Etidorhpa | Aprhodite

Posted on November 4, 2023 by Enchanted Seashells by Princess Rosebud

Have you heard of this novel?

Etidorhpa: The End of Earth (1895) by John Uri Lloyd

Complete subtitle: “The strange history of a mysterious being and the account of a remarkable journey as communicated in manuscript to Llewellyn Drury who promised to print the same, but finally evaded the responsibility which was assumed.”

This is so strange. I can’t remember how or when I scrolled past this title but it reminded me of when I was little, my dad started talking about this book. He read the title to me and, since we both loved wordplay, helped me read it backwards to reveal the mirrored magic.

I can’t remember anything else about our conversation other than that, and I don’t have the book and don’t know what happened to it, so it’s simply an amorphous slip of a memory.

it was written over a hundred years ago yet it contains absolutely profound theories about electromagnetism and gravity.

Since my dad was an attorney and lived among facts, reality, and documentation, it’s interesting to learn that he was drawn to the esoteric, but he was REALLY smart and loved to read, so maybe he was more complex than I realized.

According to Wiki, Etidorhpa belongs to a subgenre of fiction that shares elements of science fiction, fantasy, utopian fiction, and scientific (or pseudoscientific) speculation. Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth is the most famous book of this type, though many others can be cited. It imagined another world in the center of a hollow earth. Since Lloyd was a pharmacologist, his novel has provoked speculation that drug use may have contributed to its fantastic and visionary nature.

The book is available here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37775/37775-h/37775-h.htm

I started to read the first chapter. For me, it’s not an easy read, not like my romantic chicklit, so it hasn’t really grabbed my interest, other than as a vague but sweet moment in time with my dad.

If you have read it, or intend to, let me know what you think, and WHY Aphrodite is important…

Enjambment | Measure: Robert Hass

Posted on July 14, 2023 by Enchanted Seashells by Princess Rosebud

A few years ago UC Berkeley hosted an Eco-Poetics Conference. My son was invited to participate and while there he was honored to meet the poet, Robert Hass.

Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.

I love the way his mind works, it’s as simple as that.

From Hass: “This poem is called measure – I think it belongs to my learning as a young writer as to where I felt poems were coming from.”

Measure

Recurrences.
Coppery light hesitates
again in the small-leaved

Japanese plum. Summer
and sunset, the peace
of the writing desk

and the habitual peace
of writing, these things
form an order I only

belong to in the idleness
of attention. Last light
rims the blue mountain

and I almost glimpse
what I was born to,
not so much in the sunlight

or the plum tree
as in the pulse
that forms these lines.

FYI: Enjambment…From the French meaning “a striding over,” a poetic term for the continuation of a sentence or phrase from one line of poetry to the next. An enjambed line typically lacks punctuation at its line break, so the reader is carried smoothly and swiftly—without interruption—to the next line of the poem.

The World of Literature Lost a Great One – Cormac McCarthy

Posted on June 16, 2023 by Enchanted Seashells by Princess Rosebud

“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road

While his raw, savage, and uncompromising style of writing wasn’t REALLY my cup of tea as I’m an unashamed fan of happily-ever-after chick lit, I have read a couple of books by Cormac McCarthy.

MY habit of skipping over sections that contain any sort of violence probably causes me to miss a lot of narrative, but I think I come away with the gist of his message regarding the human affinity for brutality, which I personally abhor.

Even so, I can still be awed by his ability to convey the darkest sides of humanity (inhumanity) and his unflinching bare bones descriptions of people and places I’m happy I never met.

I read that McCarthy was very much influenced by William Faulkner, one of my favorite authors.

I haven’t seen the films adapted from his novels for the same reason I only touched the outer edges of his published works — the dark side doesn’t appeal to me.

Wiki recalls McCarthy this way: “Cormac McCarthy was an American writer who authored twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and postapocalyptic genres. He was known for his graphic depictions of violence and his unique writing style, recognizable by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution.”

Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road. It was recently reported that another of his novels, Blood Meridian, will be made into a feature film directed by John Hillcoat, who directed the film adaptation of The Road.

The Stolen Child

Posted on May 19, 2020 by Enchanted Seashells by Princess Rosebud

I was going to write a funny post about how my son is occasionally as childish as his sometimes feral four-year-old but then I saw this poem and thought I’d instead elevate my intellect with Yeats.

“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
with a faery, hand in hand,
for the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand…”
W.B. Yeats

Here’s the entire poem:

The Stolen Child

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,

Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand. —W.B. Yeats