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“... her own, enfolds it Don Giovanni-style, and now regards me with a rakish and appraising eye: Well, Terry [she says]: We’ll Just Have to Do Something (heh heh) to Warm It Up. Won’t We? (Heh heh heh)Love-impaled Sappho, help me in my discombobulation! Did you hear that? HILLARY CLINTON IS FLIRTING WITH ME! She’s got my hand and she is warming it ...”

“... the vision was, her art remains something we can use. One might even bless her for it.Listen to Terry Castle discuss this piece on the LRB ...”

“... melodramatic final scenes, in which Sibella, having finally escaped from her uncle’s castle, falls into a hysterical stupor on finding out that Clement has secretly married Caroline Ashburn’s wealthy, dissipated mother, Grundy enthuses over the ‘sublime’ handling of Sibella’s breakdown and the ‘extraordinary emotional power’ of the ...”

“... provenance. Like mother, like daughter. Repression the family legacy, after all. What Happens in Terry Stays in Terry. Emblazoned on the slip of paper was a Harry-Potterish list of aristocratic-sounding titles that Mavis seems to have invented for the three of us (me, my sister and herself) for reasons unknown. Honorifics ...”

“... to California the next day! I was there for months. Through all of the bombardment, of course, Terry. Then she ruminated. Had I ever met Baez? Was she a secret lesbian? I confessed that I’d once waited in line behind the folk singer at my cash machine (Baez lives near Stanford) and had taken the opportunity to inspect the hairs on the back of her ...”

“... Thinking about the three things I learned yesterday, courtesy of Levine Breaking News – a mysterious right-wing, LA-based, showbiz-obsessed website that sends me, unsolicited, ‘breaking story’ email updates several times a day. The first: Odontophobia is the fear of teeth. Good to know, but surely raises some questions. Whose teeth? What about that lady on the catafalque in the Poe story? Berenice: I think that was her name ...”

“... I said all I thought right – & if they are in the place, Mrs K. has promised to call in Castle Square; – it will be about the end of July. Elsewhere we learn more than we want to know, perhaps, about the incessant visits of various collateral family members, the meals eaten and cups of tea drunk, whether fires have been necessary in the ...”

“... in fact have been referring to me in Wretched Tatty Papyrus Fragment No. 211 (Lobel-Page): Come [Terry?] … cast off your [air-cushioned?] Nikes the [?] nightingale [?] … Sappho of Lesbos has always seemed more phantasm than historical personage, of course: we know so little of her life and have so precious little of her poetry that editors and ...”

“... The dilemma: it is 1892, you are a 30-year-old female shop assistant in a small silk manufacturing concern in Geneva, the city of your birth. You live with your parents in a modest but pleasant suburban house; you travel to work on the streetcar. You have no suitors, but don’t really mind: you have a spiritual protector named ‘Léopold’, a reincarnation of the 18th-century magician Cagliostro, who appears to you in visions in the long brown robe of a monk, offering advice and emotional solace ...”

“... Changelings, centaurs, ogres and elves may no longer inhabit the earth, but occasionally we run into their descendants: people so monstrous, incandescent, or freakishly themselves that only a quasi-supernatural description seems to do them justice. In the 20th century they come in all shapes and sizes: from the obvious ghouls and werewolves (Rasputin, Hitler, Idi Amin, Jeffrey Dahmer) to various mid-rank demigods and unicorn-people (T ...”

“... who had escaped a government firing squad – literally – by diving off the ramparts of Morro Castle into shark-infested Havana Bay, where he was picked up by an American schooner. It seems more likely, however, that he was a political snitch working on behalf of American and Cuban business interests and had to be hustled out of the country for his own ...”

“... collectors. How valuable can a flimsy Richard Tuttle wall-piece be, if the outsider artist James Castle (no relation that I know of) accidently managed to do something very similar using cast-off bits of cardboard and string in a trailer in Idaho? And yes, I enjoy a perverse feeling of triumph when art-savvy friends say of some piece, ‘Oh, whose work is ...”

“... When slave girls rebel, boss ladies watch out! In literature as in life, the revenge of a female underling on a female superior can be a messy business – with limbs, eyeballs, breasts, and other detachable body parts left dripping in gore around the house. A variety of situations may propel such fury. In Euripides’ Electra, Western civilisation’s mythic prototype for female-on-female mayhem, the rebel is an Outraged Daughter and the boss lady her Wicked Old Mother: Clytemnestra’s doom is sealed when she puts her sex life ahead of her daughter’s ...”

“... The island of Lesbos: talk about a small world. Pick up any edition of Sappho’s fragments and the same old names keep coming up: Erinna, Gongyla, Attis, Kleis, Anactoria. You would think that after two thousand years these girls would be ready to quit the scene, but no, here they come again – a bit leathery from all the centuries of tennis and golf, but still the only game in town ...”

“... self-destructive (and self-deluding) bastard Art Pepper must have been. And what’s up with you, Terry Castle, that you claim to like this guy? I admit it: it is strange. And I probably can’t keep wriggling out of it by joking about it being a sex thing. Towards the end of Straight Life there’s a long and absorbing interview with one of Pepper’s ...”