randomWalks

"The Admonitory Hippopotamus, or Angelica and Sneezeby" is a vintage Gorey story. A girl of 5 is playing cards with her brothers in a gazebo when suddenly she sees a spectral hippopotamus "rising from the ha-ha." "Fly at once!" commands the hippo. "All is discovered!"

In a journey that covers her entire life in cameo, Angelica travels the world from St. Torpid's ("to buy forbidden jujubes") to the Indian Ocean, where she has an "assignation with a Eurasian Stoker" on a ship. Repeatedly the animal appears and delivers its message, acting as a kind of constant and peripatetic conscience.

The New York Times reports that executors of the late, great Edward Gorey's estate have found hundreds of finished and unfinished sketches and stories among his left-behind belongings. As an avid Gorey fan who owns possibly all of his books, I am unimaginably excited as I think about this trove of goodies.

Thinking of all of those papery fragments, I'm reminded of the poet Frank O'Hara, a key figure in the New York School of poetry. O'Hara was known for writing poems in letters or on scraps of paper and not particularly caring if his output was saved for posterity. Maybe he could be a patron saint of the Internet, since it's hard to imagine that randomWalks entire will be preserved in some meaningful way centuries from now.

And it is somehow important that O'Hara and Gorey were roommates at Harvard. As tribute to these two late greats (O'Hara was run over by a dune buggy at Fire Island and died far too young), why not read O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died" today?