Aphorisms #2
~~~ “Dig for treasure, end up in a hole.” ~~~ If you dig for buried treasure, you are unlikely to find it, but one outcome is certain, there will be a hole. And holes, from the human perspective, tend to be a negative, particularly if they were not intended—a gardener or a soldier might extol […]
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #53
‘The Monkey and the Moon‘ I was tempted to pretend this fable had ancient origins, something from south-east Asia, or the Panchatantra perhaps, where monkeys are in abundance. It doesn’t. But it might have done. I hesitate to dub it an original for that same reason. There are too many stories about the moon. Or […]
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #52
Fables are full of implausible alliances between animals. One of the most incongruous is the friendship that develops between the monkey and the crocodile in the tale that opens Book IV of the Panchatantra. The incongruity is not played for laughs, unlike the tortoise who persuades two geese to carry him away. No, these two […]
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #51
I first came across ‘How the Tiger Got its Stripes’ in Walton Ford’s Pancha Tantra. The story was recounted without a title (in English) so I didn’t know it was a ‘Just So’ story, an etiological narrative, and as Ford’s book is a collection of paintings inspired by fables, I was expecting a more didactic […]
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #50
THE SNAKE AND THE SWALLOW-TAILED KITE ~~~ This fable was inspired by the painting by French-American ornithologist John James Audubon. It started with a simple question. The kite has caught a snake: what was the snake doing when it was caught? The same as the kite, it was pursuing its next meal, a lizard, let’s […]
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #49
‘THE MAN BITTEN BY A DOG’ This Aesop fable (Perry 69) seemed relevant to social media and all the hot takes and concern trolling regarding recent political events. I thought I’d post the Townsend version unaltered, on Bluesky, but as I wrote some changes suggested themselves to me. For those of you who don’t have […]
