J. McClain > Recent Status Updates

Prince Oldenburgsky frequently reinforced his personal example with his personal cane, whose direct Petrine heritage destined it to wreak havoc on the backs of police chiefs, bureaucrats, and insolent engineers. Sometimes this truly democratic cane even reached to generals.

Through eyes narrowed to slits she studied me with a gaze that was at once naive and cunning.

"Iceland spar is what hides the Hidden People, makes it possible for them to move through the world that thinks of itself as 'real,' provides that all-important ninety-degree twist to their light, so that they can exist alongside of our world and not be seen.

There was a "Ray-rush in progress--light and magnetism, as well as all manner of extra-Hertzian rays, were there for the taking, and prospectors had come flooding in, many of them professional claim-jumpers aiming to get on by brute force, a very few genuinely able to dowse for rays of all frequencies, most neither gifted nor unscrupulous, simply caught up in everybody else's single-minded flight from reason....

...a voice, or something like a voice, whispered unto him, saying, " Water falls, electricity flows--one flow becomes another, and thence into light, So is altitude transformed, continuously into light." Words to that effect, well, maybe not words exactly...."

"As years went along, the film got faster, the exposure times shorter, the cameras lighter."

It was a small AEtherist community, maybe as close as Merle ever came to joining a church.

"But you boys--you're not storybook characters." He had a thought. "Are you?" "No more than Wyatt Earp or Nellie Bly," Randolph supposed. "Although the longer a fellow's name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell fiction from non-fiction." "I guess I read the sports pages mostly."

"Temptation, much to Lindsay's chagrin, lurked at every step. Pavilions here seemed almost to represent not nations of the world but Deadly Sins.

At one end of the gondola, largely oblivious to the coming and going on deck, with his tail thumping expressively now and then against the planking, and his nose among the pages of a volume by Mr. Henry James, lay a dog of no particular breed, to all appearances absorbed by the text before him.

"Now single up all lines!"

"He bolted for the door, leaving me to apologize more fully for the abrupt departure--which, not surprisingly, Wissler didn't seem to mind at all. Scientists' minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in another."

"And it always seems to begin with trust..."

Flashes of silver and brilliantly colored scales caught the light of a few dim worklamps that were on, increasing the eerie impression that the fish were a terrified audience searching for a way out of this place of death and back to those deep, dark regions where men and their brutal ways were unknown.

I wondered, just as I had wondered a thousand times during staff meetings at the Times, how long many members of the press--not to mention politicians and members of the public--would be content to equate deliberate ignorance of evil with its nonexistence.

"I hope to explore the transformative possibilities and limitations that fairy tales as one wonder genre among others hold for the human imagination today, in a world that has been characterized as disenchanted."

“How about—look, I’m just throwing this out there. How about we save the world first, and then you arrest us?”

“The leerer and his empty-faced boy. They came out of blackness." The thing I hate most about Goss and Subby is that they were in a dream of mine back in 1983, long before Kraken was written. That really creeps me out.

“We didn’t invent ink: ink was waiting for us, aeons before writing. In the sacs of the deepwater god.”

“My question is, how do we interrogate ink?"

“Vardy’s point was that the most dramatic of these Armageddonim—London had had to grow used to such arcane plural forms—were events in a kind of society. Spectator sports. To miss one would be a realtheologikal faux pas.”

“Jason was a function of the economy. His knack deshaped him, he was not specific. He was abstract, not a worker but a man-shape of wage-labour itself. Who could look that gorgon in the face? So whoever saw him would concretise him into their local vernacular. Which made him impossible to notice.”

"I call for remapping the fairy-tale genre onto a worldly, not worldwide, web."

When we gone out thru the gate there wer a kid up on the hy walk sames I use to be up there all times of nite when I wer a kid.

"Be you going to put on your wig and hold the bailey and pour the ounts of judgd men or are you going to let wester day go down and ter morrer come up?"

"If you put 1 figger on your right han and a nother on your lef the 1 wil go agenst the other some how some time.

I never sung no beginning becaws you wont never fynd no beginning its long gone and far pas. What ever youre after youwl never fynd the beginning of it thats why youwl all ways be too late.

Some of them ther shels ben broak open you cud see girt shyning weals like jynt mil stoans only smoov.