Cather, Willa. My Antonia. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995. Originally published 1918.

page 21

The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass, uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seeds as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuch’s story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

continue reading "Copper-red Grass"

Banks, Ian M. “The State of the Art.” The State of the Art. San Francisco, CA: Night Shade Books, 2007.

“I shook my head. Roghres snorted. Tel put her spoon down. I sampled some of Li’s unusual dish while he continued. “I had the ship take a few cells from a variety of people on Earth. Without their knowledge, of course.” He waved the sword vaguely at the table behind us. “Most of you over there will be eating either Stewed Idi Amin or General Pinochet Chili Con Carne; here in the center we have a combination of General Stroessner Meat Balls and Richard Nixon Brugers. The rest of you have Ferdinand Marcos Saute and Shah of Iran Kebabs. There are, in addition, scattered bowls of Fricassed Kim Il Sung, Boiled General Videla, and Ian Smith in Black Bean Sauce… all done just right by the excellent — if leaderless — chef we have around us. Eat up! Eat up!

“We ate up, most of us quite amused. One or two thought the idea a little too outre, and some affected boredom because they thought Li needed discouragement not accomplices, while a few were just too full already. But the majority laughed and ate, comparing tastes and textures.

“‘If they could see us now,” Roghres giggled. “Cannibals from outer space!”

For the last few weeks I have been really itching to interact with another world.

I spend a fair amount of my time imagining myself in a number of ‘out-there’ situations. These daydreams are often fueled by a mix of history, science-fiction, my imagination and the desire to explore . While lately the responsibilities of an adult job and relationship have dampened my auto-exploratory-self-created-worlds-of-fun, I recently finished Delaney’s The Einstein Intersection, which I loved, and which also really brought my imagination back on board. Since then I have had the itch.
continue reading "Spore."

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

This is what some had claimed would be the inevitable consequences of the digital revolution: the technology would put low-cost, east-to-use tools for creative expression into the hands of average people. Lower the barriers of participation and provide new channels for publicity and distribution, and people will create remarkable things. Think of these subcultures as aesthetic petri dishes. Seed them and see what grows. In most, nothing really interesting will happen. We can pretty much count on Sturgeon’s law holding for amateur cultural creation: 90 percent of everything is crap. But if you expand the number of people participating in the making of art, you may expand the amount of really interesting works that emerge. You can pretty much count on our creative impulses to overcome a lot of technical limitations and obstacles. Amateur artists do best when they operate within supportive communities, struggling with the same creative problems and building on one another’s successes.

page 152.

Delany, Samuel R. The Einstein Intersection. New York, NY: Ace Books, 1967.

page 17

“Let’s talk about mythology, Lobey. Or let’s you listen. We’ve had quite a time assuming the rationale of this world. The irrationale presents just as much of a problem. You remember the legend of the Beatles? You remember the Beatle Ringo left his love even though she treated him tender. He was the one Beatle who did not sing, so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day’s night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatles returned, finally at one, with the great rock and the great roll.” I put my head in La Dire’s lap. She went on. “Well, that myth is a version of a much older story that is not so well known. There are no 45’s or 33’s from the time of this older story. There are only a few written versions, and reading is rapidly losing its interest for the young. In the older story Ringo was called Orpheus. He too was torn apart by screaming girls. But the details are different. He lost his love–in this version Eurydice– and she went straight to the great rock and the great roll, where Orhpeus had to go to get her back. He went singing, for in this version Orpheus was the greatest singer, instead of the silent one. In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.”

page 122-123

The millions’ music melded to a hymn like when your ears ring and you’re trying to sleep. In a village you see a face and you know it–its mother, its father, its work, how it curses, laughs, lingers on one expression, avoids another. Here one face yawns, another bulges with food; one scarred, one longing with what could be love, one screaming: each among a thousand, none seen more than once. You start to arrange the furniture in your head to find a place for these faces, someplace to dump all these quarter emotions. When you go through the gate at Branning-at-sea and leave the country, you retreat to the country for your vocabulary to describe it: rivers of men and torrents of women, storms of voices, rains of fingers and jungles of arms. But it’s not fair to Branning. It’s not fair to the country either.