ORLANDO [not the sound of Florida in my ears]

[Francis Muir]

I have said that I remembered ORLANDO hardly at all but that Sally Potter's
film seemed to generate some of the feelings I had then. By good luck the
goanna regurgitated my copy of the book but this time no longer a Penguin
but a Harcourt Brace trade paper-back hard on the heels of the film. VW
has described the book as "an escapade, half-laughing, half serious; with
great splashes of exaggeration". I think it must be the fact that it is
only half serious that has bothered some. There are two photos in the book.
One at the beginning: Orlando as a Boy. Of a painting. An Elizabethan. A
Sackville I imagine. At Knole? The one at the end called: Orlando at the
Present Time. A woman holding a shepherd's crook and with a couple of dogs.
Its a young Victoria Sackville-West of course. I last saw her when Gwynyvar
Hagan and Patricia Rowan and I drove down in my little Arbarth-Fiat to
Sissinghurst to pay our respects to her and her garden which was not then
yet the national treasure that it now is, but still work in progress.

Francis Muir

[Ted Samse]

My brother (the minor regional poet and CnW artiste) went to Orlando
(in the Mouse Kingdom) for a minor regional poet's confab oncet and
hooked up with a cowboy poet from Wyoming. They took the rentacar to
find dirt. (Parking lots in front of redneck beerjoints). Finding
none, they drowned their sorrows in a stripmall (no exotic danseuses
there) wartering hole.
Sigh!
--
Ted Samsel....tejas@infi.net.com/bh...@freenet-in-a.cwru.edu...
"driving a Hudson Hornet on the information superhighway, in search
a JC Whitney catalog sos's I can buy fuzzy dice."