The Mountains of Instead

 DREAMLIFE 2 These posts are all drawn from a dream diary I kept on and off from 2008 until 2014, but largely from the last two years.  I discovered the diary recently and read dream accounts that I had forgotten (and some that I remembered.  I'll post here the ones I think are amusing or weird, or that exhibit some condition of Story.  None were or have been altered.  Here's one that carries (for me) a glimpse of a future I hadn't yet envisioned: April 24: Turning into my driveway I felt I had driven over something, but couldn = t be sure.  I got out and looked underneath, and saw a crow had  got entangled under there. It came out, shaken and hurt but not badly.  I tried to urge it to go into the garage, where I would care for it, and  nurse it back to help.  I was secretly delighted at this chance.  The crow had meanwhile grown considerably larger, buzzard-sized.  I did get it to go into the garage, and we began a conversatio...

  DREAMLIFE I find that as I get older (and older) I am unable to remember my dreams, or to remember only a few brief parts, which I then immediately lose.   This is painful; on waking I can sense the flavor of dreaming so to speak, but retain nothing of it.   Age brings so many losses, small and large, that this one shouldn’t particularly distress me, but it does. Then lately I found a notebook in which from early 2008 to early 2014 I recorded dreams that I found to be intriguing or puzzling or outlandish in some way or another. I posted a few of these in my old LiveJournal, now unrecoverable.   But having the book again tempts me to set out a few for amusement or the general interest in dream-life.   They won’t be in time order, nor appear often.    One from August 2008: I was living with, or was member of, a Latino family in an apartment.   We were talking, a middle-aged man and children, when I saw smoke arising from the floor below, betwe...

  TIME IN FICTION In the early 20 th Century a famous professor at Harvard College claimed that all the reading that a first-rate mind needed could be fitted into a single five-foot bookshelf.   A publisher took him up on it, and the resulting “Harvard Classics” (everywhere known as “The Five Foot Shelf”) was hugely popular, published in several editions.   Christopher Beha, now editor-i-cheif at Harpers magazine, read his way through the whole Harvard Five Foot Shelf and lived to tell the tale (just barely, though not because of the reading -- the story's in his book The Whole Five Feet ).   Beha, after consuming all of those, went on to read all of the auxiliary Shelf of fiction (which was excluded from the original), and from Fielding's Tom Jones , the first in the series, he quotes this: My reader then is not to be surprized if, in the course of this work, he shall find some chapters very short, and others altogether as long; some that contain only the tim...

     WALKING MEDITATION I began meditating three or four years ago without expectations, and many insights and lots of peaceful time were a part of that process.  In particular I began "walking meditation" (which when I first heard of it I supposed meant devotees walking together around a space with eyes closed, but no it waasn't like that). The walking meditation is a walk: it can be long or short, here or there, slow or not.  I'd walked for years around my small town, which is furnis hed with hills of various steepness, roads that pass beneath elder trees and past dwellings and meadows.  In all that walking, though, I rarely if ever noticed a phenomenon that I now enjoy, and that is a constant in my "practice" if that's what I do. It's the way that trees, especially in groups and in full leaf, seem to slide aside as you pass them and reveal the group beyond, only to close again when the road takes a turn the other way.  It's the commonest thing...

 A piece that Harold Bloom introduced me to -- it was included in a book of his:  Ralph Waldo Emerson's definition, or vision, of poetry and its powers: If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found within their world, another world, or nest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop...    [W]hen Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white flower which marks extreme old age;" when Proclus calls the universe the statue of the intellect; when Chaucer, in his...

  Gregory Feeley, longtime friend and fellow writer, also a historian of the SF and fantasy fields, opened a Facebook group where stories of publishing, mostly from the past could be discussed by those interested or knowledgable. This was my contribution: When, in1972, I had finished my first novel, The Deep, I hit on a way of interesting publishers in the work, which an unknown author might not easily attract. The book was typed on an old manual typewriter, on yellow copy paper. I would take the typescript and bake it in the oven to brown the edges of the pages, then write a title page in fountain pen, with an invented name and date (1936 was the date, I think) – and then I would take it to editors as the only novel of a distant relative. If accepted, this would I thought gain me the entrée to the field that I needed. In the end I never executed this absurd plan. The other object I had in mind was to have my book appear as an Ace Science Fiction Special, books I much admired. I wa...