My Virtual Reading Room

(Cross-posted to jwatsonmd )

And now a word about Watson. Dr. Watson is often represented as "bumbling" or "obtuse" and portrayed as staring open-mouthed at Holmes' remarkable deductions. But, lest we forget, it was Watson who was the biographer of Holmes, and we all know how engagingly those memoirs were written. Not only do they possess masterly touches of character study, but in each case, we seem to share in the adventures. The prose style is always impressive and, at times rises to heights of sonorous, descriptive beauty. This brief passage from "The Final Problem", in which Watson tells his thoughts as he looks down into the tumultuous waters of Reichenbach Falls (into which Holmes and Moriarty, locked in deadly embrace, were presumed to have tumbled and been lost forever) is a notable example of the vivid imagery often contained in these pages.

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putinwatcher.blogspot.com/2011/04/cyber-war-on-russian-activist-bloggers.html

I love the literary allusions in this one...
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Catch a Body | Ilse Bendorf
"Catch a Body"
Ilse Bendorf

Salinger, I’m sorry, but “Don’t ever tell
anybody anything” is a string of words
I would like to wrap up in canvas and sink
to the bottom of the Hudson, or extract
by laser from the ribcage of all of us
who ever believed it, who felt afraid
to miss someone, to be the last one
standing. “Tell everyone everything” is
not exactly right, but I do believe that if
your mother looks radiant in violet
you should tell her, or when a juvenile
sparrow thrashes its wings in dustpiles
and reminds you of a lover’s eyelashes,
you should say so. We are islands all of us,
but we are also boats, our secrets flares,
pyrotechnic devices by which we signal
there’s someone in here we’re still alive!
So maybe it’s, “don’t be afraid.” We can
rewrite Icarus, flame-resistant feathers,
wax that won’t melt, I mean it, I’ll draw up
a prototype right now, that burning ball
of orange won’t stop us, it’ll be everything
we dream the morning after, even if we fall
into the sea—we are boats, remember?
We are pirates. We move in nautical miles.
Each other’s anchors, each other’s buoys,
the rocket’s red, already the world entire.

(originally posted by exceptindreams in greatpoets )