Octopus mittens

I just think these octopus mitten are pretty.

 

Recent books

The Complete Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper

I recently polished off Ian M. Banks‘ Consider Phlebas, about a changer named Horza; his Matter, a Culture novel about a shell world with multiple surfaces 1400 km apart; and his Transitions, which is not a book about the Culture but about hopping from one reality to another. I find his books a little hard to get into because it’s hard to care about what happens to the characters. I’ve read a couple of others and they seem very intellectual: Banks is a big-picture guy.

I read The Complete Fuzzy compendium of H. Beam Piper novels. The first is Little Fuzzy. The second is Fuzzy Sapiens. And the third is Fuzzies and Other People, which was discovered in manuscript many years after Piper’s unfortunate suicide.  They are old-fashioned space opera. Everyone smokes and drinks; women are called “girls” and work as secretaries. No one worries about alien diseases or incompatible biochemistry; but on the other hand, biochemistry and evolution are elements in the story. The stories also deal with greed and land grabs.  They were OK light reading and rather charming. They would also be suitable for young readers.

For fillers, I reread John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, an homage to Robert Heinlein but well done and not as obvious as Spider Robinson’s attempts, and Time Traps, a collection of time travel stories edited by Robert Silverberg, whose asides are full of himself as usual.

Finally, I read a couple of good science fiction cat stories from a big book of cat stories. The novella was Novice by James H. Schmitz, in which Telzey Amberdon first appears and makes telepathic contact with an alien species. The shorter story was “The Game of Rat and Dragon” by Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) from Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1955.

There’s a wrenching difference between the convoluted and rarefied worlds of Iain M. Banks and the straightforward stories by the other authors.

Cartoonless cat cartoons

Here’s a novel concept: the Cat Cartoon without the Cartoon.

Dec. 26:

Santa appears to be at the North Pole, sleigh piled with gifts, elves standing in the background looking on. The jolly old elf is holding the reins, looking on at his team of coursers who, this time, are cats.

The cats are in all manner of poses: sleeping, sitting, fighting, and just ignoring their own situation.

The title to the cartoon is: Christmas was a little late this year.

The Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten

For your amusement: The Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten.

And that Inverted Bowl of Skyblue Delf
That helpless lies upon the Pantry Shelf—
Lift not your eyes to It for help, for It
Is quite as empty as you are yourself.

Original quatrain:
And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die,
Lift not your hand to It for help—for It
Rolls on impotently as you or I.

Canadian art and the Group of Seven

This article, “White Feathers and Tangled Gardens,” is an expert from Ross King’s new book, Modern Spirits.

As we all know, their approach was novel:

…one critic cautioned that to paint a Canadian landscape under snow was “unpatriotic, untactful, and unwise.” But Snow I and Snow II unapologetically showed fir boughs weighed down by fresh snow that Harris depicted with luminous strokes of azure, mauve, salmon pink and cornflower blue.

"Snow" by Lawren Harris

Their colours were shocking:

As a connoisseur once admonished John Constable: “A good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown.” …Would Torontonians, nourished on fiddle-brown landscapes, be ready for works like The Tangled Garden or Autumn’s Garland?

Apparently not:

“that rough, splashy, meaningless, blatant, plastering and massing of unpleasant colours which seems to be a necessary evil in all Canadian art exhibitions these days…”

"Tangled Garden" by J. E. H. MacDonald

They were even accused of being limp-wristed “hermaphrodites” in spite of their canoeing, camping, and manly paintings.

"The Jack Pine" by Tom Thomson

As these paintings were being shown during the first world war, there was some discussion of why these apparently hale artists didn’t volunteer for the armed forces and of Thomson’s retreat into the forests of Algonquin Park. There, in the midst of a dangerous storm, he sketched one of his most famous paintings.

Thomson would turn this small sketch into one of his most famous paintings, The West Wind, in which the potent energies of nature are distilled into the whiplashing curves of the Jack pines. The painting is a scene of struggle, of an elemental tug-of-war between the dynamic and destructive forces that nearly killed him. If Canadians believed that what made them unique was their engagement with this hostile and unforgiving land that dictated the terms of human existence, then Thomson’s painting is an elegant image of this life-and-death encounter..

"The West Wind" by Tom Thomson

All in all, this book is more than a re-hashing of the usual biographical details. I’d like to read it.