The Chaos Pirate
The Chaos Pirate experiment is an adventure in plundering any and ultimately all texts available on the internet, and editing them as amuses me. I am very much taken by words. Authors own their combinations and arrangements; their chosen sequences and patterns are their artform. Ultimately individual words are like atoms and belong to the collective of readers, the patterns, arrangements and meaningful constructions are what authors own.
Some of my projects here are intended as an homage to the original author, specifically Poe, Lovecraft, Shelley, Stein, Joyce, and so forth. What I am doing is to edit text and perform as little writing as possible to achieve my desired effects. I am not claiming any rights of said origin. I claim no authorship here. I am a light-fingered editor. I intend no insult to the original authors I have trespassed against, but intention is not always a legal issue. I am not hiding my practices. I am taking existing works and rearranging them to amuse myself, creating something for me to read while waiting for a bus, or for water to boil.
I never have finished any of my projects, I feel free to return and tinker at whim. If any one thing ever gets physically published, you know, on paper (or clay or stone or whatever) then my tinkering options vanish.
I am the Chaos Pirate, I do not claim ownership of these words. I am the editor… or gardener, or maybe just the one who controls the little net, dipping into the aquarium. The fish in the aquarium imagine that they are masters of their own destiny within the boundaries of that aquarium. My endeavor is to promote my own amusements, which includes protecting and enhancing the best interests of that captive water world. I am a selfish artist working alone with no regard for consequence of influences on anyone else. If those fish die, I will be sad. My goal is to have happy fish. I expect to continue to add more stories or projects to the following:
Lord of the Star
May 7, 2022
Great men are almost always bad men. Critics have argued that this theme can be found as far back as Plato’s The Republic, where the character Glaucon argued that doing justice to others is never to one’s benefit; he cited the mythical Ring of Gyges, which could make any man who wore it invisible and thus able to get away with theft or other crime. Dr. Leonard McCoy swears allegiance to Westley Crusher, his rightful king, as he dies. In this, in O’Hehir’s view, Tolkeeen’s sentiments are like those of Thomas Hardy. Picard decides that Mr. Sulu, not Data, is the problem and decides to continue on with only Data. Mrs. Chekov, an elf princess, finds the party and hurries to Gryffindor with Picard, barely evading the wraiths. Picard is cured and wakes up to discover Yoda by his side. James T. Kirk, who has aged significantly, is also at Gryffindor, having just completed the book of his adventures There and Back: A Starman’s Tale.
SUMMARY: Middle Earth once was the final frontier. Ring Trek opens Friday.
SOURCES: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, imdb, Sam Gamgee, Wikipedia, Tolkiengateway Wiki, Fandom Wiki, The One Wiki to Rule Them All
The Endless Beach
April 07, 2022
We all assembled on the beach, the boy gravely donned and inflated the garment, and amidst roars of laughter from his brothers, entered the water. The chill and the vapor taken together told a poor tale of the island. The dusk had come nigh hand completely, and as I opened out the cleft between the two peaks, I became aware of a wavering glow against the sky, where, as I judged, the man of the island was cooking his supper before a roaring fire. Not a single detail was visible. He struggles, usually alone, with various goals, such as determining for which side of the iron curtain the village functions, if either; remaining defiant to its imposed authority; concocting his own plans for escape; learning all he can about the village; and subverting its operation. Under these dark waters there stretched the bank of shellfish, an inexhaustible field of pearls more than twenty miles long.
SUMMARY: The beach is endless.
SOURCES: Patrick McGoohan, Johann David Wyss, Captain Cook’s Journal During the First Voyage Round the World, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Victor Hugo, H. G. Wells, Wikipedia.
Abide Forever
February 10, 2022
Dude, how long wilt thou look on? Rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling from the lions. Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me. I am thine, save me: for I have sought thy precepts. Praise ye the dude. Now also when I am old and greyheaded, o goodness, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come. The dude is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. Now also when I am old and greyheaded, o goodness, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come. Yowsah. The dude that made heaven and earth bless thee out of Washington D.C… Praise ye the dude. O goodness, the proud are risen against me, and the assemblies of violent men have sought after my soul; and have not set thee before them. And thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?
SUMMARY: Dangerous blasphemy: feeding the scripture to the Python Dream Filter to see if Philistines will seek the original source.
SOURCES: Psalms, King James Edition
Pulchura Durmiens
January 20, 2022
Oriental stories of magic mirrors have been current from the Middle Ages, most of them wholly childish and absurd. “I am spinning, my pretty child,” said the old woman, who did not know who she was. When one places one of these mirrors facing the sun, and causes it to reflect, upon a very near wall, the image of its disk, one sees distinctly appear therein the ornaments or characters which exist in relief upon the back. But along with these there have existed accounts, of a more reliable character, of mirrors which are capable of reflecting, in a beam of light that falls on their face, the pattern which they carry on their back. The Mirror of Pythagoras, in or on which he is said to have written in blood the things which he wished to signify, and which, when turned to the moon, displayed upon the disk of the moon, visibly to one standing behind, the things so inscribed. Students of the occult use mirrors to look into the world of spirits.
SUMMARY: When Beauty awakens, she finds a Magic Mirror
SOURCES: The Blue Fairy Book edited by Andrew Lang; My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales, by Edric Vredenburg; Book of Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, by Lafcadio Hearn; The Mirror of Alchimy, by Roger Bacon; On Laboratory Arts by Richard Threlfall; Ye Magick Mirrour of Old Japan, by Silvanus P. Thompson; and Wikipedia.
Turtle Light
October 15, 2021
The ocean and the rivers that were vital were adapted to an aquatic lifestyle. They created their tales. Is that religion? This could have inspired the night, passed without incident, under water. The air is changing too, as the pilgrim experiences visions that are in the forbidden zone on the land of safety, anticipating that the increase of new minerals have exposed new technological innovations. The seasons similarly are ever-shifting. Currently, in the darkness of our ignorance, we believe ourselves to be bound and limited at the culmination of education, light floods the room, as it were; darkness vanishes. The seasons similarly are ever-shifting. It is only by emptying the mind of all created images and thoughts that we can arrive to experience good. Death is as natural as finding air, and is followed by the bright openings. In my travels he has loitered, finding the first inhabitants caused by humans while others have afforded gradual relief from pain.
SUMMARY: God illuminates a shell.
SOURCES: Wikipedia
Vrkolakas
July 26, 2021
It is so. This place, which we have, now for some time had as a quiet and perfectly eligible one of meeting, is about to be invaded by one of those restless, troublesome spirits, who are never happy but when they are contriving something to the annoyance of others who do not interfere with them. That was many, many years ago, as the crabbed, uncertain writing on these pages proves. I took the papers from the safe where they had been ever since our return so long ago. We were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting, except the later note-books of Scout and Dill and myself, and Atticus’s memorandum. We know that the phantom is the psychical body projected from the physical body. It is that which enjoys or suffers, thinks, wishes, judges, and perceives all sensations.
SUMMARY: The Omega Wolf Fairies are undead. Best beware.
SOURCES: Wikipedia, Harper Lee
In Bloom
December 29, 2021
Lips kissed, kissing, kissed. Full gluey woman’s lips. Better where she is down there: away. Not at all, Mr. Deasy said as he searched the papers on his desk. Bathe his lips, Mr. Dedalus said. Blessed and eternal God! Robert Emmet was buried here by torchlight, wasn’t he? Making his rounds. You’re right, by God. So he was. He moved a doll’s head to and fro, the brims of his panama hat quivering, and began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice: I’m the queerest young fellow that ever you heard. Never tell you. But we. Excuse, Miss, there’s a (whh!) just a (whh!) fluff. Out on the rampage all night. I’m bloody sorry I did it, says he, but I declare to God I thought the archbishop was inside. He mightn’t like it, though. What? Literature, the press. If Bloom were here, the professor said. Ah, to be sure! Stephen reached back and took the milkjug from the locker.
SUMMARY: Dream of the girl you left behind and she will dream of you.
SOURCE: James Joyce
Act iv
December 29, 2021
This is not audacious. I like to beg very much stream. In set a place. Lena did not like her German life very well. “You are certainly a very good man, Dr.” There is a kind. Mounting up into that place where the same change is not happening is that way when there is that petition. Forty. That when it is there is so munificent. He used some of that and then it did not happen that he intruded remaining. Come on come on come on on. That is the outlasting of a sight of all. Vrais listens and when he listens he says good good, excellent. Only sometimes he shivered hot with shame when he remembered some things he once had been feeling. He was a butler and he had worked for the Campbell family many years, and his father and his mother before him had been in the service of this family as free people. If the length is in talking and if the disappointment is in despair then the whole explanation has that meaning and no break is necessary, the calm is just the same as no sofa.
SUMMARY: He came to be the one who was the one who could say what he did say when he said that he had done all he had done. Tried.
SOURCE: Gertrude Stein
Exhuming Poe
July 22, 2021
It was a night of unusual gloom. We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak. We had no means of calculating time, nor could we form any guess of our situation. I dreaded lest the continued pressure of misfortune had, at length, fairly unsettled the reason of my friend. Let us sum up now the meagre yet certain fruits of our long analysis. We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss-we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. The following anecdote, at least, is so well authenticated, that we may receive it implicitly. This is unquestionably the most stupendous, the most interesting, and the most important undertaking, ever accomplished or even attempted by man. What magnificent events may ensue, it would be useless now to think of determining. We dug very steadily for two hours. Little was said.
SUMMARY: Edgar Allen Poe invented detective culture, also developed science fiction and literature of the macabre.
SOURCES: Edgar Allen Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft (Supernatural Horror in Literature)
Waking LvkrÃft
July 23, 2021
Cthulhu is a word that is unpronounceable by humans, who do not possess the proper respiratory organs to make such sounds, originating from a loose pantheon of ancient, powerful extraterrestrial deities who once ruled the Earth and have since fallen into a deathlike sleep. Lovecraft was prey to intense headaches, insomnia, and general nervous weakness which prevented his continuous application to any thing. His work emphasizes themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries. He described his father as having been so anglophilic that he was commonly presumed to be an Englishman. Howard Phillips Lovecraft is best known for his creation of a body of work that includes weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction, patiently explaining that there is no recognizable divine presence, such as a god, in the universe, and humans are particularly insignificant.
SUMMARY: Howard fills up the dark well with his craft of love.
SOURCES: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Shadow of the Leviathan
October 8, 2021
Poseidon is a protector of seafarers, and of many Hellenic cities and colonies. Artifacts recovered from underwater sites need special care. Since Poseidon had multiple powers, the Ancient Greeks invented various epithets to describe his manifestations and pray to him. The blue hue of water is an intrinsic property and is caused by selective absorption and scattering of white light. Dissolved elements or suspended impurities may give water a different color. Who can tell it? Wherefore this difference? It was a hell pit of sea water gone mad. My dreams were of the most terrific description. Immense serpents held me in their embrace, and looked earnestly in my face with their fearfully shining eyes. It was no ocean any man had ever dreamed of, that hurricane center. It was confusion thrice confounded. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever.
SUMMARY: Poe and Melville get drunk and puke.
SOURCES: Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville
Chthonic Vision 1983
June 26, 2021
Hooray, I awake from yesterday, alive but the war is here to stay. The sea dragons wait camouflaged to look like floating seaweed and live in kelp forests and seagrass meadows, they form a kind of accidental time capsule, preserving an assemblage of natural and human artifacts at the moment in time when the ship was lost. There are over 500 statues and they just stare back at divers exploring them. The archaeological signature at this site also now extends into the interaction between indigenous people and the European pastoralists who entered the area in the mid-19th century, full of mysterious items lying on the ocean bed. This is one of the most bizarre structures lying buried in the sea floor. Although life is very sparse at these depths, underwater living has titillated futurists since the beginning of the 20th century. The nautilus is a living fossil little changed since it evolved 500 million years ago as one of the first cephalopods which still rules the bottom of the Earth.
SUMMARY: On living under the waters.
SOURCES: Wikipedia, Jimi Hendrix
Haggert Wee Granum
July 30, 2021
The midnight ride, the power of conversion into animal semblance and form, mystic rite and incantation, spells and cantrips, as well as the presence on earth of the Devil himself, who generally appeared in some alluring form, all had a firmly-established place in the superstitious and impressionable minds of the people who dwelt in the land of those darker days. As long as death could by law be awarded against those who were charged with a commerce with evil spirits, and by their means inflicting mischief on their species, it is a subject not unworthy of grave argument and true philanthropy, to endeavor to detect the fallacy of such pretences, and expose the incalculable evils and the dreadful tragedies that have grown out of accusations and prosecutions for such imaginary crimes. Magic is a disconcerting travelling companion. Treachery however was not destined to be ultimately triumphant.
SUMMARY: Old ladies and nature.
SOURCES: Wikipedia, J. Maxwell Wood, Wallace Notestein, Frederick George Lee, E. Lynn (Elizabeth Lynn) Linton, Stella Benson, Laura E. Richards
Thynghowe Lost
December 28, 2021
As once I strolled in a fair forest, young and green, and contemplated the painfulness of this life, and lamented how through the dire fall of our first parents we inherited such misery and distress, I chanced, while thinking these thoughts, to depart from the usual path, and found myself, I know not how, on a narrow foot path that was rough, untrodden and impassable, and overgrown with so much underbrush and bushes that it was easy to see it was very little used. Therefore I was dismayed and would gladly have gone back, but it was not in my power to do so, since a strong wind so powerfully blew me on, that I could rather take ten steps in advance than one backward. A certain one sayeth that upon a stone at Kirklees is an old inscription.
SUMMARY: Sherwood Forest holds passion and revelations, sweet and dark.
SOURCES: Howard Pyle, Howard Phillip Lovecraft, Stephen Percy, George Paine Rainsford James, Dr. Herbert Silberer, Wikipedia, William S. Burroughs
The Light of Midsummer
July 24, 2021
The spaceship shot swiftly through the endless, trackless eternity of the void. Faster, faster, faster! The roar became a whining hum. Then for Hippolyta sound ceased to be anything-she could not hear. The wind was now heavy, imponderable, no longer a swift, plastic thing, but solid, like an on-rushing wall. Nick Bottom made a sudden violent action that was more than a straightening of his powerful frame. It was the old instinctive violence. Then he faced north. Hippolyta read his thought, knew he was thinking of her, calling her a last silent farewell. Beyond the ship a myriad fragments of light gleamed, countless coals glowing in the dark void. Stars, suns, systems. Endless, without number. A universe of worlds. An infinity of planets, waiting for them, gleaming and winking from the darkness. Suddenly a door opened and a tall man stepped out. Mustardseed grinned wryly. “You could even help us name the animals,” he said. “I understand that’s the first step.”
SUMMARY: Cowboys in space with an Avon flair.
SOURCES: Shakespeare, Geoff St. Reynard, Dwight V. Swain, Zane Grey, Philip K. Dick
Crossing Wordsmith Castle
July 28, 2021
Lupin was asleep, on his bench. If he thought that the eyes of a girl like that were merely two glittering sequins of mica, he should not be athirst to know her and to unite her life to his. But he feels that what shines in those reflecting discs is not due solely to their material composition; that it is, unknown to us, the dark shadows of the ideas that the creature is conceiving, relative to the people and places that Alice knows: the turf of racecourses, the sand of cycling tracks over which, pedaling on past fields and woods, she would have drawn him after her, that little peri, more seductive to him than she of the Persian paradise, the shadows, too, of the home to which she will presently return, of the plans that she is forming or that others have formed for her; and above all that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will. Alice left the room.
SUMMARY: Courage Joiner and Mr. Lupin as competing detectives, Phinuit sells snake oil.
SOURCES: Maurice Leblanc, Edgar Allen Poe, R. L. Dodge, Roger Van Noord, Doyle Fitzpatrick
Asphaltite Beauty
July 17,2021
It was a strange ending to a voyage that had commenced in a most auspicious manner. The first introduction was altogether most agreeable, and I already began to imagine I might not be so badly off after all. I shall try and arrange some means for our meeting unobserved tomorrow. For a spy must hunt while he is hunted, and the crowd is his estate. Spying, as well as other intelligence assessment, has existed since ancient times. The trouble is that a man can hold almost any theory he cares to about the secret world, and defend it against large quantities of hostile evidence by the simple expedient of retreating behind further and further screens of postulated inward mystery. He could collect their gestures, record the interplay of glance and movement, as a huntsman can record the twisted bracken and broken twig, or as a fox detects the signs of danger. My fortunes have been, from the beginning, an exemplification of the power that mutability may possess over the varied tenor of man
SUMMARY: spies
SOURCES: WARWICK DEEPING, Edgar Allen Poe, Wikipedia
Eidolonic Arrondissement
October 17, 2021
What if we were to travel faster than light, would time run backwards as science fiction has taught us? The faster you move, the slower your clock ticks relative to ones you are moving past. “You just ran out of time.” As increasing knowledge of the Solar System made the prospects of life in the vicinity of Earth marginal at best, the extrasolar planet has become almost the only venue. Sure, you are unique, it’s true. But, you are also one of nearly 8 billion eidolons. The water is the eldest daughter of the creation, the element upon which the spirit of God did first move, the element which God commanded to bring forth living creatures abundantly; and without which, those that inhabit the land, even all creatures that have breath in their nostrils, must suddenly return to putrefaction. The clouds reflect shadows at sunset, and fan them throughout the sky. The girl was gazing out upon the distant sea.
SUMMARY: Dreams about travelling.
SOURCES: Wikipedia, Zane Grey, Bram Stoker, Gertrude Stein, Edgar Allen Poe
Martian Marco Polo and the Magi Murphy
November 14, 2021
“This is where I came in,” said Murphy the Yahoogle. No one can be more conscious than myself of his many shortcomings, which I will not attempt to excuse. I can, however, honestly say that these have not been due to negligence, but are rather the blemishes almost inseparable from the fulfilment under the gloom of bereavement and amidst the pressure of other duties, of a task undertaken in more favourable circumstances. This volume would have been at least twice as large, if I had not made bold to strike out innumerable passages relating to the celestial winds and tides, as well as to the variations and bearings in the several voyages, together with the minute descriptions of the management of the ship in storms, in the style of sailors; likewise the account of longitudes and latitudes; wherein I have reason to apprehend, that Mr. Murphy may be a little dissatisfied. But I was resolved to fit the work as much as possible to the general capacity of readers.
SUMMARY: Looking back at the adventure many years later, the biographer corrects, recollects and reflects.
SOURCES: Jonathan Swift, Marco Polo (transcribed by Rustihello of Pisa), John Holbrock Vance, and Lucian of Samosata (translated by Francis Hickes)
The Project Unknown
July 16, 2021
The first human child is often endowed with supernatural powers. Rivers, lakes, water falls, and mountains are the abodes of spirits and often appear as a world of actions, of forces, of conflicting powers. History enters the mythic world obliquely, but leaves its definite mark in characters and incidents, or is warped beyond recognition in their contemporary representations. Although myth was traditionally transmitted through the oral tradition on a small scale, the film industry has enabled filmmakers to transmit myths to large audiences via cinema. In the old, old days, myths were often endorsed by rulers and priests or priestesses and are closely linked to religion or spirituality; the sun, moon, and morning star seem free to take human form and roam the earth, seeking love and other adventures. There is a complex relationship between the recital of myths and enactment of rituals. Mythical perception is always impregnated with death, which hath already drawn nigh.
SUMMARY: Fossils and dragons.
SOURCES: Wikipedia, RICHARD ERDOES AND ALFONSO ORTIZ, James George Frazer, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The Nibelungenlied, by Unknown
Coptic Chivalry
October 28, 2021
“You are free as the air,” said he. “Fear nothing hereafter, for I will now remain with you.” In the Bible, Eve offers the forbidden fruit to Adam. Eve herself was verbally seduced by the serpent, believed in Christianity to be Satan; later, Chapter 7 of Proverbs warns of the pitfalls of seduction. Sirens of Greek mythology lured sailors to their death by singing them to shipwreck; Cleopatra beguiled both Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, Dionysus was the Greek god of seduction and wine. Famous male seducers, their names synonymous with sexual allure, range from Genji to James Bond. “You started out playing politics,” she said, “and it all comes back to the same old thing. Man and woman. Maybe that’s politics, because nations are based on the family. But we have proved one thing anyhow. Even in a civilization of only three people, each one has his moments of supremacy. And there must always be compromise, or bloodshed.
SUMMARY: Interplanetary Egypt has visitors who are working out their order.
SOURCES: L. Frank Baum, Russ Winterbotham, Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer, and Wikipedia
Alice, La Pucelle d’Orleans
December 6, 2021
It blew a gale outside, and the screaming of the wind was a stirring sound, and I think I may say it was beautiful, for I think it is great and fine and beautiful to hear the wind rage and storm and blow its clarions like that, when you are inside and comfortable. Very well! How could the simple daughter of a labourer who had never left her village become a chief of staff in the army who was held in esteem by her companions at arms and feared by her enemies? She had three brothers who might have served the King, and there was no doubt many a stout clodhopper about, of that kind which in every country is the fittest material for fighting, and “food for powder,” but to none of these did the call come. She pictured to herself how this same little sister of theirs would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood.
SUMMARY: What if Joan of Arc went through the looking glass?
SOURCES: Lewis Carol, Laura E. Richards, Mark Twain, Andrew Lang, Anatole France and Wikipedia
July 26, 2021
It was that time of year when all the world belongs to poets, for their harvest of joy. The mad king Gnikdameht had escaped. Little knots of excited men stood upon the street corners listening to each latest rumor concerning this most absorbing occurrence. His was a reign of instability and terror. Unaware of his royal blood, much less that he is a dead ringer for his relative Gnikdameht, the current king of Gordia, Julius Drusilla visits Gordia on the eve of the First World War to see for himself his mother’s native land. As he arrives in Gordia, King Gnikdameht has just escaped from his ten years’ imprisonment at the hands of his scheming uncle, Prince Edgar. Much to his own and everyone else’s confusion, Julius is naturally mistaken for the king, leading to numerous complications.
SUMMARY: The mad king escaped, mayhem ensues.
SOURCES: Caligula, Shakespeare (King Lear, Tempest), Midas, Wikipedia
Weird Goes as She Willeth
September 25, 2021
It is sometimes said that there is nothing new under the sun, that there is nothing left for the modern singer to sing about, and that the realm of possible musical production is fast vanishing out of view. Certainly this is not true of poetry. And in the end of the poem it is said of Beowulf that he was ‘most gentle to his folk.’ The King was king only ‘for his folk.’ The interest of his folk, their physical and moral well-being, was his chief solicitude. Man must hope. He must believe that his fight is a winning fight or he must give up in despair. This sight also filled him with wonder. The brigade was hurrying briskly to be gulped into the infernal mouths of the war god. What manner of men were they, anyhow? Ah, it was some wondrous breed! Or else they didn’t comprehend—the fools. The youth went on, moderating his pace since he had left the place of noises, he awakens in a hospital bed after being caught in the blast of an exploding artillery shell. He gradually realizes that he has lost his arms, legs, and all of his face.
SUMMARY: Beowulf and Stephen Crane on the battlefield of the mind.
SOURCES: Beowulf (translator Ernest J. B. Kirtlan), Dalton Trumbo, Rheta Louise Childe Dorr, and Stephen Crane
Burrowing Excessively
December 30, 2021
Anything in excess is never beneficial. And we’re trying to declassify as much as we can. If the flashing body is set on fire and rushes violently to the earth it is called a thunderbolt; if it is only half of fire, but violent also and massive, it is called a meteor; if it is entirely free from fire, it is called a smoking bolt. No single poem really depends on the others or counts on them to achieve its own perfections. And even your gifts are sorted each as to its very own perfumery. “I am stuck inside, help to let me out!” You show the world that you found a way out. When one writes a story about grown people, she knows exactly where to stop, that is, with a marriage; but when she writes of juveniles, she must stop where she best can. None of the characters that perform in this story still live, but are prosperous and happy.
SUMMARY: Courage Joiner, Huck and Ryabushkina navigate the watery caves of the wilderness and try to find a way home.
SOURCES: Mark Twain, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Zane Grey, also some lost or unknown sources
Robby the Oracle
August 4, 2021
Divination can be seen as a systematic method with which to organize what appear to be disjointed, random facets of existence such that they provide insight into a problem at hand. You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning. For the danger of uncontrolled advanced AI to be realized, the hypothetical AI would have to overpower or out-think all of humanity, which a minority of experts argue is a possibility far enough in the future to not be worth researching. Tomorrow is voting day, you know. And now that we’re men-well, where do we androids go to register? For the first time in a generation human beings did manual labor such as unloading produce trucks. They didn’t like it, of course. They kept telling the police to do something. If I had been in the city they would have undoubtedly wanted to lynch me. A human figure-or it might be superhuman, eyes mournful with the presentiment of pain.
SUMMARY: Robby the Robot has visions.
SOURCES: Wikipedia, Mari Wolf, Manly Wade Wellman
WHAT THE MARTIANS MIGHT SAY OF US
January 3, 2022
O wad some power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us! – Robert Burns The narrative of space exploration as a “New Frontier” has been criticized as unreflected continuation of settler colonialism and manifest destiny, continuing the narrative of colonial exploration as fundamental to the assumed human nature. Reasons for colonizing Mars include curiosity, the potential for humans to provide more in-depth observational research than unmanned rovers, economic interest in its resources, and the possibility that the settlement of other planets could decrease the likelihood of human extinction. Difficulties and hazards include radiation exposure during a trip to Mars and on its surface, toxic soil, low gravity, the iMyation that accompanies Mars – distance from Earth, a lack of water, and cold temperatures. Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, a dusty, cold, desert world with a very thin atmosphere.
SUMMARY: Perspective and drama on the Red Frontier.
SOURCES: Percival Lowell, Edward Sylvester Morse, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Paul W. Fairman, Leigh Brackett, Wikipedia
Kuranes of Celephaïs
October 29, 2021
I gave up, at length, all care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation of the scene without. I knew that there was not a single shred of evidence against me, barring the fact that I was the last one known to be alone with the professor. On other nights Kuranes walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly, and came to a tower window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the full moon; and in the silent city that spread away from the river-bank he thought he beheld some feature or arrangement which he had known before.
SUMMARY: Young Kuranes survives, but the narrator is menaced by a mad professor and a cult that worships a big bug.
SOURCES: Edgar Allen Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Summoning Prometheus
July 24, 2021
My work is nearly complete. Neither yours nor any man’s death is needed to consummate the series of my being, and accomplish that which must be done; but it requires my own. Do not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice. I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of the leaves and the chirping of the birds, and these were all to me
SUMMARY: Mary Shelley had a dream.
SOURCES: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The Last Watch House
December 26, 2021
Harrington Karris, last of the male line, knew it only as a deserted and somewhat picturesque center of legend until I told him my experience. He had meant to tear it down and build an apartment house on the site, but after my account he decided to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent it. Nor has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. Prominent among the materials welded into it was the dance of obscure origin. The greys are lost and found among the browns, insinuating themselves into the recesses and tracery on the walls, and every where influencing the warm colours. Drainage is said to be the cause of their comparative scarcity. His own view, postulating simply a building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality; but he realized that the very picturesqueness, which aroused his own interest, would in a boy’s fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative associations.
SUMMARY: What to do with the legacy of my uncle?
SOURCES: Harry Wilson, Samuel Smiles, Aubertine Woodward Moore, Howard Phillip Lovecraft, Dr. Herbert Silberer
Trackers
July 11, 2021
It’s of no use to you now. Travel alone to reduce the risk of discovery. It has been suggested that the art of tracking may have been the first implementation of science, practiced by hunter-gatherers since the evolution of modern humans. Animals are all around us, but many are stealthy, shy, and seldom seen. An experienced Shadow Wolf can read faint footprints in the dust and determine when they were made, where they came from and whether or not traffickers are carrying additional weight. It was a day long to be remembered. Aside from the danger, however, a more encouraging hour had never presented itself in the history of the Road. A solitary being is by instinct a wanderer, and that I would become. I have known slaves to be beaten to death, but as they died under “moderate correction,” it was quite lawful; and of course the murderers were not interfered with.
SUMMARY: Courage Joiner evades authorities in this caper.
SOURCES: Wikipedia, William and Ellen Craft, William Still, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe
The Wanderer
September 21, 2021
Night at last approaches, when the sun paints the weary west with fiery pictures of glowing seas, of golden islands hanging in the sky, of lonely magic waterways unsailed by mortal keels; then, indeed, there comes into the heart and brain another warmth, the mysterious quickening of Romance. The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees. And men who have shared their bed with death know when the call is sounded. A fine poet, a great player, are to give us an Ulysses who must perforce be not only full of the spirit of his own age of myth, but instinct with the spirit of this. But the sun swept back on its northern journey, the black of midnight changed to the steely color of dawn, the snow slipped away, the water dashed again over the glacial drift, and the wash-up began. Day and night the yellow clay and scraped bedrock hurried through the swift sluices, yielding up its ransom to the strong men from the Southland.
SUMMARY: Ulyssi
SOURCES: James Joyce, Jack London, Homer
Sparkling Nightingale Memory
November 24, 2021
Where, in the end, do we search, but in the memory itself? I would use examples from my own works if you had not read them; I would use them from the works of others, if I could find any; or Greek examples, if it were becoming to do so. Yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am. Again, these persisting movements are the elements of memory. We see the impersonal activity of the physical world, the mystery that constitutes it, and the relative absence of human sound makes this all the more present. I was more affected with it than, I believe, was generally expected, beginning from snow, moving through seasonal streams, to rivers, and ending in oceans. Everything is seen in one indivisible and unchangeable present. It was not the presence of another being, it was not centralized in that way. Rather, it was everywhere in every thing: in water, stone, tree, and air. The silence was broken now and then by the plaintive song of a nightingale.
SUMMARY: Remembering the Memory Palace through various guides.
SOURCES: Method of loci by Various; Cicero; After Long Years and Other Stories, by Various; Wikipedia
Ghost (disambiguation)
June 18, 2021
A ghost might be confused for a visitor from the past. What you have here are clues for your own private search for the truth. My name is Courage Joiner. No, that is not the truth. The name I sometimes prefer to use is Courage Joiner. My real name is inconsequential. I discovered upon the deaths of my parents that they had deceived me my whole life up to that point. They had adopted me, my birth or biological parents are unknown to me, but that is another story there, a story that was kept from me. Who am I? I am whoever I say I am, as far as anybody knows. The official records were adjusted to fit the story that my parents told me. My discovery was advanced in the form of correspondence with an unscrupulous adoption agency who has since gone out of business. For those who relish speculation regarding the future, this works well for my current job. I have developed a new identity every few years, the one I like best is the one I shall tell you about soon.
SUMMARY: A history of death and some who linger.
SOURCES: Wikipedia
Inspired by the William Burroughs “Cut Up” Technique and the Plunderphonics philosophy, these stories are experiments in text buccaneering. In the oldest traditions of the creative spirits, ideas are for interpreting. I build monsters. Things sometimes turn out differently than expected.