Timons Esaias's Blog

I should probably announce that my short story "Of the Books of Shahanay" has been selected by The Winter Anthology as the winner of their annual contest. I'm a bit overwhelmed by this honor, but I'm very happy for the story.

You may read it here: http://www.winteranthology.com/?vol=1...

PORTLAND

"Hello," said this voice, "I'm David Loxton of the TV Lab at WNET, and I want to come talk to you about making a TV film of one of your novels."
"No, you don't," I said, terrified.
"Well, actually I do," said the voice in a mild, astonished tone.
I could not say that the only thing I dread more than phone calls from strangers is visits from strangers, because that's not the sort of thing you can say to strangers.
"I'm sorry I have this English sort of accent," said the voice. "It's because I'm English, but I live in New York. Would it be all right if I came on Wednesday?"
He said it "Weddnsdy"; there was no doubt he was English.
"You can't come all the way to Oregon," I said desperately, but it was no use. He came.


--Ursula K. Le Guin, "Working on "The Lathe""

"Do not get the idea, however, that I am outraged by ear-benders. The only people I do not care to listen to are society women, industrial leaders, distinguished authors, ministers, explorers, moving picture actors (except W.C. Fields and Stepin Fetchit), and any actress under the age of thirty-five. I believe the most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and an occasional bartender. The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun, grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels. The talk when you interview someone for a newspaper is usually premeditated and usually artificial." ---Joseph Mitchell, MY EARS ARE BENT

Don't expect me to be finishing many titles in the next few weeks. I'm slogging through over 2,000 pages of student manuscript, which I'll just about finish by the time another wave of monthly pages comes spitting through the Internet. (I teach in the Seton Hill Writing Popular Fiction MFA program.)

The good news is that all three student novels I'm reading have the potential to be in print, and listed for Goodreads.

"The Bedouin Arabs called the giraffe a collection (jama'a), and it was so called because it brought together the attributes of many animals in one form. It has the neck of a camel, the skin of the panther, the horns of a gazelle, the teeth of a cow, and the head of a deer. An authority on the natures of animals wrote that it was a crossbreed of many animals, a result of the gathering of beasts during the summer at the watering place where they mated. In some cases, a female mated with several males, and their seminal fluid mixed inside her, so she bore a creature of mixed appearance, shape and color. The Persians call the giraffe a camel-cow-leopard, which accords with what the Arabs claimed about its hybrid creation from many animals. But al-Jahiz refutes this statement, saying: "It is a piece of great ignorance, which no educated person would profess. For God creates what He wills, according to His will. This is a self-distinct type of animal just like the horse or the donkey, and what proves this to be the case is that it gives birth to its own young."

This is indisputable, for I saw a giraffe in Cairo that gave birth to another giraffe that looked like it, and it is still alive today." --Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, The Ultimate Amition in the Arts of Erudition

"The Bedouin Arabs called the giraffe a collection (jama'a), and it was so called because it brought together the attributes of many animals in one form. It has the neck of a camel, the skin of the panther, the horns of a gazelle, the teeth of a cow, and the head of a deer. An authority on the natures of animals wrote that it was a crossbreed of many animals, a result of the gathering of beasts during the summer at the watering place where they mated. In some cases, a female mated with several males, and their seminal fluid mixed inside her, so she bore a creature of mixed appearance, shape and color. The Persians call the giraffe a camel-cow-leopard, which accords with what the Arabs claimed about its hybrid creation from many animals. But al-Jahiz refutes this statement, saying: "It is a piece of great ignorance, which no educated person would profess. For God creates what He wills, according to His will. This is a self-distinct type of animal just like the horse or the donkey, and what proves this to be the case is that it gives birth to its own young."

This is indisputable, for I saw a giraffe in Cairo that gave birth to another giraffe that looked like it, and it is still alive today." --Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, The Ultimate Amition in the Arts of Erudition

"Like most women in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I have spent thousands of hours and dollars on yoga classes attempting to manufacture unconditional love and moral bliss by detaching from my ego and my desires and also, not coincidentally, working on the quality of my ass." --Kristen Dombeck, "Letter from Williamsburg" in The Best American Essays 2014 (and originally in The Paris Review)

So I'm reading a book (Minturn's From New York to Delhi) that came out in 1858, or three years before the American Civil War. In attempting to make a point about the Mutiny in India, he discounts the prophetic opinions of Sir Charles Napier (who saw it coming) by making the following observation:

With regard to Sir Charles, his writings certainly read now very much like prophecies, but when they were written did not derive nearly as much support from facts as do now the disunion threats and prognostications made, not by one man, but by whole States in the southern part of our country; and yet no one here thinks it worth while to prepare for the eventuality of a dissolution of the Union.

There's an argument that backfired.

A quote from Emily Eden's _The Semi-Attached Couple_ (published around 1860, set around 1830):

[Mrs. Douglas has been invited to a neighbor's wedding]

Mrs. Douglas could hardly do less than make a very great grievance of what was intended as a kindness. She hated a wedding: it was just the sort of thing that the world chose to make a fuss about, but which she thought the most uninteresting ceremony on earth. She did not see why she was to dress herself out in satin and blonde just to go and hear young people make foolish promises that they never could keep. What could be more absurd than to assemble a crowd to witness a man and woman promising to love each other for the rest of their lives, when we know what human creatures are, --men so thoroughly selfish and unprincipled, women so vain and frivolous? This wholesale way of dealing with her fellow creatures was one of Mrs. Douglas's favorite methods of treating them. "I should like to go in my garden bonnet and colored muslin gown, just to show them how I despise their love of fashion," she said, as she sealed the note to her milliner, which was to order the well-chosen dress and bonnet on which she had determined for the occasion; for the energy with which she declaimed against dress did not at all interfere with her inclination to spend a great deal of money on it.

Is it wrong to drink Czar Nikolas II Nostalgia tea, while reading August 1914??