1. Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1942) — I really liked this book by the way:

“After that the man had come around to her side of the table and kissed her rather greedily. She had fought him off for a long time, but at length her will had softened. She had felt tired and kind, and thought, Why not? Then there had been something peculiar about the love-making itself — but she could not recall what it was. She had tried to keep aloof from it, to be present in body but not in spirit. Somehow that had not worked out and she had been dragged in and humiliated. There was some comfort in this vagueness, but recollection quickly stabbed her again. There were (oh, holy Virgin!) four-letter words that she had been forced to repeat, and at the climax, a rain of blows on her buttocks that must surely (dear God!) have left bruises. She must be careful not to let her aunt see her without any clothes on, she told herself, and remembered how once she had visualised sins as black marks on the white soul. This sin, at least, no one would see.”

2. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1969):

” ‘What has kept me alive is my shame, my knowing that I am truly not like other women. I shall never have children, a husband, and those innocent happinesses they have. And they will never understand the reason for my crime.’ She paused, as if she was seeing what she said clearly herself for the first time. ‘Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more.’ “

3. Courtney Ryley Cooper, Designs in Scarlet (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1939) — On spanking clubs and other nefarious activities with a dash of Lautremont tossed in:

“Remember always that it is the sado-masochist who attacks little girls, or who slashes out their bowels, or who beats women to death and rapes them after life has left their bodies.”

Cooper wrote screenplays for movies and true crime for pulps.

4. I’ve been extraordinarily busy recently finishing a project started two years ago.

5. The leaves are starting to fall off the trees:

“At my poore house you shall behold this night,
Earth treading stars, that make darke heaven light.”
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, first (or bad quarto), I,ii.