this isn’t going to be any kind of specialized blog: i’ll be typing about things i think i know a little about(and find out, possibly, that i know less than i thought i did)… but whatever comes up, all comments will be welcome and conversations more than welcome (reference the two old guys chatting in the above picture)… i love books, hence the picture of the huge library, which somewhat resembles the one in the Benedictine Abbey in Mt. Angel, Oregon… i’m an ex mechanic, geologist, musician, cannery worker, and currently, reader… i’m working through Bulwer-Lyyton’s “My Novel”, but it’s a thousand pages long and it will be awhile before i finish it. if i do… so far it’s quite funny; Lyyton has a sort of Victorian sleight of hand to his humor that reminds a little of Stephen Potter, in his various excursions into English humor, sic: “Gamesmanship”… i am meandering here, i see, so i’ll wait a bit before typing more…
Day two
of the Muddle-T blog and muddle won’t write. He thinks this blog is too hard to find…and I think he has a point…we have trouble finding it, how will anyone else? When muddled, we ponder…so day 2 is ponder day.
The Beeman of Orn
Frank Stockton(1834-1902)… Not terribly well known, Frank S. is most famed for his “The Lady and The Tiger”. His writing stule, and mode of thought, tend toward the ironic(sarcastic, sometimes) and the wryly humorous. Clear, ostensibly shallow, his stories leave a kind of piquant aftertaste, like that experienced when biting into a lemon, having supposed that it was an orange. At the same time, they have a kind of moralistic flavor, as though originally they were intended to be admonitory, but decidedd to stop for a picnic under the Irrelevance Tree… As a writer, he might be best described as an amalgam of Thurber, Steinbeck, and Lord Dunsany. He’s a master prestidigitator, in a way, arranging his plots so that they often take unexpected turns at unexpected junctures. In “Christmas Before Last”, a joly marinder with his own ship (in the style of the 17th c.) is hijacked by a band of perates with whom he and his crew exchange vessels. Subsequently, after several bizarre adventures, they reach port, not at Christmas time as previously planned, but at Christmas a year before they left.
The first tale deals with a country parson(Minor Canon), his unappreciative flack, and a lonely Griffin. An unexpected turn concerns the Grifffin absconding with a statue of himself so as to have something to admire in the forsaken desert in which he resides.
In this collection there are eight stories populated by kings, queens, princes, princesses, magicians, dwarves, and a full range of other fairy tale dinizens.
Stockton was a sometime journalist and his output wasn’t limited to short stories. His novels are written in the same kind of unpredictable fashion, the otherwise standard characters displaying startling and unusual quirks at unpredictable intervals. Some of them can be found at the Gutenberg website… His most famous book was, arguably, Rudder Grange…
mudpuddle soup 