Misadventures in the Land of Fables #58
JACKDAW AND THE SONGBIRDS Weeks elapsed between the first draft of the new fable, ‘Jackdaw and the Songbirds,’ and its completion. I had other commitments. And I also contrived to delete my website. But we’re back. In the interim, however, I had forgotten what had inspired the idea. Fortunately, I had kept some notes. The […]
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #57
THE COCKEREL AND THE JEWEL It goes like this: A cockerel or rooster pecks for seeds scattered in the farmyard dirt. He finds instead a diamond and has this to say about it: “If your owner had found you, no doubt they’d have felt more delight than I who have no use for you. […]
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #56
Toward the end of Arthur Golding’s ‘A Moral Fabletalk’ there is a curious entry consisting of one long run-on sentence, plus a short explanation of the moral. It describes an ass loaded with meat and drink who must eat thistles and drink from puddles. It goes one to suggests this ass will relate a fable, […]
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 […]