("The Hearing Trumpet", "The Raconteur's Commonplace Book", "Stand on Zanzibar")

[fiefoe]

Was mostly curious because I only knew Leonora Carrington vaguely as a painter.

• Indeed I do have a short grey beard which conventional people would find repulsive. Personally I find it rather gallant.
• Ever since I stole the Paris telephone directory from the consulate I have increased my output. You have no ideas of the beautiful names in Paris. This letter is addressed to Monsieur Belvedere Oise Noisis, rue de la Rechte Potin, Paris IIe. You could hardly invent anything more sonorous even if you tried. I see him as a rather frail old gentleman, still elegant, with a passion for tropical mushrooms which he grows in an Empire wardrobe. He wears embroidered waistcoats and travels with purple luggage.”
• “No cats,” said Carmella. “Institutions, in fact, are not allowed to like anything. They don’t have time.”
• Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself. This is true of the back yard and the small room I occupied at that time, my body, the cats, the red hen all my body all part of my own sluggish bloodstream. A separation from these well-known and loved, yes loved, things were “Death and Death indeed” according to the old rhyme of the Man of Double Deed. There was no remedy for the needle in my heart with its long thread of old blood.
• A friend of mine who I did not mention up till now because of his absence told me that a pink and a blue universe cross each other in particles like two swarms of bees and when a pair of different coloured bees hit each other miracles happen. All this has something to do with time although I doubt if I could explain it coherently.
• Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody. Values are very strange, they change so quickly I can’t keep track of them.
• Or what might become souls with perseverance and Work. One could hardly give this dignified title to the fickle emotions most of you use instead of an immortal Self.”
• I pride myself that I can tell a very amusing story when I wish. Nothing vulgar, of course, but witty and even spicy when I am not too troubled with my rheumatism. Rheumatism of course is a great hindrance to funny stories.
• “You should never pride yourself on anything. Even something as trivial as a comic anecdote is a spiritual plague if used as a source of self-love. Humility is the fountain of light. Pride is a disease of the soul.
• We all like to be popular but what a price to pay, always to talk about the other person and never about oneself. It is doubtful if one would get any enjoyment at all, unless of course one was constantly invited to tea with French pastries.
• Spanish of course, an Italian could never have done anything so enchantingly sinister. A nun with a leer. Unknown master.”
• “Personality is a Vampire and True Self can never emerge as long as Personality is dominant.”
• Art in London didn’t seem quite modern enough and I began to want to study in Paris where the Surrealists were in full cry. Surrealism is no longer considered modern today and almost every village rectory and girl’s school have surrealist pictures hanging on their walls. Even Buckingham Palace has a large reproduction of Magritte’s famous slice of ham with an eye peering out.

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I did try to get to the ending where the big mystery would be revealed, but sorry Kate Milford, it got hard even to keep the characters' names straight.

• Because you can’t dance and hide who you are.
• its woodwork had taught its stonework how to breathe in exchange for lessons in strength; and the ironwork that chased the eaves and climbed the walls and curled along the windows danced in the sunset. It allowed its rooms to roam like cats.
• A truth I have noticed—I believe it’s a truth, at any rate—is that the extraordinary calls to the extraordinary.
• some of the rooms were antisocial or easily insulted or worse, and some of the furnishings had questionable senses of humor or were inclined toward troublemaking or were simply malicious. The house itself came to dislike visitors simply because they caused so many tensions between the spaces and items the structure contained.
• In fact, the only more vicious space in the house on Fellwool was the map room, which used its enchanting light as an anglerfish uses its lure.
• Perhaps it decided the boy must have some sort of death wish, in which case the house was fully within its rights to decide to set his inevitable end in the gallery, where the carpet was already spoiled beyond fixing and blood splatter didn’t particularly show up against the flocked red wallpaper. <> Who can know these things, really? We spend our lives passing through spaces, not wondering what they think of us or what logic they possess, other than the logic we imposed on them as builders or occupants, which is nothing more than a reflection. Surely places, if they survive for long, develop their own logic. Their own personalities. Their own senses of strategy.
• And now that he knew the word key could be applied to cartography, too . . . <> Pantin set the book down, returned to the map fragment with the horned and tentacled creature, and examined the legend beneath its curling claws. There, under the icons for train tracks, caves, roads, and rivers, was a symbol that looked a bit like a slice of pie topped by a circle. It was a keyhole, and it was labeled PASSAGE.
• -- In the city, the conquerors celebrated as they took possession, unaware that all around them a hidden weapon lay coiled: a weapon in the shape of a city, its whalebone heart winding slowly, slowly down. And it winds down still, all around us, as the city waits and bides its time. <> Which leaves this problem for all who hear my tale to solve: Who are you descended from—the townsfolk or the invaders? And are you, even now, living in the middle of a trap that continues winding down to the moment in which it will finally spring?
• -- “I can manage that.” The gargoyle nodded. “I think I know how the bones go together, but it won’t be less frightening if they aren’t exactly right, will it?” <> “No, it’ll be worse,” Pantin replied in ghastly delight.
• -- In alchemy, the point of sublimation was often to reduce the physical to the spiritual—that’s the solid-to-vapor part, if you follow—and then reconstitute the spiritual as a more perfect solid.” He smiled sadly. “A lot of alchemy sounds like allegory when you say it out loud.” <> Mair’s excitement faltered. It did sound like allegory, but not like an allegory for anything she wanted to think about in connection with Hale.
• As she leaned back again with a gasp, the frost on the window changed, warmed, faded, recrystallized before her eyes. Layer by layer, an image painted itself over the glass in a starry rime of cold condensate. As Mair watched, a boy’s face took shape. The details were hazy—the effect reminded her of working with her chalky pastels: you had to look at her paintings from a bit of a distance to really see the picture. But she was adept at looking at things that way, and so she had no trouble. Especially when the frost boy smiled at her.

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John Brunner provided SO. MUCH. BACKGROUND that it overwhelms the story in front. But it is amazing that so much of what he wrote has remained fresh.

• He had often said jokingly in the days when his life had room for jokes that his face was a map of his country: invader down to the eyes, native from there on south.
• 'It has been shown theoretically that with a logical system as complex as Shalmaneser consciousness, self-awareness, will eventually be generated if enough information is fed it. And we can proudly claim that there have already been signs -' <> Commotion. Several people pressed forward to get a sight of what was going on, including Zink. Stal stood his ground with a sigh. Another planted distraction was the likeliest.
• Divine Daughter. Probably called Dorcas or Tabitha or Martha. Thinking of killing. Thinking of smashing. A typical Christian reaction.
• 'It has been more than a decade since the contents of the New York Public Library were actually in New York. Their exact location is now classified, but this has not reduced - rather, it has enhanced - user-access.' <> The most versatile copying system ever developed is Eastman Kodak's Wholographik.
• a bastard offshoot of Arabic script imported to the islands of South-East Asia in the late middle ages by Muslim proselytisers.
• My education has turned me, and practically everyone else I know, into an efficient examination-passing machine. I wouldn't know how to be original outside the limited field of my own speciality,
• More probable was what he'd half-feared when with a flourish of trumpets and a ruffle of drums they declassified Shalmaneser, and he'd foreseen automation making even synthesists obsolete.
• Either side of the centre, the huge humming buses without engines-drawing their power from flywheels spun up to maximum revolutions when they turned around at the end-points of their journey
• I don't give a pint of whaledreck. Footnote: I must try to discover when that phrase leaked into common parlance; it was the sludge left when you'd rendered blubber down for oil, if I remember right. Maybe it was public guilt when they found it was too late to save the whales.
• We're at the precipice where even our own children add intolerably to the task of coping with our fellow human beings. We feel much more guilty these days about resenting other people's children than we do about the existence of people whose impulses don't involve propagating the species.
• where the reversion to the wild state is deliberately fostered by deprivation of privacy (barracks accommodation). and deprivation of property (you don't wear the clothes you chose and bought, you wear a uniform which belongs to US!!!). <> Fighting in an army is a psychotic condition encouraged by a rule-of-thumb psychological technique discovered independently by every son-of-a-bitch conqueror who ever brought a backward people out of a comfortable, civilised state of nonentity (Chaka Zulu, Attila, Bismarck, etc.) and started them slaughtering their neighbours.
• 'In short: your life from birth to death resembles the progress of a hopelessly drunk tightrope walker whose act has been so bad up till now that he's being bombarded with rotten eggs and broken bottles,
• Her almost white hair was spindled into the fashionable antenna style, her veins were traced with blue - what some wit had nicknamed 'printed circuit-lation' - and her nails, nipples and contact lenses were chromed.
• 'It's going to be tidal, solar, and deep-sea thermal. Mainly the latter. The temperature gradient between the surface and the sea-bed at those latitudes could apparently run a whole country much larger than Beninia.'
• They raised you literate and educated, Equipped to exercise initiative. But now our technological society Insists you behave as a statistic.
• it could be dodged in a great many ways, some legitimate, some dishonest None of the legitimate ways was open to Gerry: nineteen years old, rather handsome with his fair curly hair and blue eyes, and in perfect physical health. And although he knew all about the Alternative methods - one could hardly be nineteen and male and not know them - they scared him marginally more than the idea of facing the little red brothers.
• 'Old standby,' he said in an affectionate tone. 'Haven't used you as much as you deserve lately, have I? You've consulted the Book of Changes before, haven't you?'
• Two water-trucks with hoses going were methodically washing people off the sidewalks into doorways. He turned at hazard in the opposite direction and shortly encountered sweep-trucks, paddywagons adapted with big snowplough-like arms on either side, serving the same purpose as the hoses but much less gentle.
• 'Dilettante Dept. If they find out that you know I'll be activated in my army rank and court-martialled in secret.