Mr. E. Quine is feeling his muse, but only in his own tent! Ha. But he has taken the stage again with this special vers de societe as three very special horses make their way to the Wandering Barnyard Show. So pull up your chair and take note, Mr. E. Quine is taking bets now on who will win the Triple Crown.

This e-poem is being sponsored by Uncle Bubba's Hoofprint Whiskey, "Stomping down livers since 1909."

He gallops, she gallops, they gallop all three,
Big Brown, Wimpys Little Chic, and High Brow CD.
They gallop to riches, to fame, and renown,
As each keeps the pace to his own Triple Crown.
So I’ll play the prophet, be your Delphic source,
For three is a number of magical force.

Despite a cracked hoof, an unbeaten bay
Will enter the park of the Belmont race day.
Desormeaux and Big Brown, with little concern,
Will burst like a gunshot in that final turn.
Along with applause and a million-plus check,
He’ll have white carnations draped over his neck.

Now Flarida pilots Wimpys Little Chic.
The queen of the reiners, this mare’s no goldbrick.
She nails her maneuvers, she turns in a blur,
The difficult lead change looks easy to her.
She’ll then drop her head as if bowing to go;
You’ll win if you bet on that blond palomino.

The Derby in Texas is cutting’s third treat,
And High Brow CD is just too hard to beat.
Now Shepard may lighten the bridle and bit
To free up this horse; any cow he’ll outwit.
A drop of his haunches, a heave of his flank,
The stallion will go down as one of first rank.

Come one, come all and listen to the lyrical stylings of the world famous troubadour, the mesmerizing poet Mr. E. Quine himself.

This e-poem is being sponsored by Betsy's Bits and Bridles, "If you need something to chew on, try Betsy's bits, the sweetest iron west of Lake Tawakoni."

A mystical force surrounding two men
Has created a stir inside the show pen,
And they both wear green,
They’re men in green.

Some say it’s Louisiana black voodoo
That’s transformed green into a magical hue.
They’re charmed in green,
Those men in green.

Shawn Flarida slides in to whistles and hollers,
An earner of well over $2 million,
He grins in green,
Cause he wins in green.

The crock of gold will belong to Shawn,
For no one can catch this leprechaun.
A reiner in green,
That man in green.

Whether Wimpys Little Chic or Walla Walla Whiz,
If he’s donning the green, the championship’s his.
He takes home the green,
When he’s in green.

An Alabama trainer named Austin Shepard
Likes wearing green, so his rivals get peppered.
He’s a mean green bean,
In his shirt of green.

He’s won three consecutive futurities,
Including Augusta and Tunica, with ease,
While wearing green,
That gremlin in green.

Austin didn’t stop there, didn’t put on the brakes,
He then took the Super and Cotton Stakes,
There’s something about green,
That cutter in green.

All cutters are wondering what it could be:
Can’t blame it on his mount High Brow CD.
It must be the green,
Cause he wins in green.

Now cutters and reiners better listen hard
To the sage advice from this here bard:
You’ll get more green,
If you’re wearing green.

This e-show is presented by Teresa's Trampolines. "It's the bounce that counts."

Who can resist the high-wire fliers, the sultans of the skies, the defiers of gravity, those silk-scarved stylists? Be amazed, be shocked, feel the top of your head pop off as you watch the abilities of these verbal acrobats. Watch as these linguistical lions display their verbal pyrotechnics, taking even the blandest of stories and turning them into crowd-pleasers.

While Mr. E. Quine believes in clarity and simplicity, verbal artistry makes his top hat fly off. Take Truman Capote, that precocious master of style, who wrote In Cold Blood, among other masterful creations. Capote was one of viperish wit and scandalous gossip, whose prose is characterized by lush words and images with the precision of poetry. In 1963, the critic Mark Schorer wrote of Mr. Capote: "Perhaps the single constant in his prose is style, and the emphasis he himself places upon the importance of style."

And now, a little guitar...





Now, back to the high-wire act...
Take a swing with the trapeze artist Capote, but beware, he writes without a net. Read this excerpt from "The Duke in His Domain," a brilliant account of his meeting with Marlon Brando, first published in the The New Yorker in 1957:

Most Japanese girls giggle. The little maid on the fourth floor of the Miyako Hotel, in Kyoto, was no exception. Hilarity, and attempts to suppress it, pinked her cheeks (unlike the Chinese, the Japanese complexion more often than not has considerable color), shook her plump peony-and-pansy-kimonoed figure. There seemed to be no particular reason for this merriment; the Japanese giggle operates without apparent motivation. I'd merely asked to be directed toward a certain room. "You come see Marron?" she gasped, showing, like so many of her fellow-countrymen, an array of gold teeth. Then, with the tiny, pigeon-toed skating steps that the wearing of a kimono necessitates, she led me through a labyrinth of corridors, promising, "I knock you Marron." The "l" sound does not exist in Japanese, and by "Marron" the maid meant Marlon—Marlon Brando, the American actor, who was at that time in Kyoto doing location work for the Warner Brothers-William Goetz motion-picture version of James Michener's novel "Sayonara.”

My guide tapped at Brando's door, shrieked "Marron!," and fled away along the corridor, her kimono sleeves fluttering like the wings of a parakeet. The door was opened by another doll-delicate Miyako maid, who at once succumbed to her own fit of quaint hysteria. From an inner room, Brando called, "What is it, honey?" But the girl, her eyes squeezed shut with mirth and her fat little hands jammed into her mouth, like a bawling baby's, was incapable of reply. "Hey, honey, what is it?" Brando again inquired, and appeared in the doorway. "Oh, hi," he said when he saw me. "It's seven, huh?" We'd made a seven-o'clock date for dinner; I was nearly twenty minutes late. "Well, take off your shoes and come on in. I'm just finishing up here. And, hey, honey," he told the maid, "bring us some ice." Then, looking after the girl as she scurried off, he ****ed his hands on his hips and, grinning, declared, "They kill me. They really kill me. The kids, too. Don't you think they're wonderful, don't you love them—Japanese kids?"

The Miyako, where about half of the "Sayonara" company was staying, is the most prominent of the so-called Western-style hotels in Kyoto; the majority of its rooms are furnished with sturdy, if commonplace and cumbersome, European chairs and tables, beds and couches. But, for the convenience of Japanese guests who prefer their own mode of décor while desiring the prestige of staying at the Miyako, or of those foreign travellers who yearn after authentic atmosphere yet are disinclined to endure the unheated rigors of a real Japanese inn, the Miyako maintains some suites decorated in the traditional manner, and it was in one of these that Brando had chosen to settle himself. His quarters consisted of two rooms, a bath, and a glassed-in sun porch. Without the overlying and underlying clutter of Brando's personal belongings, the rooms would have been textbook illustrations of the Japanese penchant for an ostentatious barrenness. The floors were covered with tawny tatami matting, with a discreet scattering of raw-silk pillows; a scroll depicting swimming golden carp hung in an alcove, and beneath it, on a stand, sat a vase filled with tall lilies and red leaves, arranged just so. The larger of the two rooms—the inner one—which the occupant was using as a sort of business office where he also dined and slept, contained a long, low lacquer table and a sleeping pallet. In these rooms, the divergent concepts of Japanese and Western decoration—the one seeking to impress by a lack of display, an absence of possession-exhibiting, the other intent on precisely the reverse—could both be observed, for Brando seemed unwilling to make use of the apartment's storage space, concealed behind sliding paper doors. All that he owned seemed to be out in the open. Shirts, ready for the laundry; socks, too; shoes and sweaters and jackets and hats and ties, flung around like the costume of a dismantled scarecrow. And cameras, a typewriter, a tape recorder, an electric heater that performed with stifling competence. Here, there, pieces of partly nibbled fruit; a box of the famous Japanese strawberries, each berry the size of an egg. And books, a deep-thought cascade, among which one saw Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" and various works on Buddhist prayer, Zen meditation, Yogi breathing, and Hindu mysticism, but no fiction, for Brando reads none. He has never, he professes, opened a novel since April 3, 1924, the day he was born, in Omaha, Nebraska. But while he may not care to read fiction, he does desire to write it, and the long lacquer table was loaded with overfilled ashtrays and piled pages of his most recent creative effort, which happens to be a film script entitled "A Burst of Vermilion.”

In fact, Brando had evidently been working on his story at the moment of my arrival. As I entered the room, a subdued-looking, youngish man, whom I shall call Murray, and who had previously been pointed out to me as "the fellow that's helping Marlon with his writing," was squatted on the matting fumbling through the manuscript of "A Burst of Vermilion." Weighing some pages on his hand, he said, "Tell ya, Mar, s'pose I go over this down in my room, and maybe we'll get together again—say, around ten-thirty?"

Brando scowled, as though unsympathetic to the idea of resuming their endeavors later in the evening. Having been slightly ill, as I learned later, he had spent the day in his room, and now seemed restive. "What's this?" he asked, pointing to a couple of oblong packages among the literary remains on the lacquer table.

The following is being funded by Uncle Thibodeaux's Calf's-Foot Jelly. "Boiling feet in the bayou since 1932."

Come one, come all and witness the magic of the word enchantress, Linda Hussa. The devil is in the details, and watch how this seductress weaves her story with specific details, providing descriptive images of the Black Rock Desert.

Following is an example of good horse journalism by writer Linda Hussa. The article, “185 Dead Horses,” first appeared in Quarter Horse News (www.quarterhorsenews.com) and also appeared at www.horsecity.com.

On a bright day in mid-August 2007, Ron and Ginger Hopkins went for a drive in Nevada’s high desert. Someone told them that if they turned north off the road to the Sulphur gold mine on the eastern edge of the Black Rock Desert, they could find sulphur crystals the size of hen’s eggs. As previous managers of cow outfits in the desert, they know livestock and they know the country in all its many faces from bitter to benevolent. But this outing was not about anything more than getting away from the phone and spending the night 50 miles from the nearest electric light. They were looking for peace. But they found tragedy instead.

On that summer afternoon, they drove north past mining shacks and crossed the railroad tracks. The road wound up a hill and soon the truck was pushing powdery dirt. The desert country around Sulphur, that expects no more than 4 or 6 inches of precipitation a year, knows how to live with less. In 2007, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lists Nevada, the driest state in the Union, as having the second-warmest July on record, while through the winter of 2006-2007, it set a new record low for precipitation. The local people didn’t have to be told that. March looked like July, and by August, the brush on the flats appeared to have been hit with a blowtorch.

The Hopkinses were prepared to make a dry camp. Jugs of water were tied to the handles of the cold box in the back of their pickup and, with thoughts of finding saffron-colored crystals, they pushed on toward Trail Springs at the southeast edge of the Jackson Mountains. When they topped the hill, they were looking into a big open basin that ran north about three or four miles, and west into the stark emptiness of the Black Rock Desert. In the bottom of the basin, there was a round, metal trough, the kind that will hold about 2,500 gallons of water – if it’s full. Ron stopped the truck.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he tells me later at my kitchen table. Normally, he is full of funny stories and gossip, but today, his jaw is set and he barks with impatience at my questions. He wants to be rid of the memory of dying horses.

“The basin was full of horses, up on the hills, coming down to the trough, hundreds of them. The trough was empty and there were horses standing in it! And all around it,” he said.

He spun the empty coffee cup rocking like a top, then grabbed it and set it down gently.

“Up in that basin, you could see stud bunches everywhere you looked, all coming in to water. I counted 170 head before they blew out of there to the west. It looked like an atom bomb went off.”

He shakes his head remembering how the dust washed up both sides of those hills swirling in a wave that closed together at the top in a huge apocalyptic cloud.

“That was on Aug. 12; the date was on the pictures we took,” he said.

Bringing writing tips and techniques designed for the performance horse industry to a computer near you.

All copy, ideas, music selections, horse tricks, gunplay, drunken rants and any purloined materials should be attributed to Mr. E. Quine.

This e-show is sponsored in part by Susan’s Horse Emporium. “If you can’t find it at Susan’s, you can probably get along without it.”

Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Amazing Mr. E. Quine and His Wandering Barnyard Show, a dubious endeavor to corner the performance horse writing market. At this show, you will be provided magic tips and techniques to help you become a better writer. Along the way, you will want to enter various tents and witness the sideshows that will enable you to become a professional writer who writes intriguing stories using fresh language. And if you are already a professional writer, don't despair, because your ringmaster will amaze you, too! I also believe it’s no use to keep private information that you can’t show off, hence the impetus of this publication. Please note that I value a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency.
                                        — E. Quine

On with the show!

Intro music and jugglers…
In the performance horse industry, horses are described in a variety of ways, such as vanilla and scorpion. A vanilla horse is rather dull and plain, while a scorpion is an athletic, agile and stylish-moving horse.

Writing can be described in the same terms. Do we wish to be vanilla, churning out dull copy filled with clichés and colorless adjectives that are only, at best, cursorily read? Or do we want to be scorpions, “stylish-moving” writers who tell intriguing stories, describe interesting characters and use fresh language?

Writing is an art. Treat your stories more than just info-dumps. Write compelling and unique pieces that move beyond “just the facts” and introduce readers to an individual, one who has a style and personality all his own.

The following is being funded by Fiona’s Frito Pies. “Spicing up the dull taste of failure through the generations.”

Some illusionists of the writing industry believe that the “voice of the reader,” or copy that sounds like the people who read it, attracts readers more than the “voice of the paper.” To a certain extent this is true. Many homespun storytellers, like Garrison Keillor, best known for his old-style radio program A Prairie Home Companion, do indeed attract a large following because they are perceived as “one of them,” and, as Keillor has done, incorporate material from their audience. The copy is clear and simple and easily digested. However, this technique runs the danger of all writers sounding alike. Readers are often engaged by people who DON’T sound like they do. They like hearing new voices and different styles. Consider the varying styles of journalists like Truman Capote, Thomas McGuane and Molly Ivins.

What writers do you find interesting, funny or compelling? What makes them so? When Ernest Hemingway was just beginning as a writer, he would copy word for word the writings of French novelist Honoré de Balzac in an attempt to understand his writing style.

We pause for this announcement from Mark’s Specialty Saddlery. “Buffing seats to a high sheen for a couple of years.”

Some writers make the mistake of thinking they need to use complex, Latinate terms to create style. Many times, the clear and simple does the trick. Yet this doesn’t mean one can’t expand his vocabulary. “Freshly minted words get more attention than tired coinage.”

And now, a magic trick…
Children often create new words as a form of play. My daughter often creates a portmanteau word, a coined word that is a combination of two other words in form and meaning (Smog, from smoke and fog). One portmanteau word that she came up with to describe the clouds one day, and that I found quite delightful, was pluffy, a combination of plush and fluffy. This sort of thing is done quite naturally, and if we think of writing as a form of play, then we could delightfully surprise ourselves and our readers.

Organ music…
All things worth doing take a measure of risk. Sometimes our experiments fail. But we should not be afraid of failure, for it is in our attempts at creating something truly exceptional that we discover what we are capable of.