitous ugliness (The Big Sleep, Ellison's Invisible Man), a jolly pastel cover for A Handful of Dust, and my antifave, battling troglodytes for The Man in the High Castle. As George Bernard Shaw said of Times Square at night, how lovely it must be if one cannot read! Oh well, this is the publisher that just did the baby doll cover for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.