By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have wandered home but newly
From this ultimate dim Thule.Dream-Land by Edgar Allan Poe
A … happy? .. Hallowe’en to all!
Jack and Peter (and condemned pirate skeleton) framed by the guillotine at our friend Paul’s Halloween display.
Another of the creepy characters at Paul’s Halloween display.
The rain is plashing on my sill,
But all the winds of Heaven are still;
And so it falls with that dull sound
Which thrills us in the church-yard ground,
When the first spadeful drops like lead
Upon the coffin of the dead.The Unknown Dead by Henry Timrod
More from Paul’s creepy Halloween display.
. . . though I don’t think this is the sort of babysitter who will teach you the sign for “peace”, or sit on her hair, or have a boyfriend called “The King of Romance” (apologies to Dar Williams). This is the sort of babysitter who prefers to separate the heads of tots from their little bodies and has been known to roast little limbs for a midnight snack.
We visited our friend Paul’s house in Apple Valley to see his elaborate Halloween display, with creepy characters, eerie sounds, and disturbing gravestones. If you’re trick-or-treating around 136th Street Court, follow the screams to this spot if you dare: Paul promises good Halloween loot, but there’s a price to pay for it . . .
With Granddad at the top of Mount Washington.
Cog Railway up Mount Washington.
Cog Railway up Mount Washington.
Here’s our guide and brakeman on the Mount Washington cog railway ride. On the way up, the brakeman (or brake gal in our case) doesn’t have much to do; gravity keeps the car from moving very fast, with the tons of steel and coal pushing behind it. But on the way down, she didn’t have much time for chatter; she was constantly at the two big wheels that controlled the braking system to check our descent. The trip down was a lot faster than the trip up . . .
One bit of Mount Washington lore that she didn’t tell us (and that I don’t recall seeing in the museum at the base of the mountain) was the 1967 train crash that killed eight passengers and injured seventy. There’s only one line up and down, so there are a series of complex switches that allow one train to sit on a siding while another train passes; apparently a switch was set improperly, causing the descending engine to derail and sending the passenger car hurtling down the track (the engine itself being the most effective brake).
It’s the brakeman’s task to inspect the switches after they’re set to avoid another tragedy; and for forty years they’ve done a fine job, though I’m sure there’s a fair amount of pressure on the brakeman’s mind during the inspection.
The maximum grade on the cog railroad is 37.41%, with an average of 25%. This is incredibly steep–climbing to the front of the car during the assent takes some effort, and heading back down requires considerable care so as not to end up in a pile at the back.
We rode the cog railroad up Mount Washington on our summer trip, our first actual steam-engine ride. Up to now, all of our trains have been diesels or electrics; the cog railroad engine burns a ton of sooty coal and boils a thousand gallons of water on its way up the highest mountain in New England (and not nearly so much on the way down, with gravity helping out).
Peabody River, outside Gorham, New Hampshire.
There’s not much difference to show from one year to the next in the river; fast as the current moves, it slices through granite very slowly. The change is in the small boys playing in the river; they’ve grown a lot since their first visit when they were three years old.
On the Peabody River.
Peter in the Peabody River.
The is from a roll of film from the Holga used this summer to capture our ritual trip to the Peabody River in New Hampshire. As I’ve noted before, this secret spot off the Mount Washington highway is my favorite place in New England, and maybe in the world: a crystal-clear, chilly stream that tumbles through smooth rocks and shallow pools on its way from the Presidential Range to the Androscoggin and on to the sea.
Now see these:
Big Nobel news: congratulations to Doris Lessing, whose unflinching and complex novels and stories about the relations between the races and sexes have finally earned her the nod from Stockholm. If you haven’t read “The Golden Notebook” or “The Cleft”, get to work!
Oh, and some guy with a PowerPoint presentation won some prize or other, too. Kudos to him as well.
Forenoon update:
Here’s the link to the excerpts from Dwight Garner’s 1997 Salon interview with Doris Lessing: ‘I Would Have Become an Alcoholic or Ended in the Loony Bin’
At the Como Zoo, St. Paul.
Sea lion at the Como Zoo, St. Paul.
10.9.07
2008 is the “Year of the Polar Bear”, and Como Zoo will be working with Polar Bears International to promote awareness of arctic conservation. The Como bears will also be getting new digs in 2010, with a greatly expanded habitat.
This print available at Etsy.
They’re far from small, and a few shades lighter than yellow, but polar bears are the canaries in the polar coal mines. It would be a sad world indeed if the last polar bears were to be found only at Como Zoo.
This print available at Etsy.
Flying swings at Como Town.
Flying swings at Como Town.
A final thought for Banned Book Week, from Joseph Brodsky’s Nobel lecture, 1987:
. . . though we can condemn the material suppression of literature – the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books – we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.
It’s up to us not only to stop the censors, but to give the censors something to worry about. Otherwise all this ink is spilled for naught.
On Saturday, the Brackett Rocket, a piece of playground equipment repurposed as a sculpture, will be unveiled. If you’re in the Longfellow/Seward area, swing on by; Saturday, Oct. 6 – 3-5 p.m. Brackett Park, 28th St. E & 36th Ave. S, Minneapolis.
Yesterday I noted that I didn’t have a science fiction book in Google’s list of challenged books that would pair nicely with pictures of rockets. That doesn’t mean, of course, that science fiction books haven’t run into some trouble from the Powers that Be. Since science fiction is particularly ripe for use as satire and criticism, it has often raised the hackles of the comfortable.
If, that is, they figure out what’s going on behind the rocket ships and ray guns.
I ran across a snippet of a scholarly piece by Sonja Fritzsche on Ursula K. Le Guin’s publication history in East Germany. Le Guin, along with Asimov and Vonnegut, was one of the few Western science fiction writers to be published in the GDR. Asimov was allowed as a “bourgeois secular humanist”–benighted, perhaps, but not too dangerous to the Socialist Future–but Le Guin was a more slippery fish: though her books often contain critiques of capitalism, she is too much of an anarchist to be completely trustworthy. The two Le Guin books that were published seem odd choices for the snitch-ocracy of Stasi-land: “The Left Hand of Darkness”, which features a totalitarian state, Orgoreyn, which has an East German feel to it; and “The Dispossessed”, one of the classics of anarchist fiction. Perhaps some censor in the GDR had a bit more sense of humor than is normally permitted in such bureaucracies.
On this side of the Berlin Wall, Le Guin’s books have met occasional challenges in public libraries and schools: “The Lathe of Heaven”, “The Left Hand of Darkness”, and the Earthsea books have all run into spots of trouble. Last year, her YA novel Voices was released to coincide with Banned Books Week. Her books are available on most library shelves, tucked away in the science fiction and young adult ghettos; they’re certainly worth a visit.
10.4.07
On Saturday, the Brackett Rocket, a piece of playground equipment repurposed as a sculpture, will be unveiled. If you’re in the Longfellow/Seward area, swing on by; Saturday, Oct. 6 – 3-5 p.m. Brackett Park, 28th St. E & 36th Ave. S, Minneapolis.
Google gets into the Banned Books Week spirit with a list of classics that have been challenged. There are no straight-up science fiction books in this brief list to go with the rocket picture, but there are a handful in adjoining galaxies: “1984″, “Slaughterhouse Five”, “Brave New World”, and “Cat’s Cradle” are among the possible futures (and troubling presents) that have drawn the censors’ attention.
Alternative Reel presents a gallery of early covers of the Top 10 Banned Books of the 20th Century. I particularly like the almost-buff version of Winston Smith on Signet’s paperback cover for “1984″; the design is clearly of its time, when lurid pulps beckoned at the drugstore. Link courtesy of Farenheit 451.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.William Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
The University of Michigan’s graduate library staff presents a Flickr collection of banned books pictures, including “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, “The Call of the Wild”, “Slaughterhouse Five”, and “Leaves of Grass”.
Japanese Garden, Como Conservatory.
I was a little worried, when on a recent outing to the Como Zoo and Conservatory, that my assistants would get squirrely if I took them through the Japanese Garden and the rest of the conservatory before hitting the polar bears and sea lions. Not to worry, though; they found all the different plants and landscape elements fascinating and were full of a million questions (that I had no way of answering). The stone bridges in the Japanese Garden were especially intriguing . . .
In conjunction with the ALA’s Banned Books Week, Amnesty International highlights “the plight of individuals who are persecuted because of the writings that they produce, circulate or read.” Among the cases noted are Sakit Zahidov, a poet and journalist imprisoned in Azerbaijan, and Ko Aung Htun, historian of the student protests in Myanmar.
