51吃瓜

I used to like the Fourth of July okay because of the fireworks. I’d go down by the East River and watch them flare up from the tugboats. The girandoles looked like fiery lace in the sky.

There were solemn mountains of opalescent fire which burst and faded into flaming colonnades, and in an enchanting turquoise effervescence became starry spears and scimiters and sparkling shields, and finally the whole mass would reunite and evaporate into brilliant violet auroras or seven-tailed, vermilion-coloured comets. … Consumed by anxiety for Mila’s safety, he wished that these soundless girandoles, this apocalypse of architectural fire and weaving flame, would end.

No one knows what this thing is, or which neurons fire in the heads of the people who flock in droves to old Bob Ross videos on YouTube to bask in the unflappable lilt of his folksy patter and the calm, sure sound of his palette knife as it flicks and scrapes pigment onto the canvas.

My professor, Linda Heywood, was slight and bespectacled, spoke with a high Trinidadian lilt that she employed like a hammer against young students like me who confused agitprop with hard study.

Martha was envious, but she was a stalwart friend, and mordantly funny about women鈥檚 plight.

It would have needed a very stalwart young woman in 1828 to disregard all those snubs and chidings and promises of prizes. One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself, Oh, but they can鈥檛 buy literature too. Literature is open to everybody.