Reeler Than Life Itself

Exhibit b:

Is It me or is It Replimex?

The Valley Uncanned

Perhaps the best illustration of what makes the "uncanny valley" uncanny:

About the Upcoming Book

First, here is a very crude prototype of what the cover *might* look like if it were named Fire, which it isn't, but if it were:

So now you know. ;)

The following looks to be what the title and frontispiece of my short story collection will be. It is designed to work as an introduction to a "branded" fictional universe accommodating an indefinite series of novels and occasional story collections that all relate to the concepts described below:

(cover)
Earth, Wind, & Fire:
Tales of Glass Worlds

by Robin Morrison

(copyright page)

Tales of Glass Worlds

copyright 2013 by Robin Morrison

1st Edition

(frontispiece)
The Glass Worlds:

Terraria: Tales of Earth

"They gave each other a smile with a future in it." Ring Lardner

Terraria is the realm of secular fiction. No elves, no ray guns.

Zephyrut: Tales of Wind

“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.” -- Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

Zephyrut is the realm where elves and angels are equally welcome. Bending rules is the rule.

Celestory: Tales of Fire

"The future ain't what it used to be." -- Yogi Berra

Celestory is the realm where ray guns and aliens have their rightful place. Rules are not bent, for science is all about the rules. Instead, they are expanded and exploited.

(Author's Note: The realms do not interact with each other, that is, they do not intrude on each other's plots. They occasionally make cameo appearances, but not in a way that threatens the rules of a given realm.)

(table of contents)

"The things we see are scarcely here,
A dance of fairy shrouds.
But that which holds the world is clear
As sky is without clouds."
Barnabus Jenquil, Intractus Cantus, 1807

Earth
1. Wanted: Alive
2. Lion's Den
3. Texas Hold 'Em
4. Ghost Story

Wind
5. The Blind Ghost
6. Still life
7. Air Mail
8. The Tale of Two Lamps

Fire
9. The Better Part of Himself
10. God Complex
11. Heart of Gold
12. Chat on a Hot Tin Roof

(Wild Card category)
13. Sight of Hand

A bit over 75k words.

And If He Can Do It, So Can We

“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.” 

― Philip K. Dick

A chance quotation reminded me of this music, one of those semi-classics not quite famous enough to never be forgotten and not quite obscure enough to be remorsely name-dropped by inveterate hipsters.

The music:

Stolen Moments

The quote:

“Magic can be found in stolen moments.” Francesca Lia Block

On Love

“As a kid, I would count backwards from ten and imagine at one, there would be an explosion–perhaps caused by a rogue planet crashing into Earth or some other major catastrophe. When nothing happened, I'd feel relieved and at the same time, a little disappointed.

I think of you at ten; the first time I saw you. Your smile at nine and how it lit up something inside me I had thought long dead. Your lips at eight pressed against mine and at seven, your warm breath in my ear and your hands everywhere. You tell me you love me at six and at five we have our first real fight. At four we have our second and three, our third. At two you tell me you can't go on any longer and then at one, you ask me to stay.

And I am relieved, so relieved–and a little disappointed.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

I found this author searching certain concepts not worth mentioning here. I have never read a book of hers. But I immediately detect a sister author. The above is something that I could have written.

I dare not read anything more by this author, for every word I read of hers is likely to erase one that I could write without bordering on plagiarism.

Bow Tie Not Included

In the early days of the single record, an amazing amount of, well, change was packed into less than three recorded minutes:

Changes

Maria Tipo

A moment's passing wonder:

She was more famously known not for spinning handkerchiefs in moments Duchamp but for weaving sonic textures:

Bach fugue bwv 565

The Spiral Phallacy

"Those who gave counsel to build the tower, for they whom thou seest drove forth multitudes of both men and women, to make bricks; among whom, a woman making bricks was not allowed to be released in the hour of child-birth, but brought forth while she was making bricks, and carried her child in her apron, and continued to make bricks. And the Lord appeared to them and confused their speech, when they had built the tower to the height of four hundred and sixty-three cubits. And they took a gimlet, and sought to pierce the heavens, saying, Let us see (whether) the heaven is made of clay, or of brass, or of iron. When God saw this He did not permit them, but smote them with blindness and confusion of speech, and rendered them as thou seest." (Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, 3:5-8)

The Abominable Old Snowman

The face of wintry evil:

Jumbo the Killer Cloud Whale

aka Jaws

Mythological Being

Treebeard the Ent:

Be It Ever So Humble

Imaginary Chinese Food

X-Ray of Dragon Lung:

Belly Up to the Bar and Come Home

Most of us want to go home again, especially if we never had a home that felt like home to begin with or the home we knew turned hostile once it realized we were, you know, different. Here 'tis:

Open Arms

Elbow almost singlehandedly restored my faith in modern music -- pop, classical, jazz, whatever -- to speak deep and full to the reach of human hearts.

Goodness Gracious!

He calls this part of the show is called The Womb of Flame. Typically followed by Great Balls of Fire:

Whee!

As found here:  Liquid Art

Man Bites Back

Wasting a bit of time researching trademarks, I read up on old man Harlan Ellison, science fiction's most notorious luminary, and ran across the brouhaha made about him grasping the left breast of Connie Willis. (I think it's important, for some reason, to make that distinction; I do not know why.)

Here is the event:

Harlan Grabs Boob

Personally, I think that after he'd placed a public microphone entirely in his mouth, his attempt at humor (I think that's what it was) in fondling Connie's breast is decidedly a secondary offense. But that's another consideration, and I do not want to evade the main point.

Yes, Harlan crossed a line. No, it wasn't a form of deliberate violence on Ms. Willis' person any more than her placing her arm around Harlan and asking him if he would be good, in so doing casting Harlan as a childish wayward miscreant.

Here's the deal: we lionize an author, actor, public figure, for crossing the line. One of Harlan's best-known and well-loved works, A Boy & His Dog, has the main protagonist kill, cook, and feed a woman to his dog. In the circumstances of the story, he was both justified and wise, or so the story implies and so I feel.

The story also typecasts the young woman as a superficially heartless wench, a version of femme fatale. But then, the protagonist is typecast as a horny teenage rapist (albeit in a world where rape is so common and cannibalism is probably not especially rare), so neither gender gets a positive stereotype, and that is good, I think, because stereotype tend to be more negative than not: they either diminish the status of the thing typified (woman as subordinates; men as monstrous horndogs), or exalt it in a way that diminishes it by placing undue pressure on the thing to live up to its hype (the pristine 'pedestalization of women; the noble self-sacrificing bravery of men).

Harlan has made a name for himself as a man who breaks rules if they stand in the way of truth, and also likely to break noses if he felt his interests were being violated. He once advised someone thusly (paraphrase alert but I think my memory is verbatim in this instance): "If they try to change your words, hit 'em."

He has had many adventures -- by choice -- that most of us would not undertake, including me, and I have had more adventures and taken more physical risks than most.

Crossing the line is, simply, what Harlan does. As a veteran line-crosser myself, I can testify that doing so changes one's perception of and approach to acceptable norms and behavior. People will cheer you for crossing that line and painting a mustache on Mao's image (or whitewashing Hitler's 'stache); but they expect you to return to their side of the line unchanged. It doesn't work that way, as any soldier who's seen battle action can testify. Shell shock; combat fatigue; PTSD: they're all the result of crossing the line. Crossing the line changes you.

So I say, let us consider this in the light of the following maxim of tolerance that Xtians use when dispensing their (often harsh) judgment via their interpretation of Biblical law: 'Hate the sin, not the sinner.'

I honestly think that Harlan meant no wrong with his grope. I honestly think few if any appreciate that a lifetime line-crosser sometimes literally "can't help himself". By this, I am not excusing Harlan of not knowing that grabbing a woman's tit without permission is a no-no, especially in public and most especially on stage (unless it's a scripted event, which this definitely wasn't).

By this, I mean two things: 

1) Harlan, as a lifetime foe of hypocrisy and unchallenged dogma, was naturally aware, (perhaps even excruciatingly so, if I may project my feelings onto Harlan) of the many hypocritical conventions that stage and podium and conference and spotlight converged upon him at that moment, and as a lifetime freelance contrarian, he naturally chafed at this, in an almost allergic reaction: he (like I would)  felt compelled to *do something* to push back the seemingly endless tide of herd behavior group-think. He has made a career of doing so.

2) Given the above, that impulse to *do something*, especially after a lifetime's cultivation of employing that impulse to great financial reward and public acclaim, can produce sudden spontaneous behavior that gets a fella in trouble.

Harlan both apologized for the act but also denounced the denunciation of his action and tried to make people see it in broader context, and so is alleged to be even worse than a titty-groper but also, a hypocritical retractor of apology. A kiss ass who won't stay bought, something The Public loves to despise. Being Harlan, alas, much anger ensued, because Harlan is that way. He is harshly protective of both himself and his perceived interests and whatever moral or philosophical concept he feels is being trampled by applause or boos. It is not, I think, the best response to such things, but it is not hypocritical nor petty: it is the opposite: a man who strongly believes certain things and sticks his neck out time and again in support of those things.

What I perceive Harlan objecting to in his rather confusing quasi-apologies/quasi-denunciations, is how the bulk of responding voices mostly chose the safe bandwagon of popular opinion and turned what was merely, for Harlan, a regrettable faux pas into a deliberate act of cruel insensitivity and de facto assertion of male chauvinism. (Harlan may well be a male chauvinist; I don't know. I DO know that he is a FIERCE advocate of individual liberty and freedom of expression, so whatever personal gender bias he might have is overshadowed by his support of basic civil liberty. He marched in the famous Selma/Montgomery Bloody Sunday March in 1965. He has been an outspoken supporter of women's rights for pert near ever.)

Here is, for me, the money quote by Harlan on this specific event:

"So. What now, folks? It’s not as if I haven’t been a politically incorrect creature in the past. But apparently," (I've deleted the name) ", my 72 years of indefensible, gauche (yet for the most part classy), horrifying, jaw-dropping, sophomoric, sometimes imbecile behavior hasn’t–till now–reached your level of outrage."

Some might object to "(yet for the most part classy)", but that is a highly subjective concept in today's world. Point is, Harlan long ago made it clear that he is a loose cannon on any deck, that he is as likely to denounce his cheerleaders as praise those who disapprove him, doing so on the basis of his rather stringent personal moral value system, which is highly humanistic and deeply compassionate although willing to fight in self-defense at a moment's notice and willing to go to the wall to do so: he has physically assaulted people, and (allegedly) bragged about it.

He is by no means perfectly congruent with his value system. Like almost every human being I've known including both of my dear parents, he can be an asshole, sometimes at the oddest and least expected moments. With his back to the wall, Harlan is a caged animal who'll succumb to a kind of bloodlust (and I mean that literally). This is my impression of the man, and if he objects to this impression: tough. It is meant as a compliment not an insult: he is, like me, like you, a fragile vulnerable creature and he knows it, and knows it seemingly more so than most considering his pessimistic view (which I mostly share) of the state of humanity in our time.

(Sample evidence of Ellisonian pessimism:

Q: "One of your books, The Glass Teat, had on its back cover the words "AMERICA: CHANGE IT...OR LOSE IT! Do you think we're losing it?"

A: "We lost it long ago. Look at our country, for Chrissake. We're nothing but purchasing machines for giant conglomerates. We're ruled by the tyranny of the stupid."

from an interview in Details magazine available Harlan Ellison interview in Details magazine )

Sadly, I tend to agree with him. Sadly, I often feel so terrified by the hypocritical stupidity not just of the ignoramii but of people who are associated with advanced and enlightened perspective that I find myself doing the craziest dang things. At 58 years old, I still must constantly remind myself that I 'Do Not Think Like Other People'. I can relate to doing something wild and crazy like groping the breast of a woman I've known as a friend for decades to prove the point she makes steadily in that video: he is a wild and crazy guy. I don't think like most people. I am not safe for public spectacle.

But I'd be among the first to cross that line in your behalf. Really. I've proved it too many times to doubt it. And so has Harlan.

So yes, Harlan once again did an outrageous and sophomoric thing. Yes, it superficially lessened the public stature of a woman in public, and yes, he should apologize for doing so... but not on anyone's terms but his own. He should not apologize for being some kind of woman-debasing male supremacist unless he believes he is, which he apparently doesn't (nor do I). He should not have to endure narrow-minded, short-sighted, and often hypocritical insults made by people who probably possess less than half of Harlan's courage, intellect, erudition, and most of all, experience.

The shamefest he endured was basically an example of the same mob behavior that, in more extreme circumstances, has innocent men lynched and is also, I'll point out, the key ingredient in group rape. When you find yourself nodding your head in assent with the group, you're probably nodding to things you would not believe were right if they were applied to you. Harlan has always spoken out for the innocents trampled in our various, publicly-approved, politically correct crusades which tend to crush one moral in support of another. (Remember, please, that hating Jews was politically correct in Germany 80 years ago, and more than half of Americans thought that bombing and invading Iraq was politically correct just ten years ago.)

Sometimes line-crossers like Harlan and me are saved by quick thinking. As a much younger man, I was at a party at my boss's house. Alcohol was served, and I drink too much when I drink. I was at the peak of my inebriation, full of myself, a fully-deployed raconteur. I had several people around me listening to my trademarked Adventures of Robin that I often recited back then to allay my sense of insecurity and general inferiority: look at the cool&crazy things I've done!

The story was poised, literally, to kick the punchline over the field goal when I realized that in such mixed company one shouldn't say "in the nuts" nor even "testicles", but the kick was already in motion. We all have moments of inspired genius. The eudaemonic spirit put its arm over my shoulder, whispered in my ear, and I turned tragedy into triumph by saying, "kicked him right smack dab in the euphemisms!"

Sometimes you can cross that fine line in public and be a hero. The group around me not only laughed but deferred to me, for I had slung a turd across their prow disguised as a rose, and it was an admirable feat.

But other times, you reach out and grab an old friend's titty at the worst possible moment, as in Harlan's case, trying to graphically prove that you are indeed as troublesome a public persona as she has introduced you as being. To you, it's a natural and honest thing to do, and is justified by the circumstances. Afterward, it hits you yet again: I Don't Think Like Other People.

All that said, I'll show my street cred and state that the Harlan Ellison I've read has two modes: spot on and perfect, or grossly and indulgently overwrought. (Not unlike this opinion piece.) But in the former mode: A Boy & His Dog made an aesthetic and moral impression on me at 14 years old that has stayed with me since: difficult choices have to be made, and they have to be made according to what YOU think is right.

Hold Tight to Your Dreams

A broomstick between the legs looks different when a man's holding it. Also, it makes the broom suggest jet exhaust.

"Honey, I'm going to sweep the pool!"

Music, Maestro:  Hold On Tight to Your Dreams

Primal Starbucks: the ur-logo

If You Like That Sort of Thing...

...is what I feel obliged to say when I recommend highbrow music. This is because for many people, most classical music is annoying pretentious rot yet they often feel they have to pretend to at least admire if not enjoy it.

Traditional tails'n'white tie concert hall performances are as ritualized as a rock/rap concert. ('C'mon! Put those hands togethuh! Yeah!') The setting must be opulent or vast or tastefully subdued. The performer must convey his communion with the music even if he is in fact, merely performing mechanically, going through the motions, but with a level of skill that makes the difference negligible.

Some of those reverent hand movements are mechanical: lifting the hands slowly off the keys like a final farewell reminds the pianist to relax, remain  limber. The expressions are often sincere, a genuine attempt to seduce the music into making love with the artist. Legendary pianist Artur Schnabel gave wise advice on this matter:

Here, equally legendary comic, Sid Caesar gets it wrong in all the right ways, and takes Schnabel's advice to the bank:

First Recital

Here, not quite legendary but only because his career made a virtue of quiet servitude to the music, Alfred Brendel plays a piece that exemplifies all that is beautiful about the music and some of what is bemusing about classical performance. There is no audience so we are graciously spared that bit of pretentious rot. Indeed.

Schubert Piano Sonata No 21 D 960 B flat major

Save Your Breath, eh?

The Breath of Palin ( martial art school from the Land of Ice & Snow)

Ice Throne

I hear it's cold in the midwest.

Today's Curious Quote

"The Divine Secrets of the Whoopie Pie Sisters is a different type of Amish Christian story. "

Book Three of the Amish Christian Trilogy, which is apparently a top-selling literary enterprise.

We live in interesting times.

There's something about a Monday morning that wants hope

My vision of humankind's prospects in this century are so black that any hope at all shines like starlight: bright but distant. This is why I am committed to writing fiction that is 'realistic' but hope-inspiring.

'Realistic' means 'doesn't ignore the facts'.

Hope-inspiring is harder to define. It's like that judge's definition of pornography: he couldn't define it in legal language, but he was sure that he could recognize it when he saw it. But, like the purpose of pornography, it's primarily about pretending.

Hope: the truest fallacy known to humanity.

Besides, as a guy trying to make it as a writer, hope is everything. It's my morning coffee, my breakfast oatmeal, my favorite drug and my comfiest recliner, and the raw ingredient of what happens on the next page and what survives the 'leventy-seventh edit's brutal and ruthless cut.

Hope: take it with you wherever you can't currently reach. For everything else, there's cold hard cash unless you're one of the select few who still have available credit on their plastic.

The Honorable Judge Dee, Sherlock Holmes of ancient China

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee

Primordial pulp.

The First Trilogy

The First Trilogy by Joyce Cary gets too little attention. It is one of those great works that never quite made it into the classics canon, and so it is not one of Those Books that people know by name and a sense of shame that they are less refined or educated for not having read War & Peace or To Kill a Mockingbird.

The three books of the trilogy: Herself Surprised, The Horse's Mouth, & To Be a Pilgrim, provide three views of events shared by the three. Not shared in the rakish sense of three views of a zombie apocalypse, but in the tellings of three lives whose characters crossed paths in critically important ways.

The Horse's Mouth is the tour de force. Alec Guinness starred in and wrote the screenplay for a movie version. It's a fun film but the book transcends it in the way a book written by a deft lover of language can only surpass mere cinematography with its moving images and recorded dialog. It contains passages of prose as ecstatic in their way as that of Nabokov or Updike, if brusque.

Herself Surprised is the heart of the trilogy. Sara Monday, its heroine, is something of a middle-aged servant class Huckleberry Finn of the first half of England's 20th century.

To Be a Pilgrim is the reflective soul of the book, memoirs written by an ailing old man. It's delights are quieter but most poignant of all.

These books are far from ignored. They are regarded as masterpieces and enjoy regular reprints. But the pleasure they provide is classical.

Begin with The Horse's Mouth for a flamboyant introduction, follow with Herself Surprised, finish with To Be a Pilgrim. I am sure you will be pleased.

To boldly go...

Where no man has gone before...

This post inspired by final obsessive pruning on part of a story called God Complex:

“I like you, Tenloew. You’re a true believer. No, it isn’t real. I haven’t whisked you off to some real other place. We’re just inside what you’d call the world’s most powerful information processor.

“The surface you saw outside is about three feet deep, composed of mesoscopic diodes except for Bose-Einstein helium canals of microscopic size. They cool the diodes not so much by their temperature itself but by the virtual elimination of electron resistance. There’s a thin layer in the middle of that layer where the superpositioners are.”

“How many?”

“That’s a question with too many answers for any of them to be wrong or right. Only way to know would be to use the machine and that would be like asking you to climb up your ass and count the stars. The technically correct answer would be ‘infinitely indefinite’, which is the sort of paradox that made me the man I am today.”

We had both laid down by then, breathing the starlight in deeply.

“ ‘Infinitely indefinite’: that sounds like a description of the mind of god.”

“Only if you think that forever eluding a finite resolution is an attribute of the divine. To me that doesn’t sound like the mind of God but rather the mind of a man trying to imagine what God might be like.”

He whistled a melody. He whistled well with a strong vibrato over a firm pitch. The tune was some yearning thing that triggered childhood memories.

“What song is that?”

“ ‘Star Trek’, son. Just a bit before your time. The franchise finally burnt itself out around 2030.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Yes.” He whistled some more, then asked, “Do you really understand what I’m asking of you?” 

Machina speculatrix

"Grey Walter's most famous work was his construction of some of the first electronic autonomous robots. He wanted to prove that rich connections between a small number of brain cells could give rise to very complex behaviors - essentially that the secret of how the brain worked lay in how it was wired up. His first robots, which he used to call Machina speculatrix and named Elmer and Elsie, were constructed between 1948 and 1949 and were often described as tortoises due to their shape and slow rate of movement - and because they 'taught us' about the secrets of organisation and life. The three-wheeled tortoise robots were capable of phototaxis, by which they could find their way to a recharging station when they ran low on battery power.

"In one experiment he placed a light on the "nose" of a tortoise and watched as the robot observed itself in a mirror. "It began flickering," he wrote. "Twittering, and jigging like a clumsy Narcissus." Walter argued that if it were seen in an animal it "might be accepted as evidence of some degree of self-awareness."
(wiki -- emphasis mine)

Illuminating the fine line between preparedness and paranoia:

how-to-use-a-tactical-flashlight

Nice Work

The value of selfishness is ever debated. We bounce from denouncing selfishness and exalting selflessness to promoting loving and taking care of yourself and establishing strong, "healthy", self-reserving-&-protecting boundaries and learning to say no.

I sat in a Xtian service last Sunday where selfishness, egoism, et cetera were denounced, but then we sang praise to God because God Can Save US.

There's no escaping one is a self and that self is as deserving of one's love and care as your ailing grandmother.

There's a special value to taking extra good care of yourself: assuming you're not a sociopath and have healthy empathy levels, you will be more inclined to make lifestyle changes that reduce harm on other beings, because we feel pain knowing that Chinese factory (or Amazon!) workers labor in conditions we feel are more slavery than not, or that factory livestock animals endure torture so that we can buy more flesh for less. (Imagine a meat dept that promoted a sale that way: FLESH FOR LESS!)

If we care enough about ourselves to desire happiness enough to strive for it as an attainable goal, we find new motivation to make that vegetarian crossover to a meatless diet. Rather than deem it a futile gesture that won't really make a difference in the big scheme of carnivorous things, one says, 'But I will be happier if I abstain from subsidizing the factory meat industry. I will enjoy looking in the mirror of my conscience rather than loathing what I see.'

Taking care of ourselves is not mutually exclusive of being our sister's keeper. Just as the wiser sociopaths learn to care about the effects of their actions on others so that they don't experience retribution for the harm their apathy causes others, so they aren't exiled from their circle of friends and have no one to call on when they seriously need help, so do the wiser empaths learn to nurture themselves exquisitely, because it is Hard Work caring about one's fellow beings.

But, to quote the song:

Nice Work If You Can Get It

Guts, Glory, & Galaxies

It pleases me to announce that I have finished story # 13 of a collection tentatively titled, Guts, Glory, and Galaxies.

Here is a sample of the final story:

Imagine the world beyond the treeline as a sea of smell crashing on the shore of my nose. Before smartification, that was "the great beyond" for me.

Smell is the grandest of senses. Even with you peoples' numb noses, smell reigns supreme. Kyle comes over for dinner and he goes wild over the smell. Sounds like he's got a bunny in his jaws. When Shelly's dressed up for him, he tells her how pretty she is (I'm pretty sure she're very pretty as humans go), but when he hugs her, he says, "Ummmm, you smell good!"

Smell rules. Did you know I can smell the doppler shift in jogger sweat as they run by?

You people are mostly visual. I have good eyes too. But smell! ...
Shelly has this big old radio that used to be her Dad's. On his birthday she drinks wine and fiddles the knobs, hunting signals from around the world. In between is static -- cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang -- talk about vast reception. Sometimes, especially at night, she'll pick up signals from Asia. Kamchatka, Korea, who knows? They're talking Russian with a Chinese accent. (If cats could talk they'd sound Chinese, I'm sure.)

Smell is like that. Some days I can get Benton Harbor loud and stinky. (We go there sometimes to visit her Aunt. I know BH's olfactory 'frequency'.) Some days I get smells from places I know are very far away. Like those radio signals from Russia or Swaziland. You know it's more than static, you know it's the smell of another animal far far away, but you don't understand anything beyond that. Sometimes I get smells that I know are extremely old. Mostly in summer, when the wind blows straight down from the Arctic over the frozen Great Lakes. I think it's stuff frozen in the last Ice Age melting from global warming. Ancient mastodon musk?

Below is a very rough first draft template of its book cover:

Tempus figut

Pray Your Brain Strong

Study Demonstrates Neurophysical Mechanism of Reducing Depression via Meditation/Prayer

Fabio the Yeti Hunk

No it is not safe to go outside without a chaperone:

Learn more about:

Monster Porn

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CRYPTOZOOLOGICAL EROTICA

Boxes

The degree to which corporatism has become the dominant cultural influence can be seen in the music video link below's panoply of ugly, rectangular, spiritually desiccate corporate logos behind these musicians playing music from a tradition we associate with anything but merciless plaques of corporate greed.

Despite this, the music is wonderful:

Tribute to the Late Ravi Shankar

The moving finger writes, and having writ...

Our ancestors practiced this art of communication in which handwriting employed scripted fonts:

The photo below is by my brother-in-law, Eric Johnson. He's a gifted shutterbug, but in terms of his eye and in handling people for portraits and events.

He and his daughter work as a team. Their website:

2eesphotography

Tropical Mystery Gods

No one does stuff like this anymore.

The image is the set design for "le dieu bleu" by Leon Blakst, 1912

le dieu bleu was a ballet by the famous Ballets Russe. Famous names involved include Serge Diaghelev (impressario), Michael Fokine (choreographer), Nijinsky (literally the most famous and legendary male ballet dancer in the history of the art form), Jean Cocteau (co-writer with Federico de Madrazo y Ochoa of the story), and Leon Blakst.

More Bakst, the set for Afternoon of a Faun (  L'après-midi d'un faune ):

1880s London in 2014 Beijing

Beijing Smogshine

Bad Sneakers

The song:

Bad Sneakers Steely Dan

I know: Donald Fagen looks like an aging vampire and his voice has one of the weirdest registers, somewhere between your low-rent aunt with the smoker's cough and Woody Allen impersonating Ray Charles. But he is what he is; it's hard to find any trace of pretentious affect. He has that cool that only comes from not caring about being cool, from knowing that to try to be cool is to achieve being a fool, and it's hard to imagine anyone else singing his songs with convincing conviction.

Then there's the song itself, and its neatly ambiguous lyrics that don't convey their literal meaning but fill one with the sense of being in on the joke, and the chorus - "...and I'm SO-o-o alone..." - feels like Colden Haufield on his infamous weekend.

When one adds to this the pearly luster of the band performing the song live and sounding better than the studio, what remains is Walter Becker's guitar solo. His sound straddles the divide between the wild tone of a vintage Stratocaster and pure jazz clarity.

For early photographic proof that Donald and Becker (the two on the right) were, if anything, so anti-hipster that they were literally too cool to be uncool, look at this photo from the early days of Dan (click to enlarge):

The long and winding road...

Wu Conghan and Wu Sognshi, 101 and 101 years old respectively, renewing their vows after 88 years of marriage.

Red Rajah

There is art that I appraise not so much for its aesthetic effect on me but also for how well it seems to attain what I perceive to be its goal. 

This one scores an A in both departments.

Whether to Weather the Weather or Not

Sometimes, a writer just has to flaunt the rules, indulge himself, and commit no-nos like starting with a description of weather. But it's not irrelevant. Weather can turn a protagonist suicidal as a stand-up comic flopping live on the Tonight Show. It can give a man reason to live again. Most of all, weather is rarely as boring as indoors. Why do you think movie cams keep moving in indoor scenes? They get bored too.

Anyway, I just might start a story with the following passage. In fact, I'm sure of it. It is, among other things, a refutation of what literary types call the Pathetic Fallacy :

Winter, where Raleigh lived, could be pointlessly cruel. Not in the brutal exhilaration of snow and single-digit temperatures but by day after day inflicting the same, sad, saggy gray clouds.

For four weeks the world looked like an old Technicolor movie trapped in a b&w TV. Winter kept the sky locked up in relentlessly dull cloud cover, except for one day when pinpoint silver linings exposed brief soft spots in an otherwise grim afternoon.

Days were dim but nights were too light: streetlight curdled the midnight sky into the pinkish gray color and texture of boiled blood. Low-flying aircraft glowed like Wise Men from the East, and the rare glimpse of starlight was like a message in a bottle from outer space.

That this happened during the worst possible time in Raleigh's 31-year old life felt ominously unbearable but the sun came out on the 29th afternoon of its sentence, possibly let out for good behavior. Exhilarated beyond belief, the sky whooped it up. Clouds performed circus acts; the flying trapeze of high cirrus wisps caught small scudding cumulus puffs and swung them across the horizon; low scudding clouds somersaulted each other like circus clowns. There were the usual impersonations -- camels, battleships, dragons -- and disappearing tricks: one cloud, just joking around,  blocked the sun for a moment then broke apart and instantly evaporated.

People walked looking up heedless of traffic across busy streets. Jubilant squirrels ran acorn games. Tweety birds did the wave on power lines bouncing in the heady wind. Jitterbug flocks of sparrows turned bushes into quivering animations, sunlight splashing like water off their feathers.

A few glorious hours later, the sun set, winking better things to come as it faded behind the Cascade mountains. The moon rose like an encore, stars quivered like jewels in jello, and the night flowed like a river through time.

But that was it. Next morning, the east horizon briefly opened a small dungeon window, chucked prisoner rations of sunshine on the valley floor, then slammed it shut. The last puddles of sunlight seeped underground as the overcast settled in, but this time it wasn't featureless and void. If there was no hope on the horizon there was at least a glint of brightness in the sky and some variety in its shades of gray swarming restlessly like a brewing prison riot.

Walking down a windy street downtown, Raleigh cheered briefly at the sound of a styrofoam coffee cup tumbling down the street.

'Like a tap-dancing butterfly,' he thought, but he was too broke to buy a cup of coffee.

Copyright © 2014 by Robin Morrison

From a story with the working title: Raleigh & the Little People

Accompanied by King of the World -- Steely Dan

God Complex

(read it here) https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/393395

Blind Ghost

read the story here: 

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/391531 

Visit me at my FB page: 

https://www.facebook.com/RobinMorrisonWritesHappyEndings

Wanted: Alive

A not-quite-true, slice-of-life, coming of old age story about facing death in various forms and living to tell lies about it.

Read it here:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/392454

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A Tale of Two Lamps Pt. 1 of Burton in the Taklamakan

A Tale of Two Lamps

On swings of song...

Goddesses of harmony and swing.

Beware imitations

The false unicorn root:
The true root of the unicorn.