Misadventures in the Land of Fables #55
This was not how it started, a frog assuring the public there’s nothing to worry about, the snake doesn’t mean them any harm. No, it started with something else: the patterns on the snake’s skin. Studying these patterns one day, they seemed as if they might be intelligible, a kind of scaly pixellated script, that […]
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #54
While searching for images to accompany ‘Aphorism #2,’ in which a man digs a hole looking for treasure, I found numerous illustrations for Aesop’s fable of the miser and his pot of gold. A fable I hadn’t thought much about, because I prefer the animals fables and because miser’s are easy targets; nobody likes a […]
The Mouse, the Lion, and the Fabulous Feminist
I recently came across an interview with the fabulist, Suniti Namjoshi, conducted as part of a project entitled ‘Rethinking Fables in the Age of Global Environmental Crisis.’ This grabbed my attention for obvious reasons, rethinking fables is what I do, though admittedly not in any particular context, beyond literature, philosophy, and the imagination. The interview […]
Joanne M Harris: ‘Honeycomb’
“There is a story the bees used to tell…” Browsing the shelves of my local library earlier this year, the sub-title embossed on the cover of Joanne Harris’ ‘Honeycomb’ caught my eye. Eh up, I thought, bees telling stories seems remarkably similar to the strap line of my wasp cycle: “It is a little known […]
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. You fall down holes, you get […]
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 […]