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Col. Kurtz: Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.”

Enchantment: The story of Gilbert’s abandoned Brazil romance that migrated to Ann Patchett is the source of the title. The personification of an idea makes a figurative way of handling the phenomenon.

Gary or Hugo? The erratic terrain of Kismet’s heart.

Is Speck’s riff on “exponentially” too brilliant a metaphor?

“Enchantment”: parallel to BM, theoretical physicists Sara Imari Walker and Lee Cronin were considering the properties of life. They started studying how information structured matter. In short, they came up with Assembly Theory: life is the only physics that can generate complex objects. Ideas and information moving between us is a creative act.

In “First Light,” the “sweat” and “flesh” (45) seems to prefigure the water content of the body in the title poem (95).

This poem also includes a Humpty Dumpty and a John Wayne reference. Both will be critiqued for misleading boys about the reality of war.

“Interstices” is one of Second Skin’s most memorable poems (44). The “tree” is something the teen soldier kills out of being “scared,” his fear misplaced. The killing of the truck is at least directed at property, a stand-in for the lethal policy authorized by a government that secretly knew it would not prevail. Likewise, Tessler a tree near H in the jungle of soldiers.

Is the right margin of “Saying Goodbye” intended to look like the “eggshell” mentioned as the final word (43)?

After too-much-chocolate-induced insomnia, I read "Avirus runs through it" (24) a second time and still found no resonance with the Norman Maclean memoir even though Snyder shows atention to watersheds in a previous essay, "North Beach" (6)

A more interesting essay is "Smokey the Bear Sutra." The notes on publication and rejection offers some perspective on editorial appetites and authorial blind spots (31).

Will this be Alex’ story?

V.v has no irony about H8’s future marriage’s an E1’s scrappy existence at the royal margins.

V.iii twists Cranmer from The Tower to E1’s godfather. Fortunately, she has the Duchess of Norfolk and Lady Marquess Dorset as godmothers.

V.ii by Fletcher thinly dramatizes The Catholic-crown split by having KH8 watch the Archbishop from a distance.

V.i is supposed to be by S.: according to the Old Lady, K8 is “a boy.”

IV.ii Wolsey’s death by messenger, Katherine forgives Henry without apparent irony.

Earl of Surrey ctd.: Plague of your policy!/You sent me deputy for Ireland,/far from his succor, from the king, from all/that might have mercy on the fault thou gav’st him,/whilst your great goodness, out of holy pity,/absolved him with an axe.

Earl of Surrey ctd.: Plague of your policy!/You sent me deputy for Ireland,/far from his succor, from the king, from all/that might have mercy on the fault thou gav’st him,/whilst your great goodness, out of holy pity,/absolved him with an axe.

Earl of Surrey ctd.: Plague of your policy!/You sent me deputy for Ireland,/far from his succor, from the king, from all/that might have mercy on the fault thou gav’st him,/whilst your great goodness, out of holy pity,/absolved him with an axe.

Earl of Surrey: Thy ambition,/thou scarlet sin, robbed this bewailing land/of Noble Buckingham, my father-in-law:/the heads of all the brother Cardinals–/with thee, and all the best parts together–/weighed not a hair of his.

III.ii by S. delivers Wolsey’s takedown-by-messenger:

To Katherine, Wolsey oozes half-truth, false witness: pray, think of us,/those we profess, peacemakers, friends, and servants.” (III.i)

II.iv is supposed to be by S. Instead of Katherine’s guilt or innocence, her charge against Cardinal Wolsey results in King Henry’s defense of him.

Propaganda, glosses over Bullen’s execution: Chamberlain: beauty and honor in her are so mingled,/but they have caught the king; and who knows yet/ but from this lady may proceeded a gem/ to lighten all this aisle?” (II.iii)

In “Who Makes the Movies?” Vidal ruins a perfectly good case history of Ben Hur’s screenwriting credit to whip the often misused auteur theory. Vidal says Hitchcock is an exception, but won’t cite the name “Truffaut” because it would complicate an already convoluted argument in which Hitchcock is exempted from plagiarizing Welles but Ebert has to step with footnotes re: Kael.

Fletcher turns a phrase on Henry’s marital trouble:
Chamberlain: it seems, the marriage with his brother’s wife/has crept to near his conscience.
Duke of Suffolk: No, his conscience/has crept to near another lady. (II.ii)

Last words, dangerous gossip, “slander…is found a truth” (II.i).

Last words, dangerous gossip, “slander…is found a truth” (II.i).

Wolsey’s unmasking of the king could be a threat: “You are a churchman, or, I’ll tell you, cardinal,/ I should judge now unhappily” (I.iv).

So I.iii is supposed to take us back to Fletcher. Poor France, fashion pariahs even then (54).

Spedding (21) attempts to show difference between S’s writing and Fletcher’s by counting syllables. While counting is exact, poetry resists science. In I.ii, the demotion of Queen Katherine and state craft of Cardinal Wolsey plants the hook: will & how will Henry wise up (50)?