Ursula K. Le Guin: Telling It

“Interactivity in the sense of the viewer controlling the text is also nightmarish, when interpreted to mean that the viewer can rewrite the novel.  If you don’t like the end of Moby Dick you can change it.  You can make it happy.  Ahab kills the whale.  Ooowee.


“Readers can’t kill the whale.  They can only reread until they understand why Ahab collaborated with the whale to kill himself.  Readers don’t control the text: they genuinely interact with it.”

—from “The Question I Get Asked Most Often”



“Prose does not have meter.  Prose scrupulously avoids any noticeable regularity or pattern of stresses.  If prose acquires any noticeable meter for more than a sentence or so (just as if it rhymes noticeably), it stops being prose and becomes poetry.

“This is the only difference between prose and poetry that I have ever been certain of.”

—from “Stress-Rhythm in Poetry and Prose”



"Nobody who says, 'I told you so' has ever been, or will ever be, a hero."

--Ursula K. Le Guin,
from "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie"

A Taste or Two

Clay: Glazing and Trimming

Body parts, tails, nonfunctional whale-oracrina, faces of various sizes, potbellied merman, and bowls:

Images of a Day (The Slow Version)

Coffee out at the Point: sailing school weather, bright skies and light airs.

Summer's recommended reading: Homer's Iliad!

Garage art: the clay bits are mine.

I'm still getting over another round of illness--sore throat, cough, headaches, body aches, whatever--so the day has been a slow one with a coffee jaunt followed by garage-time, by old projects and new projects.

Old school depth gauge; fishing gear.

Salvage work: the larger 'blue boat'.

Photocopied art from Classical Greece: inspiration while using the old rowing machine.

Photocopied art from Classical Greece II: inspiration for sculpting heads.

Garage art: inspiration from Ayrton and Weil.

Waterhouse's "The Siren", I think.

Old wall-fish: stoneware; blue glazing.

Fresh whale: air-dry clay, first attempt/use.

Mermaid (rough): air-dry clay.