The Mossy Skull

Doin’ that Rag

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:38:05 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Wade in the water
You’ll never get wet
If you keep on doing that rag.

–Robert Hunter

Circular Time

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:15:39 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

In which I digress (much) further about the not-coming apocalypse.

This is long. Sorry. I tried to break it into two parts, but it just wasn’t happening. Thanks in advance for your kind attention.

The Popol Vuh is the Mayan creation myth. The version available to us today was written in secret between the years 1554 and 1558 by three anonymous philosopher-priests of the Maya religion, during the early years of the Spanish occupation of Mexico, when Catholic missionaries under Friar Diego de Landa were systematically destroying all evidence they could find of indigenous religion and culture. In order to preserve it, the authors of the Popol Vuh spirited it away somewhere in the Guatemalan city of Chichicastenango (underneath a Christian altar, perhaps, as was a favorite tactic of the Maya, preserving the old beneath the new) until 1701, when it was discovered, copied, and translated from the original Roman alphabet transliteration of Quiché into Spanish by Francisco Ximenes, another Catholic friar. His copy is the only one that survives today.

All of which is to say that the contents of the Popol Vuh as we know them have been deeply, irrevocably compromised by the influence of a conquering culture. Some evidence mitigating against this has come to light fairly recently: a stucco frieze dating from before 100 BC has been uncovered in the ruined Mayan city of Mirador, which depicts in detail a scene from the Twin Gods cycle of the Popol Vuh myth. That’s some impressive continuity, considering what an incredibly diverse range culture and belief can be seen across mesoamerica—even from one Mayan sacred site to the next. Still, there is a huge gulf of uncertainty in the 1600 years between those two points, and in the 450 years between then and the winter solstice, 2012. And it’s exactly that kind of gulf from which new-agey doomsday conspiracy theories are born.

Read the rest of this entry »

Angry Cernunnos

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:36:15 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Happy Hallowe’en!

No Parking

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:04:39 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Is what this sign used to say, before I messed with it, when I found it in the woods full of bullet holes and being eaten by this tree:

Not sure what I’m going to do with it now. Already got a perfectly good, conveniently scalable mossy skull for graphic purposes. Probably not going to change it, if ever I get around to designing ye blog theme v.3.

So. Anybody got a noble cause for which they might require a picture of some words, any words at all, on a bullet-riddled street sign getting eaten by a tree?

No Apocalypse

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:30:43 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

I love the Mayans. That ought to be obvious to anybody who’s even looked at my WordPress theme. And I guess that makes me biased. Look back through the film category of this blog and there’s a lot of needley criticism of a lot of movies with Mayan themes. For a movie that’s blatant about it the way 2012 is blatant about it, I go into the thing harboring at the same time a sense of dread and a set of unattainable expectations. Which is, of course, not anything like the state of mind that causes people to make movies with Mayan themes. They do it because human sacrifice and murky prophecies penned by ancient mystics from lost civilizations are freaky and cool, and there are a lot of other people out there like me who drool over them.

And I guess because of the mystery involved, people’s imaginations seem to be more inspired by the iteratively more far-fetched folkloric misinterpretations of these myths than the real thing. Crystal skulls, for example, sure do seem a hell of a lot cooler in the popular perception than, say, mossy ones. And I can get behind that. I can sit and enjoy the popcorny adventure elements while managing to mostly ignore my nagging annoyance with the associated historical inaccuracies, cultural insensitivities, even the occasional new-agey hyperbolic pseudo-prophetic ego trip. For the sake of the story, I can look past that stuff. I know what poetic license is. And to a certain extent, the organic, evolving, cyclical nature of Mesoamerican and precolombian mythology lends itself perfectly to that kind of speculation. These are stories that propagate and develop through oral tradition, improvisation. Changing old stories to tell new truths, and vice-versa. There’s room for sprawling, reverently researched historical epic like Gary Jennings’ Aztec, transportive surrealistic allegory like Asturias’ Hombres de Maiz, absurdist, hallucinatory postmodern ultraviolence like Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex and intimate, intense contemporary fairytale like Aliette de Bodard’s “Blighted Heart”.

I love all that stuff. I love it to death. Which maybe means I’m less critical of Mayan influence in fiction than in film…or maybe it means that fiction’s better! Ha! But anyway.

All that said, every time I see the 2012 trailer, it gets harder to sit through, and my inclination to see it gets tinier. The best thing about that trailer is over before the titles have even finished rolling, and it’s this:

An actual, beautiful piece of Mayan relief art, CGI’d to look like it’s carved into the side of the three-million-foot high movie title logo. That one tenth of a second gives me tingles. The rest of it can go throw an aircraft carrier at itself for all I care. Because as far as I can tell, it doesn’t have a story. It may have a character or two, but mostly it appears to be about some CGI death and destruction. It doesn’t even seem to be bothering to use the mythology at all, even for entertainment purposes—it’s just a convenient date they can assign some doomsday to. And that kind of thing really does have the potential to make me mad. Because not only is it playing to the lowest common denominator at the expense of practically any resemblance to the noble, ancient art of mythmaking, and frankly bears more resemblance to a fireworks display or a line of cars slowing down to look at a wreck than it does to storytelling, but it’s perpetuating the worst, most irresponsible part of the stupid pop culture folklorification of Mayan culture. And it’s making me afraid that what I’m about to say actually still does need to be said.

There won’t be any %&*@ 2012 apocalypse.

Now, if we’re lucky, maybe there just might be a singularity. Or at least a global reawakening. I sure hope so, because for crying out loud, we could use one.

More about all that, and what the Mayan mythology and “prophecy” actually predicts, next week.

But the main point of this week’s angry anti-2012 rant is simply this: go ahead and entertain me with alien-powered crystal skulls and doomsday scenarios if you must—but couldn’t you at least try to engage with the underlying ideas a little bit? The history, the art and culture and mythology of the Mayans has so many fascinating, pertinent, complex and thought-provoking lessons to convey. Can’t we talk about that just a little?

More of that next week too.

Writing Spider

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:50:15 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Argiope aurantia

Yes, it is actually called that. Because of the white jagged line it sews into its web, which I suppose is for stability, but on the other hand may be there in order to contribute to the already hypnotic effect had by the tattoo on its back depicting the spider’s Lovecraftian collective alien hive-mind deity, Atlach-Nacha, aka Iktomi, aka Xochiquetzal.

Casey Jones

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:46:49 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Long have I been familiar with the Grateful Dead ballad of that name, at whose lyrics I once giggled mischievously and thought I was getting away with something as I listened on my walkman headphones in bed late of a school night:

Come round the bend
You know it’s the end
The fireman screams and
The engine just gleams
Drivin’ that train
High on cocaine
Casey Jones you better
watch your speed

Years later I heard the traditional version by Mississippi John Hurt, with that one eerie verse that always sticks in my head, about his wife’s cold practicality upon hearing of her husband’s death:

Mrs. Casey when she heard the news
Sitting on her bedside, she was lacing up her shoes
Children, children now hold your breath
You will draw a pension at your Papa’s death

And of course there’s the Johnny Cash version… and Josh Ritter has a line about him in To the Dogs or Whoever, which I figured was a reference to all these other roots folk songs, since that’s sort of his M.O…. So I always assumed Casey Jones to be a purely folkloric figure, like Clementine, Peggy-o, John Henry, Fennario and Ichabod Crane. Specifically, I thought he was ye archetypal train engineer, in blue and white striped overalls with soot all over his face and a corncob pipe in his mouth, whistling dixie as he drove The Little Engine that Could up that mountain.

Not so, as it turns out. In fact, Casey Jones was a real, flesh and blood train conductor in the 1890s, who was so dedicated to his job and so good at it that he ended up as a national hero, with his face on a stamp and everything. He once saved a little girl from getting run over by a train by climbing down out of the cab onto the cowcatcher and snatching her up right off the tracks. He drove the famous “cannonball run” at eighty miles an hour between Chicago and New Orleans. He had a special way of blowing a train whistle so that whenever a train he was driving pulled into a station, you knew it was him at the tiller. And in 1900, on a densely foggy night passing through Memphis, Tennessee, he stayed onboard a doomed locomotive to save its passengers and crew. There was a stationary train idling on the same track as his own, and though he couldn’t prevent the collision, he managed to slow the train enough before impact that he himself was the only casualty.

Hence all these songs about him.

And what do you know, there’s an even older version of the song, by a fellow named Wallace Saunders, who was a friend of the real Casey Jones and worked with him on the railroad, which tells the story of his death.

Trust research to destroy your childhood illusions.

To Eat and Drink of Trees

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:19:05 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

The newest entry in my occasional blog series on homebrewing is live on the Small Beer Press site.

In this one, I go on a pine-needle eating spree, brew some beer with spruce tips in place of hops, and then proceed to party like an 1830s New England housewife.

And by the way, just in case anyone is actually syndicating these, the location of the Literary Beer RSS feed has changed to the following:

http://www.smallbeerpress.com/?tag=literary-beer&feed=rss2

Scott Andrews Interview at the Odyssey Blog

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:36:38 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

The Odyssey Workshop LiveJournal blog has an enlightening interview with my pal Scott H. Andrews, a great writer, and the editor of the online magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He has some interesting stuff to say—which I wholly agree with—about what works and what doesn’t in crafting an engrossing story opening.

Lao Tsu On Nothing

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:42:13 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a vessel,
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.
We pierce doors and windows to make a house;
And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.
Therefore just as we take advantage of what is,
We should recognize the usefulness of what is not.
– Lao Tzu, On Nothing

Living Architecture and Art

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:01:07 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

O how dearly I wish I had posted this post:

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2009/09/living-growing-architecture.html

I am going out in the backyard and starting one of these for myself right now.

So jealous!

On Ouroboros, the Wheel, Constancy, Flux

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:55:30 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

So here we are. We know what we know. There are certain givens: time, matter, energy. We come out of them, we plod and stutter through them, we go back to them. There are also unknowns, and of these—their quantity, their breadth and scope—we haven’t got a clue. But we progress. We live. We add to the knowns. From within them, our discoveries seem vast. Yet our carvings away at the unknown, which ought to correspond in moment and consequence, after contemplation, after living, emerge as imperceptible. Death, God, Fate, Consciousness. We can be overwhelmed by these unknowns, we can proceed in spite of them, we can ignore them to our peril. We can fall back on what we know. Time, matter, energy. But more likely, more often, we fall back on what we are. Consciousness. Ephemeral, yes. Indeterminate, yes. But there. Present. A focal point of known and unknown, a pinhead upon which angels and mortals dance even though it can take them nowhere but where they are.

What is all this, exactly? I suppose it’s an argument against fear, and for striving. I look across the table, across the gulf from screen to screen, and there I find identities in the same situation, existing at the same summit of incomprehensible, familiar, unknowable, and inevitable. And sometimes I’m shocked at the far more tangible gulfs in ideology and apprehension that result from what is essentially the same. And other times I’m shocked any of us manage to communicate at all. But we’re all going to the same place: death. And we all came out of the same set of resources: matter, energy, life, the past. And we’re all trying to occupy the heads of our own pins with recourse only to those same resources. Trying to maintain equilibrium and to progress at the same time.

Sometimes I wish I could pull off my head, pull of my worldview, my set of both rational and irrational connections to life, matter, energy, the past and the unknowable, and plunk it on top of somebody else for a little while. On the other hand, the prospect of somebody, anybody, doing the same thing to me—no matter who it is, Ghandi or Dr. King or Einstein or Tesla or Marx or Erin or my father—frankly, terrifies me. I try to overcome that. I strive. Just like I take what I can get when it comes to the head-popping-off, head-hopping, etc. And I consider myself lucky, when it occurs to me to do so. And other times I hate myself, because it isn’t luck at all, it’s how you use what you’re given.

And that’s what striving is. We do what we can.

Forgive me. I realize I’ve been stating the obvious here, and just because I’m formulating it in these vague, mystical terms doesn’t make it any more meaningful. There are parts of this argument I’ve been having with myself that I can’t formulate except in my head, and occasionally, when the moment’s right, in person.

Ask me about it sometime.

On Ouroboros, the Wheel, Constancy, Flux

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:54:58 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

So here we are. We know what we know. There are certain givens: time, matter, energy. We come out of them, we plod and stutter through them, we go back to them. There are also unknowns, and of these–their quantity, their breadth and scope–we haven’t got a clue. But we progress. We live. We add to the knowns. From within them, our discoveries seem vast. Yet our carvings away at the unknown, which ought to correspond in moment and consequence, after contemplation, after living, emerge as imperceptible. Death, God, Fate, Consciousness. We can be overwhelmed by these unknowns, we can proceed in spite of them, we can ignore them to our peril. We can fall back on what we know. Time, matter, energy. But more likely, more often, we fall back on what we are. Consciousness. Ephemeral, yes. Indeterminate, yes. But there. Present. A focal point of known and unknown, a pinhead upon which angels and mortals dance even though it can take them nowhere but where they are.

Sometimes I wish I could pull off my head, pull of my worldview, my set of both rational and irrational connections to life, matter, energy, the past and the unknowable, and plunk it on top of somebody else for a little while. On the other hand, the prospect of somebody, anybody, doing the same thing to me–no matter who it is, Ghandi or Dr. King or Einstein or Tesla or Marx or Erin or my father–frankly, terrifies me. I try to overcome that. I strive. Just like I take what I can get when it comes to the head-popping-off, head-hopping, etc. And I consider myself lucky, when it occurs to me to do so. And other times I hate myself, because it isn’t luck at all, it’s how you use what you’re given.

And that’s what striving is. We do what we can.

Ask me about it sometime.

Yellow-Tipped Coral Mushroom

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:16:14 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Ramaria formosa
Haydenville, MA, mixed hemlock, eastern red oak forest, 20 yards from a beaver swamp.

A poisonous mushroom the size of my head with the texture of freshly lab-grown human flesh. This is the same mushroom from two angles. Click the thumbs to look at the full-size photos.

I’m finally halfway learning how to use the manual focus on my camera, which is no doubt clear from the encroachment of blur into these photos. Thing looks like some kind of crazy colony of sentient interdimensional alien mushrooms manipulating the fabric of space-time.

Still fuzzy about F-stop.

Painted Suillius

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:53:18 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Suillius pictus
Graves Farm Sanctuary, Haydenville, MA, mixed hemlock, white pine and birch forest.

The suillii were everywhere in the woods this week—the driest, hottest week in awhile. The chanterelles, which thrived on practically the same ground just a few weeks before, were barely in evidence.

I’ve eaten painted suillius many times, prepared several ways—raw, as a pizza topping, sauteed in olive oil and butter and chilled for summer sandwiches–and I prefer them to every other mushroom I’ve tasted. With the possible exception of porcini pickled in light vinegar. Raw, they taste like what I imagined the ideal wild mushroom to taste like before I ever had one: nutty, earthy in the way of a portobello, rich like slightly burned butter, yet light in texture. The earthiness they impart to a robust, chunky pizza sauce…well, mmm. And sauteed, they turn creamy dark brown and become thick and chewy like a sauteed portobello. I make myself drool thinking about it.

Still, though—don’t go eating mushrooms you find in the woods, even if they look exactly like this, unless you actually know what you’re doing. Thanks.

Of Hooves and Handcannons

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 23:17:57 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Tonight at midnight, “Between Two Treasons”, the second in my hopefully never-ending series of short stories about those lovable, man-eating, gun-slinging, ten-gallon-hat-wearing, prick-devouring centaurs goes live in issue #23 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

It is not for the faint-at-heart. Or the underage.

But please go read it anyway.

And the first one too, if you like—which is here.

This is some gloriously beer-addled 17th-century monk’s copy of a copy of a long-lost ancient jewelry engraving depicting a cloven-hoofed centaur residing at the center of the labyrinth of Daedalus. Whoever that monk was, if I ever manage to hunt down his moldering skull, I will give it a fat, wet smooch.

Transcendental Gastronomy

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:29:14 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

What follows are Brillat-Savarin’s rules for achieving the perfect meal. As far as I’m concerned, among the poetry of the rational they ought to be considered on par with The Art of War, Ovid’s Art of Love, and the Phaedo. They open with a solemn invocation to a Muse of Eating invented on the spot, and they close with immortality—but what’s in between is the stuff of everyday, run-of-the-mill happiness.

But the impatient reader may ask, how, in this year of grace 1825, must a meal be contrived in order to combine the conditions which procure the pleasures of the table in the highest degree?

That question I am about to answer. Compose yourselves, readers, and pay attention; Gasterea inspires me, the prettiest of all the Muses; I shall be clearer than an oracle, and my precepts will go down the ages.

Let the number of guests be not more than twelve, so that the talk may be constantly general;

Let them be chosen with different occupations but similar tastes, and with such points of contact that the odious formalities of introduction can be dispensed with;

Let the dining-room be well lighted, the cloth impeccably white, and the atmosphere maintained at a temperature of from sixty to seventy degrees;

Let the men be witty without being too pretentious, and the women charming without being too coquettish;

Let the dishes be few in number, but exquisitely choice, and the wines of the first quality, each in its class;

Let the service of the former proceed from the most substantial to the lightest, and of the latter, from the mildest to the most perfumed;

Let the progress of the meal be slow, for dinner is the last business of the day; and let the guests conduct themselves like travellers due to reach their destination together;

Let the coffee be piping hot, and the liqueurs chosen by a connoisseur;

Let the drawing-room be large enough to allow a game at cards to be arranged for those who cannot do without, yet still leave space for postprandial conversations;

Let the guests be detained by the charms of the company and sustained by the hope that the evening will not pass without some further pleasure;

Let the tea be not too strong, the toast artistically buttered, and the punch mixed with proper care;

Let retirement begin not earlier than eleven o’clock, but by midnight let everyone be in bed.

Whoever has been present at a meal fulfilling all these conditions may claim to have witnessed his own apotheosis; and for each of them who which is forgotten or ignored, the guests will suffer a proportionate decrease of pleasure.

—Jean-Anthelme Brillat Savarin, Physiologie du goût, ou Méditations de gastronomie transcendante

It’s hard not to notice: the man’s got an ego on him. But he’s not wrong, is he? This stuff is gold. Interpret some of these things metaphorically, the way I do, say, that line about giants in the bible, and he could really be talking about my local writing group in Noho the other week, a recent weekend with my gaming pals, a night of blissful exhaustion and bisquick pizza cooked over a propane burner on a trail somewhere under the stars, or a protracted dinner with the Homeless Moon. Some of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

Angry

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 02:01:58 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

You’ve probably heard by now about the Bush Administration covering up evidence of melting icecaps.

20,000 musk oxen starved to death in the arctic because of a phenomenon called a “rain on snow event”. Rain falls on snow, turns to ice. Oxen come by and try to dig with their hooves for the grass under the snow. But they can’t break the ice. So they die.

Meanwhile, New England is having one of the coldest, wettest summers ever. There’s mold growing in my closet and I can’t get the moisture out of the carpet. And I live on the third floor.

And around me all I hear about how it’s too much work to change people’s habits, and we’re all screwed anyway ’cause nothing we do will take effect for another fifty years, and we don’t live in the arctic or the tropics or a third world country, so why bother.

So! It’s time for another big long ranting list of stuff I really hope I can get you to start doing to reduce your environmental footprint, in hopes of preventing myself from drowning in impotent rage and guilt. Fun!

Compost. It’s not that hard. You already learned how to recycle. It’s just one more container. Corn husks, banana peels, apple cores, carrot stubs, coffee grounds, tea leaves, untreated paper, eggshells, etc., etc. Keep it in a sealed tub; when the tub fills up, empty it in a heap in the backyard, in the same place you put your leaves and grass clippings. Aerate it once in awhile with a shovel. In a couple months, you’ll have some fine, fertile dirt. No, animals won’t get into it–not if you don’t try to compost bones or meat. No, you don’t have to lay off during the winter. Cold slows down decomposition, but doesn’t stop it. Decomposition produces heat!

You can even compost if you don’t have a backyard. Learn about vermiculture. It is super cool.

Consume less. For example:

Get ice cream in a cone instead of a cup. Ice cream cones taste good and are fun. And then you don’t have to throw away the cup and spoon.
Stop buying bottled water. Filter your own water, and drink it from a container you’re not going to throw away when it’s empty. Recycling isn’t perfect, and chances are you’re just paying them to bottle tap water anyway. And ship it to you from Fiji. Expending fossil fuels in the process.
Stop buying coffee. See above. I don’t care if it comes in recyclable unbleached paper cups now. Make your own. Then you don’t need a recyclable unbleached paper cup.

Recycle. Learn the rules of recycling in your town, and follow them, for real, all the time. If you work in a different town than you live in, learn those rules too. Hassle your co-workers about it. If they see you picking their plastic and aluminum out of the trash enough times, they’ll quit throwing it away out of guilt. I’ve seen it happen. No, you should not feel guilty for making other people feel guilty. Guilt is the only thing that’s going to get anybody to change. Why else do you think Bush covered up those satellite photos?

Reuse. Brew beer like me! Then you don’t even need to recycle. Drink out of the same glass bottles over and over until they break.

Buy food grown locally. Tomatoes shipped to your megamart from a thousand miles away taste like cardboard. Local tomatoes by comparison are a revelation on the tongue, and nobody had to spray them with chemicals or burn a lot of gas getting them to you. The same is true of pretty much everything else you can get at the supermarket. If you can buy something locally, do so.

Grow food. It’s not hard. You have a window. Get a window box. Plant herbs.

Read labels. Don’t just accept that because your dishwashing detergent now comes with green dye and a tree on the label that you’re allowed to feel better about yourself. Repackaging the same horrible stuff and trying to pretend like it’s environmentally conscious is just as bad as trying to cover up the satellite photos of the receding arctic ice.

Educate people. If any of what I am saying is getting through to you, try to get it through to somebody else. Even if it pisses them off. Think of it this way: not trying might keep them happy, but it pisses me off.

Suck it up. Do without.

Trade in your gas guzzler. I’m doing it. Obviously it’s not for everyone, but if they’re going to throw money at us, might as well try and catch some of it. If you have a big old car, trade it in for a little new car. Doesn’t have to be a hybrid or anything. Just a bottom-of-the-line, sensible hatchback.

I could go on. I still feel guilty and filled with impotent rage. But I’ve probably alienated you by now anyway. And I’m not sorry.

“Starlings” in Abyss & Apex #31

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:14:10 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

My near-future-apocalyptic magic realist short story “Starlings” is now live in Abyss & Apex #31. (Which issue also happens to feature a very cool poem by LCRW author Daniel A. Rabuzzi—lucky me!)

“Starlings” is a story about climate change, tech withdrawal, and memory—themes all very near to my heart. With the possible exception of “Construction-Paper Moon”, in no other story of mine have I laid my own emotional evolution so open on the page.

Please go read it, and enjoy!

TNEO 2009 Flash Fiction Slam

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:58:09 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

is tonight, at the Barnes & Noble on 1741 Willow Street in Manchester, NH. Four of the five writers who make up the Homeless Moon will be there, plus a whole bunch of other clever and hilarious people, each of whom will tell a story in five minutes or less. It’s great, silly fun.

And I’ll be reading a new William-O story. Woo!

William-O the Pirate King, if you are unfamiliar, is my swashbuckling, one-eyed cat hero, who battles foes both real and supernatural in defense of his farm and family.

If you can’t make it, fear not, I’ll probably post an mp3 of the new story here in a couple of weeks.

Chanterelles

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 15:00:10 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Canthalrellus cibarius
Hemlock and oak forest, Graves Farm Wildlife Sanctuary, Haydenville, MA

Chanterelles, after truffles and morels, are among the most sought-after of wild edible mushrooms. I have seen them for sale at Whole Pocketbook for $50 a pound. I have seen them used on Iron Chef. And I’ve seen them growing in Western Mass—on moist but not swampy ground, in deep shade, almost exclusively within 20 yards of a stream or pool. They appear starting in late June and are gone by the end of September, and by virtue of their creamy, pale orange color, I’ve been noticing them in the woods ever since I moved here. I had not, until this summer, dared to pick any myself, because they have a vomit-inducing near look-alike, the Jack o’Lantern Mushroom, Omphalotus olearius.

The differences between the two, I have finally learned sufficient to be confident of not picking the wrong one, are as follows. Chanterelles have forking gills, Jack o’Lanterns don’t. Jack o’Lanterns are likely to be found growing on tree trunks, stumps, and partly-buried roots. Chanterelles are more likely to appear on open ground. And Jack o’Lantern gills, or so I am told, glow in the dark.

So I picked some, finally. And ate them. When raw, they are lemony at first, with a peppery/bitter finish. Once cooked, they are milder, earthy. One of the things for which they are so prized is their firm texture, which allows them to stand up better to more robust compliments.

I put them on a pizza:

Note: Please don’t take the above as any kind of justification for going out and picking mushrooms without a guidebook or guide. I will not be responsible if you poison yourself.

Competentest Self-Promotion Ever

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:48:42 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Heh.

I was so busy arranging my weekend of Readercon and chapbook and family reunion running about that I forgot to come on here and mention in advance the fact that I got to participate in two readings while at Readercon, not to mention stand about at the Small Beer table chatting up the fancy folk.

One of the readings was for Interfictions 2, which I am not in, but for which they were nice enough to let me read anyway for some inexplicable reason.

The other was for Beneath Ceaseless Skies, wherein when I preambled the bordello scene from “Of Thinking Being and Beast” with the fact that it was set in a world where centaurs had conquered the American West, the people in the seats actually applauded. Who would have thought? Not I… even though I must confess the seats were somewhat packed with ringers.

Also: the hotel pub had Sam Adams Brick Red on tap. Mmm.

“May the devil’s head-cook conjure my bumgut into a pair of bellows”

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:11:58 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

For the stories in our second chapbook, each of us at The Homeless Moon chose as inspiration a fictional setting. Here’s the first scene of mine, “The Cannon and the Prophetess”:

One Kestrel pronounced the last phrase of the sonnet he had been reciting for the Duchess of Ennasin, and the crowd of loungers who made up her court erupted in applause. Acknowledging their flattery, he lowered himself to one knee.

“No, no,” said the Duchess, twiddling her manicured fingers to indicate he should arise. “You mustn’t prostrate yourself. Your primitive origins are of no consequence—you outrank me, Your Majesty!”

The assembled nobles tittered at their hostess’s kind condescension.

With an abruptness inappropriate to tact—but which he had come to know would be expected, secretly desired, of an educated savage such as himself—One Kestrel surged to his feet like a predator ready to strike. The bones and beads sewn in his robes of state rattled satisfactorily, the brilliant feathers of his royal headdress rippled, and he allowed his eyes to flash just so.

The nobles gasped, recoiling; this time, the nervous laughter of the Duchess betrayed an underlying terror. “My dear Captain Saturno, you are to be commended on such a magnificent find! If only you would allow me to purchase him from you.”

Captain Saturno took a knee himself. Resplendent in his shining steel cuirass and waxed moustache, he made a flourish, and taking her offered hand, placed his lips to her ring. “Your praise is acknowledged most humbly—but I am afraid King Kestrel cannot linger, for he is called away on an engagement at another court—and I’m sure Your Eminence could not wish to sully His Majesty’s reputation by making him late.”

“At the very least,” the flush Duchess begged, “allow me to offer His Majesty a parting gift—a boon. Name anything! It shall be wrapped and placed in his flagship’s stateroom, where my court’s generous donations to his cause already await.”

One Kestrel drew back overeducated lips from filed teeth, and throwing a ravenous glance at his master and keeper, uttered that too-familiar entreaty with which he’d caused himself to be expunged from so many a court. “There is one small secret I dearly desire. I can only
further impose on Your Eminence’s hospitality in this: if you would, provide me with your military’s recipe for gunpowder.”

Amidst the ensuing uproar, Saturno clutched One Kestrel by the elbow and propelled him from the court. His face was bloodless, blank—but whether with rage or something else, One Kestrel didn’t know.

Once they were safe aboard the caravel Constança, Captain Saturno barked orders to throw off the moorings and get underway. He escorted His Primitive Majesty One Kestrel, King of America, to his sumptuous, gift-strewn lodgings in the brig, shoved him inside, and slammed the door.

And here are the relevant lines from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, from which I took my inspiration:

Pantagruel then asked what sort of people dwelt in that damned island. They are, answered Xenomanes, all hypocrites, holy mountebanks, tumblers of beads, mumblers of ave-marias, spiritual comedians, sham saints, hermits, all of them poor rogues who, like the hermit of Lormont between Blaye and Bordeaux, live wholly on alms given them by passengers. Catch me there if you can, cried Panurge; may the devil’s head-cook conjure my bumgut into a pair of bellows if ever you find me among them! Hermits, sham saints, living forms of mortification, holy mountebanks, avaunt! in the name of your father Satan, get out of my sight! When the devil’s a hog, you shall eat bacon.

I’m not going to make any attempt to synthesize one with the other; chances are it would turn out a disaster, and anyway I’d much rather just encourage you to read the story and form your own opinions.

So instead, I’ll close with Gustave Doré’s utterly demented evil jester illustration to Rabelais’ prologue, which starts like this:

Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my writings)….

200 Chapbooks Equals Heavy

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:24:16 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Particularly when they are twice as big! Last year’s Homeless Moon chapbook weighed in at 44 pages. This year’s: 80. The poor woman working the register at the printers nearly killed herself trying to get them up onto the counter.

Two weeks remain until Readercon and the “official” release. In the meantime, we will be sending out a few advance copies for review and/or to wedge under your chair legs so they don’t wobble. I am setting ten copies aside for ye F&SFesque blog promo. If you want one, and are willing to write a bit of a blog entry about what you thought of it, ask. If you are not the eleventh person to do so, you’ll get one.

Otherwise, you’ll just have to wait the two weeks and paypal me the two bucks for shipping. Less than that, even, if you’d prefer the electronic version. Not sure exactly when that’ll come off. But soon–in the next couple days. When it does, you’ll see it here.

Hemlock Varnish Mushroom

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:13:48 GMT

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Ganoderma tsugae
Mt. Toby Reservation, Sunderland, MA

These are smooth and soft to the touch, firm like a piece of cork. They grow pretty exclusively on hemlock—living wood or rotten. They’re inedible, but are ascribed medicinal properties when taken in the form of a tea or extract. Have not tried that yet.

I also read of one guy who puts it in his homebrew. Haven’t tried that either.

Before they get bigger, they look like this. This is from the other side of Mt. Toby back in May.