Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 45

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December 5, 2008


D & S -- Hand... hand... special effects (circles of light)
D & S -- cough/distraction/whatever
Write Teller and ask

Notes for to-be-written bits of Dancing With Bears.  I can make no sense out of them.  Did I really plan to write Teller, one of the living masters of the art, and ask his advice on sleight-of-hand?  That seems pretty nervy, even for me.

"Spoken, She Said, Like A Gentleman"

Actually, a pretty good title.  A pity I didn't have a story for it.


A snatch of speculative prose:

There is always worse, there is always more grotesque, there is always another step down.  Which being so, why should we ever glance in that direction?

Sing, goddess, of insignificant things;
of toothpaste, shoelaces, and gum
Of grocery lists and plastic bags
And {habits?] of which we are [something].

And, not a fragment, but a complete two-sentence fiction:

The cockroaches wrote a manifesto which, unfortunately, I did not read.  In my defense, it was rather stained by big spots at the time.

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3 comments:

Matthew Brandi said...

And that's as far as the Anti-Iliad got?

Michael Swanwick said...

Well, as Melville said, "No great and enduring volume can ever be written upon the flea." Though I believe somebody did write a story about a mad starship captain in search of a gigantic albino space-flea, back in the New Wave days.

And come to think of it, I myself once wrote a story set on a planet-sized grasshopper.

So . . . hmmm. I seem to have disproved my own point.

Richard Mason said...

[Insert weak joke about "special effects" and "circles of light" as they might be generated by hydrogen bombs.]