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 […]
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 […]