The first reading is the opening of The Bogey Man, George Plimpton's memoir of a month spent on the professional golf tour in the late 1960's.

My woes in golf, I have felt, have been largely psychological. When I am playing well, in the low 90's (my handicap is 18), I am still plagued with small quirks--a suspicion that, for example, just as I begin my downswing, my eyes straining with concentration, a bug or a beetle is going to suddenly materialize on the golf ball.

When I am playing badly, far more massive speculation occurs: I often sense as I commit myself to a golf swing that my body changes its corporeal status completely and becomes a mechanical entity, built of tubes and conduits, and boiler rooms here and there, with big dials and gauges to check, a Brobdingnagian structure put together by a team of brilliant engineers but manned largely by a dispirited, eccentric group of dissolutes--men with drinking problems, who do not see very well, and who are plagued by liver complaints.

The structure they work in is enormous. I see myself as a monstrous, manned colossus poised high over the golf ball, a spheroid that is barely discernible 14 stories down on the tee. From above, staring through the windows of the eyes, which bulge like great bay porches, is an unsteady group (as I see them) of Japanese navymen--admirals, most of them. In their hands they hold ancient and useless voice tubes into which they yell the familiar orders: "Eye on the ball! Chin steady! Left arm stiff! Flex the knees! Swing from the inside out! Follow through! Keep head down!" Since the voice tubes are useless, the cries drift down the long corridors and shaftways between the iron tendons and muscles, and echo into vacant chambers and out, until finally, as a burble of sound, they reach the control centers. These posts are situated at the joints, and in charge are the dissolutes I mentioned--typical of them a cantankerous elder perched on a metal stool, half a bottle of rye on the floor beside him, his ear cocked for the orders that he acknowledges with ancient epithets, yelling back up the corrridors, "Ah, your father's mustache!" and such things, and if he's of a mind, he'll reach for the controls (like the banks of tall levers one remembers from a railroad-yard switch house) and perhaps he'll pull the proper lever and perhaps not. So that, in sum, the whole apparatus, bent on hitting a golf ball smartly, tips and convolutes and lunges, the Japanese admirals clutching each other for support in the main control center up in the head as the structure rocks and creaks. And when the golf shot is on its way the navymen get to their feet and peer out through the eyes and report: "A shank! A shank! My God, we've hit another shank!" They stir about in the control center drinking paper-thin cups of rice wine, consoling themselves, and every once in a while one of them will reach for a voice tube and shout:

"Smarten up down there!"

Down below, in the dark reaches of the structure, the dissolutes reach for their rye, tittering, and they've got their feet up on the levers and perhaps soon it will be time to read the evening newspaper.

The second reading is from the The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander, one of his young-adult novels based on the cycle of Welsh legends called the Mabinogi. Taran, an Assistant Pig-Keeper, is a member of one of several parties on a dangerous mission against the evil empire of Annuvin. His leader, the wise and gentle Adaon, has just been killed by the bad guys, leaving Taran in charge. Adaon seemed to have a premonition of his fate, and insisted that Taran accept his brooch as a gift should anything happen to him. As he and his party resume their journey, Taran begins to notice that some things are different while he wears the brooch...

It was Taran's intention to ride southward, hoping somehow to come upon the Marshes of Morva within another day; although he admitted to himself that he had no more than a vague idea of their distance or exact location.

The day was bright and crisp. As Melynlas cantered over the frosty ground, Taran caught sight of a glittering, dew-covered web on a hawthorn branch and of the spider busily repairing it. Taran was aware, strangely, of vast activities along the forest trail. Squirrels prepared their winter oard; ants labored in their earthen castles. He could see them clearly, not so much with his eyes but in a way he had never known before.

The air itself bore special scents. There was a ripple, sharp and clear, like cold wine. Taran knew, without stopping to think, that a north wind had just begun to rise. Yet in the middle of this he noticed another scent mingled through. He turned Melynlas toward it.

"Since you're leading us," Eilonwy remarked, "I wonder if it would be too much to expect you to know where you're going."

"There is water nearby," Taran said. "We shall need to fill our flasks..." He hesitated, puzzled. "Yes, there is a stream," he murmured, "I'm sure of it. We must go there."

Last modified 18 August 2010