"A German woman, with a strong accent, called to talk to him about 'The Building of the Ship,' which she was planning to read in public, and which she called 'The Lunch of the Sheep.'"
1/ Homage to Leo Marks, WWII cryptographer, and author of the screenplay for Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960).
2/ A shorthand for this vertigo of the unfolding epigram: the experience of an aphorism as it re-engineers the world, whether cruelly, or paternally, in the model sense of the word, as a house-husband delighting the orchid in its pram.