feastful rites

He set up two anchor points for his system using articulatory criteria: cardinal vowel 1 was the highest, frontest vowel that one could make without the sound becoming a consonant, and cardinal vowel 5 was the lowest, backest vowel one could produce without pulling the tongue back into the pharynx.

[…] my agent, Kristine Dahl, and Laura Neely, at ICM, who keep track of the kind of details that make my head all 'splodey; […]

Something up above was calling him imperiously[.]