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First Comes Winter: Get a Rake.

December 30, 2014 by Exangel

by Debbie Naples.

Noise and death normally don’t go together in most people’s minds. In most people’s minds, death is a startling unending silence, an infinite pause, a landscape of deafness…death has no sound. Unless you consider the leaf blower and dead leaves, and the wood chipper and dead trees, and the tree stump and the chain saw…death attracts noise and machines in this century like no other grim reaper ever did. In Egypt professionals were hired to howl and mourn, there was so little noise of torment back then.

The howling screams of the dead or how a leaf blower can rend silence into fragments all the way into December is one thing, and then comes the snow blower, and if you are Scrooge, the Christmas carolers.

But that’s it. Meanwhile it’s winter and it’s quiet. The big wide heart of the sun has withdrawn and fails to melt the icebergs that seem to appear everywhere, the flowers are dead, sleeping, covered in snow, kept in greenhouses or your actual house. The Winterberry is bright red and shining in the parking lot, the rustle of leaves is gone, tree bark is exposed, the whisper of grass is a dream….The wind sweeps the snow and rolls over the desiccated gardens, all there is to hear is a hiss or a distant whistle. No trumpets blare at the rose glow sunrise of January or the orange burn of twilight…just quiet. Everyone fun is hibernating: dancing bears, cosmos, daises, water features, lily leaf beetles; everyone is either in bed or dead.

That’s winter. Unless you are human, and then you must find ways other than the ski slopes to imbibe the joyousness of cold freezing single digit temperatures and greet each day with a smile on your face. And so….

The ‘winter-interest’ or ’bitter-winter-interest’ shrubs are in full use. The red twig dogwood, with its red twigs…the Kerria japonica with its insanely bright green stems, insane in contrast to the brown gray white collection in the yard, and the pines among other nonbrowning plants. Still the silence is deafening.

Though most plant life, beyond the evergreens, that has not disintegrated, is clinging  to the vine with small plant claws in an earth as hard as granite, the beauty of twisted dead things, like Hellenic statues, faces contorted in agony and age, hopefully becomes apparent,… or else you go to the pub and eagerly await the vernal equinox.

 

Filed Under: EAP: The Magazine, Winter 2015: Firsts.

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In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

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