'There may be various ways to organize 

one’s story, structuring it 

By place-names or by people or 

by poems, instead of incidents 

And years, yet all of them seem equal in 

the end.'

from La Duree

by Koethe, John. 

`And beyond the Wild Wood again?' he asked: `Where it's all blue and dim, and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn't, and something like the smoke of towns, or is it only cloud- drift?'

`Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,' said the Rat. `And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all.

"There came news of a word.
Crow saw it killing men. He ate well.
He saw it bulldozing
Whole cities to rubble. Again he ate well.
He saw its excreta poisoning seas.
He became watchful.
He saw its breath burning whole lands
To dusty char.
He flew clear and peered."

from A Disaster

Ted Hughes

book Crow

Yes more BC vacation photos. One of the first creatures that

welcomed us on our initial somewhat damp walk on the

seawall were the crows. They were everywhere in the surf, on

the beach, in the park, in the sky. After watching them mob

the Bald Eagles, quarrel with the gulls  and raid the trash cans.

I decided this will be my "totem" animal, go figure I have always

felt a certain affinity for crows whether they were acting as the

noisy heralds of spring or moving through our neighbourhood

in great silent flocks in the fall, they have exerted a strong pull on

my imagination.  Possibly if I lived by a winter roost I would

feel differentely but I don't so I won't.

A great book about Crows is Crow Planet by Lynda Lynn Haupt.

Her book about Darwin, Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent is

also very good.

And  like a good poem or painting the more closely

you look at a crow the more beauty you find.

And as with all good totems he can be scary looking,

magisterial,

and he also points the way.

"But Crow . . Crow
Crow nailed them together,
Nailing Heaven and earth together -

So man cried, but with God's voice.
And God bled, but with man's blood.

Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint
Which became gangrenous and stank -
A horror beyond redemption.

The agony did not diminish.

Man could not be man nor God God.

The agony

Grew.

Crow

Grinned

Crying: 'This is my Creation,'

Flying the black flag of himself. "

from Crow Blacker than ever

Ted Hughes

book Crow

“Wait for evening.
Then you'll be alone.

Wait for the playground to empty.
Then call out those companions from childhood:

The one who closed his eyes
and pretended to be invisible.
The one to whom you told every secret.
The one who made a world of any hiding place.

And don't forget the one who listened in silence
while you wondered out loud:

Is the universe an empty mirror? A flowering tree?
Is the universe the sleep of a woman?”

                                  from Become Becoming

                                  Li-Young Lee

 I have always read and enjoyed science fiction and I have a modest collection. My collection includes early pulp magazines from the 1920’s and 1930’s, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Air Wonder Stories with their lurid covers of dinosaurs, aliens and terrible experiments gone wrong, through the small press era after World War Two with small publishers like Arkham House (mostly horror) to SF presses like Gnome, Shasta and Fantasy Press producing beautiful limited edition hardcovers, thru the paperback revolution with companies like Bart, Avon, Ballantine, Signet and especially the Ace Doubles running from the 1940’s to the 1970’s . I do not read or collect much modern material the field has gotten quite large and tastes have changed, but I find lots to read and collect and ponder in the (at least for me) more congenial older works.

Pulps spanning 1927 to 1933 

Pulps spanning 1936 to 1941

I was creating list of ten of my favourite stories to discuss with a friend and I realized what one of my very favourite stories was (based on rereading, thinking about etc. ) “In Hiding” by Wilmar Shiras published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1948 she later expanded this to Children of the Atom which was published by Gnome Press with a beautiful dust jacket but as is often the case I prefer the short story to the novel. It tells the story of a young boy and his relationship with the school psychiatrist who eventually realizes that the boy Timothy Paul is a genius, his mother was exposed to radiation from a nuclear accident and Timothy is a mutant. This has made him a genius of incredible power, but he wisely has concealed his gifts (because we all know what people are like) and has conducted several adult careers via correspondence while doing lots of cool stuff in his grandparent’s garage.

Early hardcovers

 

Selection of paperbacks

Two favorite author Norton and Simak

The story has several problems and is only one of a number of stories based on the mutant child theme, but I love it and one thing that really interests me is the prevalence of the special child unrecognized by their peers theme, in literature from Greek myths to Dickens to the present day whether the child is the offspring of a god, the heir to a throne or an immense fortune, or in SF an alien or a mutant. That this theme is both popular and convenient is obvious by the frequency with which it is used, but I wonder if it does not also dovetail with a stage in adolescence that many children go through, where they deal with the all too common feeling of alienation, the emotional outbursts and fragile psyche that come with the physical changes and social miscues that accompany them on their journey to adulthood. I often feel my journey does not seem to have ended and I have pretty much given up expecting to arrive. But if I do I want to arrive via rocketship and with a very cool raygun. Oh yeah and a jetpack.

A Favorite Artist Richard Powers

“ We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us

and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else “

from Why We Tell Stories

Lisel Mueller

  



“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.

 The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and 

let the beautiful stuff out.”

 Ray Bradbury

I learned yesterday that a favorite author

Ray Bradbury had died. Ray wrote beautifully

and for me often captured the wonder and terror

of everyday life. Last night I watched The Beast 

from 20,000 Fathoms a film loosely based on 

Bradbury's story the Foghorn with the monster

created by his friend Ray Harryhausen. Since

I am travelling I would like to offer some quotes

from the internet with photos from my earlier blogs.

All the quotes below come from Bradbury or

his works

"The sun burnt everyday. It burnt Time. 

The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis 

and time was busy burning the years and the 

people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt 

things with the firemen and the sun burnt time, 

that meant that everything burnt."   

Fahrenheit 451

Montag

"Yet this train's whistle! The wails of a 

lifetime were gathered in it from other 

nights in other slumbering years; 

the howl of moon-dreamed dogs, 

the seep of river-cold winds through 

January porch..."

Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if 

they don't they should, for their feet are 

dusted with spices from a million flowers.”

Dandelion Wine

“Way out in the country tonight he could smell 

the pumpkins ripening toward the knife and the

 triangle eye and the singeing candle.” 

Dandelion Wine

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? 

Well, what tongue does the wind talk? 

What nationality is a storm? What country do rains 

come from? What color is lightning? Where does 

thunder go when it dies?” 

Something Wicked This Way Comes

"I have never listened to anyone who criticized 

my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. 

When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs 

and leave the room.” 

Ray Bradbury 

Thanks Ray