« March 2006 | Main | May 2006 »
April 22, 2006
Reynard
A red fox I met on a recent afternoon in a backyard near the Chesterfield River.
An interesting article on foxes coexisting with people in London.
Reminds me of the fox spirits in Pom Poko.
Posted by mjd at 01:29 PM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2006
Mt. Norrowtuck, Viewed from the Tower
Posted by mjd at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)
Stone Mark
I found this mark cut into a fat block of granite, part of a centuries-old colonial post road embankment two miles back in the woods of Chesterfield, MA.
Posted by mjd at 10:28 PM | Comments (5)
Centaur Research
Fun for those of you who've been enjoying my recent ultraviolent centaur stories: I thought I'd share a little bit of my recent research into the centaur myth and fascination.
The word "centaur" means "race skilled with horses", and referred originally to a race of people living in the mountainous valleys of Thessaly, west of Mount Olympus. At some point probably generations before Hesiod composed the Hercules heroic cycle, some nameless greek storyteller recast them as the horse-human hybrids we know. From Hesiod through Homer and Virgil, 450 years, centaurs were consistently nasty, bloody, drunk and lusty. They got the crap kicked out of them a lot by heroes. See Ovid's Metamorphoses Book XII, for some serious brutal ass-kicking of the skull-crushed, teeth-kicked-out variety.
In classical myth, not surprisingly, there are several competing stories as to the centaurs' origin. The most prevalent is that in which Ixion, a king of Thessaly, tried to rape Hera. Zeus made an example of him, and Ixion ended up impregnating a raincloud and getting a fat lightning bolt to the head. My favorite version is the one in which the North Wind was flying along minding his own business one day when he happened on a herd of really hot Thessalonian mares and decided to swoop down and fuck the whole lot of them.
Nowhere in the original myths can I find reference to there ever having been a female centaur. Chiron, the one centaur to break the mold and not be an ultraviolent lech, was apparently married and had at least one daughter––but all the texts I've found are pretty ambiguous as to the physical appearance of these women, and as far as I'm concerned they could easily both have been human.
The only exception I've encountered is a mosaic dating from the era of the Roman colonization of North Africa which depicts two female centaurs crowning Venus. I'm discounting this because of the obvious cultural cross-pollinization. You might as well call this ancient fan-fic, because the style of the depction has a lot more in common with Holy Rome, and hell, Renoir, than it does with Hellenistic Greece. Perhaps you did not take Art History in school and have no idea what I'm talking about. If such is the case, have a look at this, by way of comparison: The Abduction of Hippodameia, by Carrier-Belleuse (one of Rodin's masters, who may reputedly have had Rodin's help with the mold). Now that is some sculpting. Makes me shiver its so good.
So, if you've been reading my centaur stories, you're probably beginning to get an idea of where the whole gay ultraviolent cannibal angle comes from. That isn't even the half of it. Do not open the following link at work or anywhere else where anybody might catch you. You don't need that. Trust me. boytaur.net
The bottom line is that centaurs are wicked cool and for some reason a lot of people are obssessed with them. Below in no particular order are a few of the fun centaury things the internet has to offer.
http://web.utk.edu/~blyons/centaur.html A decade-old hoax perpretrated by the University of Tennessee in an attempt to convince people centaurs were real.
http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/377/16284_centaur.html
Another hoax. Less well-thought-out, but more entertaining. The fact that this site exists at all has me pretty overjoyed. It's a Russian tabloid news site. At least, tabloid is the closest adjective I can come up with to describe it. If it's sensational, involves exotically-dressed pretty ladies or gruesome death, they'll post about it.
It appears that there actually is somebody named Christopher Chippendale in the employ of the University of Cambridge.
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/10/28/centaurs-were-real/
A poorly-executed and hilarious refutation of the aforementioned hoax.
Posted by mjd at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2006
A Bunny and a Monkey Vie for My Soul
I am writing/reading/experiencing a story/film/dream written by Neil Gaiman/myself/a mysterious third party, in which the main character, a college student played by myself/Tom Cruise, is haunted by by a series of increasingly intense and insidious specters, including a befuddled, gray-bearded homeless man, a guy in a white bunny suit and a guy in a black gorilla suit.
Part of the action of the dream was contained in a nondescript black hardcover book/manuscript whose text veered wildly with the turning of the pages between a pleasingly large, semibold serif font, neat, almost feminine handwriting, and a dense, ash-black, angular block-print that looked as though it had been carved into the page by a fiery claw.
As I pinballed about campus between classes and dorms, library and bed (I was taking five classes all loosely related to science fiction, writing and literature, one of which was taught by John Fyler of Tufts), I would in any spare moment I could find take up this book to read or write.
Nate Gurevich was my roommate. We shared a room with twelve other guys, who slept all crammed in a row in one long bed. Because there was so little space in the room, I kept my walking-sticks (both the dragon-engraved Purpura staff and the Blackthorn cane) leaning in the hallway outside my door. They seemed always to be there when I wanted them, but it became apparent others were borrowing the sticks for their own purposes. Every morning I found the purpura staff in worse and worse shape, until one day it appeared that someone had snapped it into quarters over his knee, then pathetically attempted to reassemble it using rubber bands and splints. It resembled one of the Roman fasces, the rod-wrapped ax symbolic of enforced peace and grand authority.
The alarm clock which awoke me for classes every morning was a magical pint glass with a radio somehow embedded in the glass. At the appropriate, and often other, inappropriate times, it would begin to emit the strains of anthemic rock songs, which could only be silenced by pressing the red ink decorations on the glass, causing them to dilate or contract. It angered my fellow-roommates to no end.
At one point I passed a mirror and realized my hair had grown long again.
The book was about transformation. It conspired with the specters of the bunny and gorilla to goad its reader/protagonist towards some monumental change. At its climactic moment I was lifted up out of my university setting and deposited on a rutted road of worn, cracked asphalt that led across a windswept highland field. I was chasing the gorilla, which had itself been transformed into a massive, faintly iridescent black geological being reminiscent of the Thing and the Spirit of the Forest from Princess Mononoke. It could fly, or rather it could jump as though it weighed nothing, as though the Earth's gravity was to it as that of the Moon was to men. Its sheer power taunted me; in my present form there was no way I could catch it, yet everything about this place, about the ashen text that had preceded it, told me I could take another form if I only had the strength of will. The man in the bunny suit appeared beside me, trying to explain this, trying to prod me onward and upward. I shrugged him off. I didn't want his help. Yet when I did so he seemed to fall right out of existence. His body, or what was left of it, crumpled to the fallow ground by the roadside among the stumps of last year's corn. And I realized he had left his bunny suit behind. I picked it up, put it on and resumed the chase. Still, I couldn't close the gap. But I was motivated now. I engaged the full focus of my consciousness on the task. I envisioned myself changing, my body growing large and dense and yet weightless, ascending into the upper air. But with the bunny now my ally, I realized a direct transformation wasn't the way. My path must be unique.
An infinitely long chain of hobo circus clowns (evoking the homeless graybeard of the university) descended towards me out of the clouds, each gripping the ankles of the next.
The nearest one gripped me by the hands and drew me upwards into waking.
Posted by mjd at 08:49 AM | Comments (0)
