Tag Archives: news

To Whom Cares: Forum’s Working!

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HERE’S A YOU-CAN-COLLAPSE-AND-SLEEP-NOW delicious name-your-favorite celebration cake for Chris our Webmaster! The forum’s up under “Community” on the menu bar effective now.

No rules for anybody except post something inappropriate and I’ll delete it and shut down your access. You’ve found what “inappropriate” means after you’ve been deleted.

Since I am fairly prim on coarse language and low-class ideas, assume I’m spring-loaded to the REJECT position, don’t mess with me and everything will be fine. Here’s a guide: so far there hasn’t been a single post on the site that I’ve found less that positive and thoughtful and appropriate for discussion.

Let me or Chris know any problems you have with the forum/discussion pages should you decide to play there and run into trouble.

You can pick up the title of any journal entries from the beginning of the site, if you feel like developing those ideas. Be careful about disagreeing with me, though. I shall allow only a hundred, that is, a single hundred disagreements on any one topic before I’ll begin to consider I might have said something wrong.

— Richard

Rarely Asked Questions: Sequels?

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UNDER WHICH conditions would I write a sequel to Jonathan Seagull or Illusions?

None.  Those books stand alone, and to sequelize them, while it might be fun to see old friends on a new stage, can’t advance either story in any direction that means anything to me.  Of course the possible income from a sequel would be welcome, but did Judas build lifelong security for himself and his family on the interest from his 30 pieces of silver?

I do have certain principles in regard to my stewardship of these ideas I so cherish, but they are not for sale unless I’m offered at least two hundred American dollars and I mean in cash.

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“Mesdames et messieurs les voyageurs…”

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I HEARD IT, boarding the train from Chaumont to Paris.  This was a while ago, and I thought no more than the wisp of a smile at the conductor’s voice in the speakers: “Bonjour mesdames et messieurs les voyageurs…”  The rest of the announcement was in French, so I didn’t understand a word.

But it struck me then and it strikes me now, piling into bed at 1 am with my computer and no reason to remember.  What a thoughful elegant way to begin a travel!  We passengers weren’t cattle crushed into a boxcar, harried about with our rush and our disparate concerns.  We were voyageurs, we were ladies and gentlemen, citizens of an honorable country, and wherever we planned to visit we’d bring our civility and justice and respect for the rights of others.

I had been ennobled by a phrase.

There are few modern cultures much suited to taking over the world.  Give me a minute, I can’t think of one.   But since somebody has to do it, I’d prefer it be the French.

At least the world will be taken gently, with charm and courtesy.  It’s true, isn’t it, that the French _invented_ courtoisie in the thirteenth century, when everyone else was running around hitting people with sticks?  Yes.  I checked.  It was the French

Do we need to vote on this, or do I just hope they take over on their own?

 

Question for my Visitor: What would you do?

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THIS NEW WEBSITE has been open for a week or so.  It is great fun for me, a chance to write all the short thoughts and idea-fragments that otherwise would never have seen the light of day but most often night, as they’re finished.   I’ve been at the computer full time enjoying every minute.

What this obsession means is that I’ve stopped writing on the new book.  The first chapters of Deeper have been seen by one American book-publisher, who rejected the story as a little too far out, and one Spanish, who loves it and wants the finished story to take to press as soon as possible.

Given that I have bills to pay, that I live and work alone and choose not to hire assistants, and that this site is for communicating instead of for income, my question: What would you do…cut back writing to the site for months and finish the book (making this place less interesting for you), or ignore the book and starve to death, writing happily on line till my last word (probably “…water…”)?

I think I’m getting my answer.  Spend all my savings on water, keep writing here and never finish another book!

Is that what you’re thinking too, or might you have something different to suggest?

Richard

 

That Which Makes Me Happy

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THIS IS A STORY of so-called good and pretend evil.

You don’t have to be a chess-player to study the picture and know it’s a battleground. You know by the nature of human beings that our games require winners and losers, the victors and the defeated.  So many of our sports are meant to be showcases of skill, tests to display the beauty of superior skill.   They do this, yet almost always there’s a final scene, half triumph half disaster.

Knowing this we can see that the game above was not going well for White.  Look at the row of its captured pieces, lifted off the board, at the far side of the photograph.  For proof, instead of holding its own, White has taken only three of the opponent’s pieces, and is being ravaged on this side of the board by Black, who has swept down to dominate the game.

And yet, when we look way in the corner at the far right side of the board, we see that White has pulled off a miracle.  His Queen’s flown to storm the very bedchamber of Black’s King, who cannot escape, and the game is over.  Victory goes to battered White.

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