change/no change:...edwardianjackal.com...

Lots of changes coming to the 'ol website over the next few weeks, please bear with tweaks here and there.  New content, new look...why, even bought myself a personality.  It's going to be swell!  All coming soon, and, as always, all for you!

free:"...the Interminable Da Vinci" Novella

"Bing Crosby and the Interminable Da Vinci" available for download:

BARNES & NOBLE 

LULU

iBOOKSTORE

"What first appeared as normal foliage was nothing more than shriveled growth.  In fact, as far as I could see in the meager light, the entire jungle around me had been sucked dry as if a capable agent had ingested the entire plant and animal life in this little circle and swallowed its animus whole. The ground beneath my feet, where there would have been a wet loam, was completely dry.  Perhaps this was the answer for coming to the dark of the world."

poem:Crumbs from Feast, the Poisonous Beast

Insidious, yet only in the tense past
as a shadow, only sighted whence we turn
Grew behind me like a veiled whisper
Brilliant in its disguise
Fatigue it fained, confusion fed me
Sight poisoned, passions drained
I would not turn, I refused it
Until the shade and the sun's light
Were no different, impossibly indistinguishable
And we are
Human
After all.

How are we to defend the slow worm's draw
When we are poisoned in crumbs and not in feasts?
Only seen when I mine eyes were no longer straight
Drowning for the fathom above me
Drowning until I saw, twice in error
And the body convulsed and my eyes opened
My head turned
And it can no longer hide
Reveling in the damage it has done.

Daemon.
The ancients would care for their names,
Divining them in parchment and smoke
But nothing matters so little in this.
Turn upon the shadow and see
Veiled whispers and shadow
Made true.

revel: Google Doodle William Shakespeare...

Google is celebrating William Shakepeare on his possible birthday (or at least death), http://www.google.com/doodles/celebrating-william-shakespeare.

Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Midsummer's Night Dream, Richard III - did I get them right?

If music be the food of love, play on,

Rebecca Hall as Viola

Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, 

The appetite may sicken and so die.

That strain again, it had a dying fall.

O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound 

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more,

’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

[Music ceases]

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou

That, notwithstanding thy capacity

Receiveth as the sea, naught enters there,

Of what validity and pitch so e’er,

But falls into abatement and low price

Even in a minute! So full of shapes is fancy

That it alone is high fantastical. 

           (I.i.1–15), Twelfth Night

read: A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess...

“Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.”
- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

read: Gabriel Garcia Marquez 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings'

Whilst at the Palazzo/Venetian this week, Bauman's had a copy of Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude in the window.  The heady magical realism of his prose is unmatched.

Here is a short work entitled 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings' hosted by North Dakota State.

"The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon."

Quote from 'One Hundred Years'

hear: Opia - Falling

Why’m I falling for this toxic love?
Why’m I falling for this tender touch?
Why’m I falling for this toxic love?
Why’m I falling for this tender touch?
I’m still falling for ya, I’m still falling for ya

read: Ovid's "Metamorphoses" (Signet Classics, Horace Gregory translation)...

I picked up The Metamorphoses at a small book shop adjacent to the Hong Kong Citygate Outlet this past Monday.  Reading through it this afternoon, Ovid (via Horace Gregory) has a crisp cadence with his prose and brings the lives of Gods and Man to life.  Ovid also made particular care in telling the story of the Earth from beginning to end.  He was keen on the constant change of God and Man - their transformations from one form to another, may it be reward, punishment or dumb luck.

What strikes me, having read so many mythology books over time, is that the Gods of the Ancients were not fixed characters, but change according to each individual, and Ovid no different.

With the creation of Man, how poetic it sounds here, and how parallel to the Judeo-Christian ethic:

"As God divided regions of this world
Into their separate parts, then all the stars
Long lost in ancient dark began to light
Pale fires throughout the sky.  And as each part
Of universal being came to life,
Each filled with images of its own kind....

Yet world was not complete:
It lacked a creature that had hints of heaven
And hopes to rule the earth.  So man was made....

Then careless things took shape, change followed change
And with it unknown species of mankind." - Book I, page 5

Then it was not much later, in Book III (72), is the story of Narcissus, that it reminded me of the Beiber.

"....Enchanted by the charms which were his own.
Himself the worshipped and the worshipper,
He sought himself and was pursued, wooed, fired
By his own heat of love, Again, again...."