You folks don’t live in New York City do you? Of course not. Everyone in New York right now is either huddled for warmth around the nearest burning trash barrel or is an untoppled captain of finance, shoving stimulus money into his hand-woven silk shorts and chewing truffle-infused shark fin with his mouth open.* (Everyone except me, I guess? I don’t know.) Neither have time for bookstore blogs. A tip for both groups: crumple and uncrumple the paper a few times before you shove it into your clothing, whether for warmth or gall. It’ll be much softer that way.
If you did live in New York you’d know we all spent the past day talking exclusively about snow. One of the central qualifications for being a bookseller is a near endless patience for smalltalk. I may not have actually said “Hey, how about all that snow, eh?” or “What is that, like six inches out there?” a million times today, but I actually said that a million times today. Which is why it’s time to let other, less pithy voices have their say.
Let’s take this chance to introduce a series I’ll call Deep Cuts, in which I address a theme by hunting down random passages I vaguely remembered from books I may not, in fact, have ever read. After the jump, Kenzaburo Oe and Andri Snær Magnason on snow.
Time passed, but the powdery snow went on falling, betraying my private hope that it would change into larger, petal-like flakes, and I remained alien to it. I stayed shut up in the storehouse, concentrating on my translation, never going out into the snow. My meals were brought to me there; the only time I returned to the main building was when I needed to replenish the water in the kettle on the stove. Whenever I went, I found Takashi and his companions in state of childlike innocence, drunk with the snow and showing no signs yet of the fatigue or wear and tear that goes with a hangover. New snow wiped out all traces of deterioration in what had already settled, constantly renewing the first impression, so there was no chance for the devotees in the min house to recover from their snowy infatuation. Eventually, I discovered that I could use melted snow in my kettle, and my daily life was cut off even more definitively from the main building. I spent three days enfolded in the driving, alien snow, savoring the sense of relaxation of one free from all surveillance, a sense so strong that I could tell that my own expression and movements were slackening and slowing up.
§ from Kenzaburo Oe, The Silent Cry
But one autumn the monarch butterflies took themselves up and flew in completely the opposite direction. Instead of heading south to their wintering grounds, they flew north. People tried to point them in the right direction with giant fans or nets; they were trapped from helicopters and taken to the butterfly forest by force. but some instinct was telling them to fly north and that’s what they did the moment they were released. they set a course for the North Pole and swarmed around it until they froze in the air and fell to the earth like giant snowflakes. They continued to flutter north until the ice cap around the pole was red with monarchs. Viewed from space, the world seemed to have acquired an orange hat. Polar bears, wandering around in the camouflage they had aquired over ten thousand years, could now easily be spotted from a hundred kilometers away. When the white blobs moved over the butterfly-patterned carpet of snow, the seals yawned and slid unhurriedly through holes in the ice. The polar bears almost died of starvation; they didn’t have ten thousand years to turn orange. But then they learned to roll in the butterflies when their pelts were wet and if enough monarchs froze to them they became invisible again. Their tracks remained white but the seals didn’t have the wits to beware of white tracks with sharp teeth approaching at speed.
§ from Andri Snær Magnason, “Interference” in issue 15 of McSweeney’s Quartely Concern.
*Chewing with your mouth open is, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest mortal sin. Even Dante knew it. His Lucifer was condemned to hell and still can’t break the habit.I bet he smacked his infernal lips, too.
Just thought I’d check to see whether your comment system is working now. It wasn’t last Wednesday. (News flash: Philip Jose Farmer died.)
All this fuss over, what, half a foot of snow? Ye youngins not recall the Blizzard of 1996? 20-30″ that time. Stiff upper lip, people! It will get worse before it gets … worse.
Ah, NOW it works! News flash: Philip Jose Farmer died. (But of course you already now that … NOW.)
http://www.pjstar.com/entertainment/x1749108393/Philip-Jose-Farmer-dead-at-91 “Humble at home, Farmer enjoyed international fame”
http://www.sfwa.org/news/2009/pfarmer.htm “Philip José Farmer (1918-2009)”
http://www.locusmag.com/News/2009/02/philip-jose-farmer-1918-2009.html “Philip José Farmer, 1918-2009″
http://www.locusmag.com/Roundtable/2009/02/philip-jose-farmer.html “Philip José Farmer”
http://www.pjfarmer.com/ “The Official Philip José Farmer Home Page”
Ah, NOW it works — except it seems to reject posts that include URLs.
Hey Michael.
Yeah, I turned HTML on for the comments, but putting a lot of links gets the comment held up in moderation. Looks spammy. The previous post should be in place now.
I’ve only read Farmer’s Riverworlds, the Trout novel and the Tarzan biography, which is fantastic if you haven’t read it yet. Any suggestions for further reading?
Yes: the “World of Tiers” series (a half-dozen or so novels, the titles of which I leave to you to dig up), which with its Blakean, cosmic complications I rather preferred to the “Riverworld” books; Farmer’s spicy tales “Image of the Beast”, “Blown”, & “Flesh”; the recently reprinted “The Unreasoning Mask”, an almost Delanyesque interstellar Ahab story; and of course “Riders of the Purple Wage”, which you probably recall from “Dangerous Visions”. And since you’re so fond, as am I, of “Tarzan Alive” (the Bison reprint I bought from you guys, remember?), let me add “Lord Tyger”, a Tarzan saga as PKD might have imagined. Oh, and if you missed his Hugo-winning first published sf story, “The Lovers”, you’ll certainly want to catch up with that.
So, thanks for getting my link-laden post posted (which probably makes the one right after it moot) and for the Farmer mention on the front page, where it of course belongs. Can a tribute display be far behind…?
– And if you liked “Venus on the Half-Shell” you’ll love … Kurt Vonnegut! Tee-hee.
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