"By the time Collins was being pursued by a woman with green tusks, you sense he was in big trouble"

Back from Boston, where I had a pleasant few days, to "fyre and flete and candlelight," and the (more urgent than I had realized) task of finishing up my thesis. Some linkage:

1. Engaging review of Peter Ackroyd's (apparently dull) biog. of Wilkie Collins.

2. Geoff Dyer on porn and Thomas Ruff. Inter alia I am grateful to GD for teasing out the pun in "coming to our senses." (Which also enriches that Frost line, "going home / From company means coming to our senses.")

3. From Guy Davenport's diary in The Hunter Gracchus:

The white frost that made the fire feel so good, and the quilt so comfortable, had also reddened the maples and mellowed the persimmons. Cloth shoes stink by the fire. Foxes bark in the deep of the wind.

Opossum:persimmon::moth:mulberry. Christmas Island (South Pacific): imperial pigeon, noddy, glossy swiftlet, reef heron.