(urth) New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press

[Mo Holkar / UKG]

At 05:15 27/06/2007, Don wrote:
>Maybe this is reaching on my part, but Herman Hesse wrote a story 
>about a hideous dwarf who belonged to a princess. He's given a puppy 
>that he loves more than anything, but the princess' jackass husband drowns it.


A more familiar reference might be to Rumpelstiltskin, who spins 
straw into gold for the miller's daughter in exchange for (he hopes) 
her first-born child.

I'm also picking up references to Don Juan -- the great hand which 
drags people down to Hell, and the quotation from Byron about his dog?

The epigraph is from Shakespeare's 144th sonnet:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil,
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turned fiend,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell:
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

although what to make of that, I don't know. Possibly also a 
reference to Lord Alfred Douglas's "Two Loves", one of which famously 
dare not speak its name?

I'm not sure why the narrator implores God to forgive him for taking 
Rover back to Roberta. Julianne has already said that she didn't want 
Rover, so it's not like he could have stayed there. Unless the 
narrator thinks that Julianne was lying about this? He's said that he 
was doubtful when Roberta said that both girls called the deal off.

Mo