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Around 4:30 this morning, a fat full moon setting in the southwest woke me, peering through my window all silver-gilt and bright. Eventually it went more parchment gold, sinking into the trees, veiled by our tainted atmosphere.
*
One of the medications my father is taking apparently can cause nightmares. My father's reaction to this yesterday was to fixate, by my brother's report, on a Sherwood Anderson book he remembered, published in 1919, something about the grotesque. This is through the screen of his impaired speech and my brother's attempts to understand. But he was clear about Sherwood Anderson, 1919, the grotesque. My brother asked me to find out what book it was--which was very easy to do. It's Anderson's story collection Winesburg, Ohio, which has a kind of prologue story that more or less subtitles the book, called "The Book of the Grotesque." The book was, indeed, published in 1919.
It's on bartleby.com, http://www.bartleby.com/156/index.html. Here's an excerpt from the Book of the Grotesque, which is about an old writer and his strange notion of truth and the grotesque:
The idea had got into his mind that he would some time die unexpectedly and always when he got into bed he thought of that. It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was quite a special thing and not easily explained. It made him more alive, there in bed, than at any other time. Perfectly still he lay and his body was old and not of much use any more, but something inside him was altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay on his high bed and listened to the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get at is what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was thinking about.
I find it somehow reassuring that this is what my father is thinking about, this little tale and the book from which it came.
*
Vonda McIntyre's fantastic Nebula award winning novel The Moon and the Sun, is available as an ebook through the Book View Cafe site. A really great read, this book (as are, in fact the other books of hers featured there). (You have to register with the site, but why wouldn't you?)
*
One of the medications my father is taking apparently can cause nightmares. My father's reaction to this yesterday was to fixate, by my brother's report, on a Sherwood Anderson book he remembered, published in 1919, something about the grotesque. This is through the screen of his impaired speech and my brother's attempts to understand. But he was clear about Sherwood Anderson, 1919, the grotesque. My brother asked me to find out what book it was--which was very easy to do. It's Anderson's story collection Winesburg, Ohio, which has a kind of prologue story that more or less subtitles the book, called "The Book of the Grotesque." The book was, indeed, published in 1919.
It's on bartleby.com, http://www.bartleby.com/156/index.html. Here's an excerpt from the Book of the Grotesque, which is about an old writer and his strange notion of truth and the grotesque:
The idea had got into his mind that he would some time die unexpectedly and always when he got into bed he thought of that. It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was quite a special thing and not easily explained. It made him more alive, there in bed, than at any other time. Perfectly still he lay and his body was old and not of much use any more, but something inside him was altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay on his high bed and listened to the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get at is what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was thinking about.
I find it somehow reassuring that this is what my father is thinking about, this little tale and the book from which it came.
*
Vonda McIntyre's fantastic Nebula award winning novel The Moon and the Sun, is available as an ebook through the Book View Cafe site. A really great read, this book (as are, in fact the other books of hers featured there). (You have to register with the site, but why wouldn't you?)
