A Stuga On the Cusp of the Orust Riviera, tucked away next to a hobbit hole in the woods.
"An enormous brick-red, boiled ham appeared, strewn with crumbs and served with a sour brown onion sauce, and so many vegetables that the company could have satisfied their appetites from that one dish.
Lebrecht Kroger undertook the carving, and skillfully cut the succulent slices, with his elbows slightly elevated and his two long forefingers laid out along the back of the knife and fork. With the ham went the Frau Consul's celebrated " Russian jam" - a pungent fruit conserve flavoured with spirits."
This Dean Pugh character would need close watching. He was foul and lean, junk-food raised and opposed to dentistry judging by his greening teeth. His skin had a yellow tinge, beneath shitfly green eyes, and his brain was probably odd enough to posthumously set off a bidding frenzy among scientists. He generally seemed batty as a loon, goofy as a goose on ice, immaculately weird, with no stain of normalcy on him at all.'
The Wing was a white prison gang, a loose nationwide cartel of sorts that kept in touch via three-to-five jolts and visitation privileges. Though not as strong as The Aryan Brotherhood or The Brown Mafia or The Locked-Up Muslims, The Wing had dirty fingers that could pull triggers on both sides of those high federal walls.
Coal bins lined the tracks, providing a haven for those rambling men who couldn't spare the buck for a flop and refused to perjure themselves on the God issue for the payoff bowl of soup and green-blanketed bunk. Urban Darwinism was at work in the grim light of this place, and the mean got over with their no-limit rage, while the weak went under, silently."
Indeed, our Philistines have ceased to be faint-hearted and bashful, and have acquired almost cynical assurance. There was a time, long, long ago, when the Philistine was only tolerated as something that did not speak, and about which no one spoke; then a period ensued during which his roughness was smoothed, during which he was found amusing, and people talked about him. Under this treatment he gradually became a prig, rejoiced with all his heart over his rough places and his wrongheaded and candid singularities, and began to talk, on his own account, after the style of Riehl's music for the home.
The heaven of the new believer must, perforce, be a heaven upon earth; for the Christian "prospect of an immortal life in heaven," together with the other consolations, "must irretrievably vanish" for him who has but "one foot" on the Straussian platform.
for YouOpening quotes by Dostoyevsky and Proust.