this is what I would call a tulgey wood

[freckles_and_doubt]

Hmmm. Term must be approaching at speed, judging by the increasing trickle of bemused students lining up outside my door to have their curricular hands held. I swear one of last week's was on drugs, though. What illegal substance would create verbal diarrhoea and a complete inability either to focus on my face, or to directly answer a question? Or are we looking at a paranoid schizophrenic?

The pile of books I've been reading has a healthy proportion of kids' and young adult material, which has given me a happy couple of days in between Farscape.

• Does anyone share my fondness for Edward Eager? He wrote mostly in the 50s, children's fantasy in the E. Nesbit mould, children dealing with magical artifacts or creatures - the one I've just read is Half Magic, but I'm also fond of Magic By the Lake and The Time Garden. He writes with a sly, dry deadpan wit which yesterday had me chortling out loud, and has a wonderful tendency to continually reference the best of children's lit.


• I was also tickled by Margaret Mahy's wonderfully off-the-wall collection of short stories for younger kids, The Downhill Crocodile Whizz & Other Stories. Unlike her young adult works (The Haunting, The Tricksters, The Changeover, among others), which are beautifully-drawn character studies with a mature, serious treatment of the supernatural, the kids' books have a marvellous line in logical lunacy and unlikely juxtaposition which I find pleasantly akin to James Thurber in "Great Quillow" mode.


• I wasn't so impressed with the John Christopher: A Dusk of Demons is relatively interesting post-apocalyptic kids' sf, but its underpinnings don't quite hold together, and it's not a patch on the understated menace of his Tripods series.


• Christopher was more interesting, however, than The Green Hills of Earth, which is a Heinlein short story collection largely representing gritty, solar-system-bound near-future realism with the usual line in moral superiority and extremely dodgy gender politics. Looking at the extent to which most of these were one-idea wonders, the sf short story has come a hell of a long way since then.

The nice man is coming to tune my piano tomorrow, after randomly phoning me to suggest this was due. Clearly this was prompted by posting about playing it. Either everything is interconnected by cosmic wossnames, or else blogging does, in fact, make the world go round.

Comments

Re: The drug is question

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I wondered about tik, actually. I don't know a lot about it, but the young man's responses were distinctly weird in their combination of hyperactivity and total failure of focus.