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Recent Comments
- dominicvine on Subject: click click
- JP on Subject: click click
- Dominic Vine on rainy rainy bear camping
- Edw11122 on rainy rainy bear camping
- FrogmoreOtter on 43.27

0 thoughts on “When the world ends…”
winstonthriller
One of my favorite authors, though “Little, Big or, The Fairies’ Parliament” and “Engine Summer” are my very favorites of his.
dominicvine in reply to winstonthriller
ah, I love you Stephen
yes
those two are the unanimous greatest
but even thus series is amazing
and I’ve loved everything of his I’ve read
… do you read him here on LJ?
winstonthriller in reply to dominicvine
Yes, I friended him here.
The Aegypt series is wonderful, but a very, very tough nut for many to crack.
Engine Summer contains the most shocking frightening last page or two of any book I’ve read.
dominicvine in reply to winstonthriller
i just finished the third book, starting the fourth.
it astounds me…
some of the beautiful phrases he writes
the things that bring me to tears
or laugh out loud
i made the same mistake with “Little, Big”
telling everyone i knew to read it
giving them copies
years later i asked them all
and only one or two got through it
— to me it’s just the best writing
to many it is very much not.
(but i’m different than most in many ways, so i’m used to it)
yeah, Engine Summer was a lot of fun
and the ending was brilliantly horribly . . . hmmm. well, it wasn’t sad. not in the light of everything else that had happened. it was just so Mortal. such a strange way of interacting with mortality.
have you read his collection of short stories? there is a similar idea of working with mortality in the story “Snow”
have you read any of his last few books?
i’ve bought them, but not got into them yet.
winstonthriller in reply to dominicvine
It was very sad, poignant, and frightening to realize that Rush was trapped forever in the crystal, repeating his story and not knowing until he came to its end what had happened, and that he would never know what the rest of his life held after Montgolfier left him on the hillside.
dominicvine in reply to winstonthriller
yeah… but it wasn’t really Rush that speaks anymore.
it was just a . . . Recording of him in a crystal.
it wasn’t HIM.
just as my journal and flickr account aren’t me
they just tell my story
it’s just a different technology
and the storyteller led us to believe that it was a person telling the story. . .
Rush wasn’t trapped in the crystal anymore than your soul is caught in these pictures of you.
of course, though
a work of fiction can be interpreted many ways
that’s how i remember understanding it.
that’s why it wasn’t so Sad sad for me. . .
except not to know how the story goes on…
and my imagination played with that a bit
and walked on down the hillside.
i always think about those four pots he carried
and the one to “lighten the load”
and how he threw it away.
winstonthriller in reply to dominicvine
But to Rush in the crystal, it WAS real.
dominicvine in reply to winstonthriller
well… that’s a place i’m different.
Rush that Speaks was a Speaker. that’s what he was made to do
to tell stories.
the thing that was so shocking to me was that he was dead already
had maybe been dead for hundreds of years
HE who was telling the story.
dead.
what was telling the story was a recording of his emotions, his memories.
what was shocking to me was the vision painted of that world
after our world was dead
and by the time that story was being told to that Angel
THAT world might have already passed as well
Gone
but that’s not sad to me
death happens
always has
always will
in order to keep the stories going
it has to
not sad
just is
but shocking, yes
to think you’re somewhere
talking to someone
like falling in love with walt whitman
through his poems
and only later finding out that he’s dead!
past
gone
different world.
same world.
different.
you know.
have you read any of his newer writings?
i wanted to audit a course of his at Yale
ya know
just to see him talk and hear how he thinks
but it’s Yale
and i’m not an academic
so i’m glad he’s on LJ and i can dip in from time to time
i also just bought a limited edition non-fiction book of essay he published a few years back (like 600 copies, i think) called “In Other Words”
and i bought, three years ago, a limited edition special printing of “Little, Big”…
but it’s not made yet
so i wait for it.
pffffffff.