All the things you can talk about in anyone’s work are the things that are least important. It’s like the ballet. You can describe the externals of a performance—everything, in fact, but what really constituted its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what’s important is left after you have explained everything else. Ideally, if anything were any good, it would be indescribable.
--Edward Gorey, Ascending Peculiarity
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Zombies run amuck & other desirable auction items
THE FIRST AMENDMENT AUCTION
As a person who lives in a village infiltrated by events and landscapes and structures from a handful of nineteenth-century novels, I find the recent online literary auction rather disturbing. I already troop around a semi-fictional world on a daily basis, and some of my stories fool with the fictional nature of the place. It's enough to make the head reel.
What would Borges say?
On the other hand, perhaps it was rather tempting to choose from becoming a rogue moon doomed to smash itself to smithereens against a doomed planet, a disgusting exotic disease, or an entire extraterrestrial tribe. All that, for little more than two thousand dollars.
As a person who lives in a village infiltrated by events and landscapes and structures from a handful of nineteenth-century novels, I find the recent online literary auction rather disturbing. I already troop around a semi-fictional world on a daily basis, and some of my stories fool with the fictional nature of the place. It's enough to make the head reel.
What would Borges say?
On the other hand, perhaps it was rather tempting to choose from becoming a rogue moon doomed to smash itself to smithereens against a doomed planet, a disgusting exotic disease, or an entire extraterrestrial tribe. All that, for little more than two thousand dollars.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
The Midget Palace at 2:00 a.m.
After an afternoon with three rambunctious children and an evening of watching teens spar and do kata (while I tweaked a novella in fits and starts) and a late night of urging one belated soul to finish homework, I suddenly remembered that I never managed to go to the Midget Museum in Montreal, despite all my pilgrimages to the city. And this seemed a great sadness.
So...
I googled it, and discovered that the no-doubt beloved institution no longer exists. Not only that, but it has left almost no trace behind. In a teeny-tiny post fooling around with that jolly topic, his family cremains, Shane Simmons mentions the museum:
If you ever get a chance to go to a burial for ashes, I highly recommend the experience. Seeing the teeny-tiny grave is worth the price of admission alone. It sort of reminded me of my childhood visit to Montreal’s now-defunct midget museum where they kept all the teeny-tiny chairs and teeny-tiny cutlery and teeny-tiny toilets. It was all so cute. And, if a grave can indeed be cute, then gosh-darn-it this one was downright precious.
And Simmons' link takes us to a letter in the Mirror, where we can learn etiquette:
First, just to make sure that next time you write about this subject, you will avoid insulting some concerned persons: "shorties" and "midgets" are nowadays considered terms not to be used anymore, having been replaced by "little people" or, with a certain reserve, "dwarfs."
However, I note that the loss of good old words like midget and gimp is a sad diminution of the language...
I assert this despite the undeniable fact that I have frequently been referred to with some opprobium or reproach as a midget, owing to the fact that I refused to drink milk when I was an infant, a baby, a toddler, a child, or, indeed, at any other time in my life. And that unfortunate deficit led to an utter--an "utter and complete"--failure to fulfill my doctor's prognosis in the matter of future height.
Even in the bosom of my kin, I have occasionally found not the proper milk of human kindness but an unkind ridicule. Yet I am of a respectable height and taller than many shorties of my acquaintance.
As reflected in the Mirror, the Museum turned out to be a bit grander than I had imagined: I simply want to point out that the Midget's [sic] Palace was no more than a family house opened to the public as a museum.
See there? The Midget Palace.
So...
I googled it, and discovered that the no-doubt beloved institution no longer exists. Not only that, but it has left almost no trace behind. In a teeny-tiny post fooling around with that jolly topic, his family cremains, Shane Simmons mentions the museum:
If you ever get a chance to go to a burial for ashes, I highly recommend the experience. Seeing the teeny-tiny grave is worth the price of admission alone. It sort of reminded me of my childhood visit to Montreal’s now-defunct midget museum where they kept all the teeny-tiny chairs and teeny-tiny cutlery and teeny-tiny toilets. It was all so cute. And, if a grave can indeed be cute, then gosh-darn-it this one was downright precious.
And Simmons' link takes us to a letter in the Mirror, where we can learn etiquette:
First, just to make sure that next time you write about this subject, you will avoid insulting some concerned persons: "shorties" and "midgets" are nowadays considered terms not to be used anymore, having been replaced by "little people" or, with a certain reserve, "dwarfs."
However, I note that the loss of good old words like midget and gimp is a sad diminution of the language...
I assert this despite the undeniable fact that I have frequently been referred to with some opprobium or reproach as a midget, owing to the fact that I refused to drink milk when I was an infant, a baby, a toddler, a child, or, indeed, at any other time in my life. And that unfortunate deficit led to an utter--an "utter and complete"--failure to fulfill my doctor's prognosis in the matter of future height.
Even in the bosom of my kin, I have occasionally found not the proper milk of human kindness but an unkind ridicule. Yet I am of a respectable height and taller than many shorties of my acquaintance.
As reflected in the Mirror, the Museum turned out to be a bit grander than I had imagined: I simply want to point out that the Midget's [sic] Palace was no more than a family house opened to the public as a museum.
See there? The Midget Palace.
Saturday, September 24, 2005
The Golden Age
What one learns from shoveling out the writing room! Last night I found a scrap of paper with a note about Peter Hitchens' "This is the most dangerous author in Britain," published in January 2002 in The Mail on Sunday. Evidently I read portions of this article to my daughter, who had read and loved the first two volumes of Pullman's His Dark Materials--and who also loved the Narnia books (and the BBC production of the same.)
M., quoting Pullman: "I hate the Narnia books, and I hate them with deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling-away."
R., age 10, astounded at the author's lack of understanding about fallings-away from the desirable condition of a happy childhood: "Well, they are."
M., quoting Pullman: "I hate the Narnia books, and I hate them with deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling-away."
R., age 10, astounded at the author's lack of understanding about fallings-away from the desirable condition of a happy childhood: "Well, they are."
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