Thank you for your essential work on maintaining literature.cafe's hygiene.
This week I started reading Ursula K. Le Guin's Rocannon's World (1966). I had previously read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973), and the The Dispossessed (1974) is in progress.
Now I'm crossposting from Lemmy to Mastodon, by tagging myself, @robertoqs@writing.exchange. Lemmy's “Title” field produces, conversely, an initial separated line in the resulting toot.
Edit: But only a link to Lemmy is displayed in said toot, and not the post's “Body” field.
I love that poem, too. I think there is more of the author's work in the referred journal.
She didn't look forward to going out to meet her friend for lunch. It was two degrees, and wasn't the fire inviting?
She went, though, out of a sense of social duty, out of the knowledge that she should have friends of her own, out of the memory of a day last winter, when she had canceled the lunch, because of the cold, because of the fire. Her friend had not been amused, nor had the friend's co-worker been amused; abused, perhaps, they had felt abused in the lawyer's office, where there was no fire, and no lover reading it.
Over lunch they talked about her friend's project, a one-woman play using only selections of Emily Dickinson's letters. The question of a title came up: Emily Unplugged; A Taste of Emily (they laughed for the connotations of it). Papers. Emily's Papers. The friend said, “Vellum”, and she said, “That's it!” The friend said, “What?” “Vellum, Emily, that's it, Velemily, something. It's the word, it's the right word, better than Emily Verso and Recto — Vellum.”
The table erupted into textures. The napkins, suddenly, were thick and writable. It was a question of the bite of the paper; how lovely it seemed that paper should have teeth, that Vellum may have the strongest teeth to go with the sword of a pen. It was better than tongues of fire.
— From The Prose Poem: An International Journal, vol. 8.
One word is busy constructing the others. It is a carpenter creating props for a play. It takes a rock and makes it a hat. Thus there is now a rock-hat. This stuff becomes real. All that is real becomes props while all that's not becomes the play. And somewhere in the performance the words start whispering back to us a permutation we hadn't planned. Strangely, as we, the actors, speak our parts, we grow another body. It is suggested our other body is living under the stage, reciting words of another play which we are simultaneously enacting. And we can feel the floor of the stage about to collapse.
— Douglas Blazek, “The Metaphor”, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, vol. 8 (1999).
I think it makes perfect sense. Federation is great, certainly, but at the same time it's desirable to keep certain communities local, as otherwise they might not be able to focus on what they're meant to be about.
While the fluidity of interconnection is one of the principal aspects of the fediverse, if no particular group were able to specialize, then having different instances, or even using different applications, could become pointless.
I'm an avid reader of L. E. Modesitt Jr's oeuvre. I'm usually on at least one of his novels in parallel with whatever else I'm reading at that moment. For a few years now, I've been immersed in his “Saga of Recluce” series, an informal name given by the readers, if I remember correctly. I'm currently at the fifth novel, in publication order, which is also the last one in the internal chronological order. After that, I'll continue with the sixth published novel, one of the oldest stories in the internal chronology, and one that narrates essential events. Following that one, I plan on interrupting the publication order to then read another few novels that I'm more interested in, due to the fundamental importance of those stories in the global arc, and therefore in the worldbuilding. Some of them narrate the oldest events in that world, thus far.
To anyone who may be interested in the series, my recommendation is to not search for worldbuilding and plot details online. I think it's best to get into it without knowing, or knowing as little as possible. Concomitantly, I agree with the author on his recommendation to read everything in publication order.
More recently, I started one of his science fiction novels, which is what has most of my attention at the moment, in fiction reading. It's Gravity Dreams (1999).
Robertus Cognoscens @literature.cafe - Cōgitō ergō quaerō · πάντα ῥεῖ · γνῶθι σεαυτόν
- Mnemonic praxis, callisthenic cycles, anagnosmic ethos.
- Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@robertoqs