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Excavating a library...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 2109
I'm in London not London, the abundant tubes leading out of the city, travelling around but I'm not recognizing any of it, none of it at all, it's not as I remembered...
I find a large vacant lot, much of it torn up by excavators, half of an old building still standing, it reminds me curiously of the new condo developments near the Hillhurst Community Center...
...Anyways, I have permission to be here, going in amongst the big piles of dirt being excavated I can see the giant ends of old books buried in the mud, I climb the hill and begin to pull out the books, I'm free to salvage what I can...
...the first find, giant, old pages, 200 pages at least, and I pull it from the muck and read the words and I'm thinking it's by Salman Rushdie, that can't be, this is far older than him, some odes to Satan or some such, not time to read, work is off for today but they're not stopping for me...I take it down the hill to a table I've set up, there's a cute blonde there and I'm showing her what I've found, I don't know her but she's agreeable and interested...
...Back up, into the muddy hillside, pulling out more books....and then I'm inside the tenement building, what hasn't yet been torn down, there's books here as well, odds and endments, some CD's, games I recognize from my previous life and I'm annoyed they've been left here, bits of me I'd forgotten about, there's an old book, about (???), and another, I'm pulling it apart, handwritten, a curiosity, scrapbook of somebodies life, handwritten and illustrated with artworks, and around every letter written in the book there's a picture or a story written, there are decoupage and paintings and other trifles of the authors life (a she, I'm presuming), I'm trying to date it, guess when she lived and wrote it, I'm convinced it's valuable, priceless, but I'm in a hurry, I resolve merely to gather it beneath the covers of another old book, I can discover it later, there's an antique typewriter, with a large brass screen above an ugly 50's keyboard and the logo "Royale" written in Gold letters, unplugging the typewriter (and someone is telling me there's a sheet of paper inside, between the brass screens, I don't check it, there's no time) I see the light fading beautifully behind the "Royale" logo, from between the screens where the sheet of paper is, I can do something with this, I will take it with me, to an airport with the books and ship them back to Canada before I go to Europe...
Pellucidar - Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 2002
I found it at a thrift shop, Dover reprint, and I picked it up because when I was a kid I was crazy for this sort of stuff.
By the time I was 12 I'd read almost the entire children's library, and some of the books that I hadn't included Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I knew who Tarzan was, of course, who doesn't? But I wasn't that interested. Nonetheless, it was getting down to Tarzan or nothing, so I checked out a few of the books.
And I loved them...
I mean, I read everything by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Tarzan books, the John Carter on Mars, the Moon Maidens, Tarzan at the Earth's Core, I'm pretty sure the library didn't have them all, but what they had, I read.
I loved 'em all.
So when I got to be twenty-ish I revisited them. Specifically Tarzan. And I found them painful, awkward to read, horrible, just appalling...
I blame my fancy highbrow European tastes, I'd been reading the English authors, Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maughm, George Orwell, any number of other authors, Vladimir Nabokov...clearly I was raising the bar...
When I had my son, perhaps when he was 10 or 12, I gave him a couple of dozen original dime-store Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books I'd found at a garage sale. He pretended to try and read and then discarded, they weren't to his taste, what can you do?
But finding this, the Dover reprint, slender, the adventures of David Innes and company at the Earth's core, I couldn't resist. I'd try him again.
And, a slender book, filled with original, novel ideas, poorly executed and even more poorly recorded...psychological gold, this, the primitive, stone age and reptilian races at the earth's core, the beast-man named "Gr-gr-gr", the thags and dinosaurs, the inwardly curving horizon and the stationary hovering moon, but, like Gaston Leroux's "Phantom of the Opera" it's also literary torture. The brilliant device of the author addressing a letter of criticism from a fan at the beginning (who turns to a believer when he sees the evidence the author provides) is undermined by it's execution, and perhaps it's wrong of me to judge as Burroughs himself never aspired to be more than a pulp-fiction writer, in any case, intriguing for the ideas, and he did have some great ideas, but for the most part these books will have to remain in memory and childhood...
U of A offers Spoonbending Course
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: WTF
- Hits: 2012
They really should have offered this to the Undergraduates first. There would have been less of an uproar. And regarding the assertion: "There is absolutely no physical way you can bend a spoon with your mind" Sir/Madame - I would suggest you watch "The Matrix" again. And grab a spoon with two hands, one hand on the shaft, the other on the bowl. Apply pressure. ???. The result, dear Mr/Mrs/Ms, is clearly a result of your intentions, or mind. Discard the intermediaries of hand and force, you did this with your mind. Now chill...
I think it would have been far more interesting if all the "doctors"/"students" had been allowed to take the course and then review it...
PS: I know there are diamonds here, regardless of whatever other bollocks course they offer...
The Pox
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2635
It began with a toothache. Sure enough, the tooth was wiggly, but my jaw swelled and it hurt more and more and I was thinking there was no way out of it but the dentist when it disappeared...
...Not in a good way. My groin - my private parts, member, erupted in a series of painful blisters, and the symptoms seemed obvious enough, but, well, I haven't been intimate in a long long while...still, I googled and found a great many pictures which underestimated the damage being done to my own loins, and I suspected that somewhere, somehow, I may have acquired a severe, an apocalyptic case of genital herpes...
...with this, the puss burning, oozing, building up beneath the penis and scrotal sac, the white-capped ruby blisters, the end of my tallywhacker swollen to double it's girth, quadrupling the pain, sensitive to every chafe and touch of my undershorts or burning urination through suppurating blisters, I could tour the high schools of America and ensure that no student lost their virginity until marriage. And no sooner am I confirmed in my diagnosis when...
...The skin still peeling on my groin, the lymph nodes swollen to the proportions of garden hoses, visibly extruded above my skin, when a fine, chicken skin rash appears upon the back of my hands...there's an electric tingling upon my palms, a pins and needles, then they begin to grow patches of yellow, the skin thickens, like crusty leather, and breaks into painful crevasses upon every distinguishing line ...the loveline, the heartline, crack to painful fissures a quarter inch deep, suppurating sores, upon the backs of my hands appear ruby blisters, the wrists, and leading up my arms, the sores break out upon my face, my thighs...my ears fill with fluid, draining upon my pillow nightly, burning scabs into my earlobes, and all of a sudden I'm deaf.
90% deaf. I can hear, if I know your speaking to me, if you speak loudly, to my face, but easily 90% of my hearing is gone...
I email Mom. The symptoms have varied enough that I'm thinking it's not genital herpes...Maybe Shingles? But the symptoms of shingles are always asymmetrical, and I'm in perfectly symmetrical misery...."Did I ever have the Chicken Pox when I was young?". She doesn't remember, I can remember the measles, she thinks about it, probably not...
I still have to work, damn the quarantine, the health laws, I try to stay away from the tables, Despite becoming the Red Death the owner will grant you no reprieve. Ever. If you've worked in enough restaurants you know. Even in death I'd have to work there, they'd wheel my corpse about on a dolly to take orders and spray cologne on me to hide the smell, you'd never get a day off until the undertaker came for you and buried you in the ground...But in this deafness, this swimming deep beneath the sea it acquires a new tranquility. I can imagine the harried and henpecked husband becoming deaf, enjoying his deafness, a lifetime of scolding now escaped, I've known a few and I'm more than a little suspicious...the staff are forever testing my hearing, saying things behind my back, I catch them laughing, I can't hear a word.
Still, this is not elective deafness, this is the sores in my ears blocking the canals, not painful, but the city now from my balcony gives the illusion of perpetual quiet. I grow in my beard to hide the scabs on my face, it's been a little over two weeks and the symptoms are abating, the sores disappear, I'm still deaf, but I have a feeling it will restore itself as suddenly as it came, in the meantime I enjoy it, watch "The Tribe" in my free time, irony, those badass-deaf kids, and make my plans for summer...
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