Well, I've crossed the "dragon bridge".
That's the description Ursula gives to the last of her 'Tales from Earthsea': four short stories following a novella, 'The Finder,' in which she tells us how the school on Roke island was founded.
Unless you've only recently stubbed your toe on this log, you'll know that I have been an almost unconditional admirer of Ursula K. Le Guin since my childhood, so I won't repeat myself tonight on the subject of a woman I consider to be one of the greatest story-tellers, inventors of other places, times and spaces (all serving as mirrors of our own), and thinkers and sages of our day.
In the five tales, Le Guin gave us more of the history and the stories of 'Earthsea', which she had left for more than a decade after 'Tehanu' (1990, which was the last part of the 'Earthsea Quartet' and itself waited for 17 years to take shape). With 'Dragonfly', she spans time and space between 'Tehanu' and 'The Other Wind', an enchantment still to come for me.
I like the comment made about Le Guin by "lin-da-finn" in a customer review of this and other 'Earthsea' books at Amazon UK:
"To read them as wizard-adventures is to miss out on their almost Taoist meditations on death, freedom, fear - moving and noble themes.
All the Earthsea books I've rediscovered concern the painful relationship between the living and the Dry Land - our human fear and grief at the thought of dying and giving up everything here - and the destructive results of trying to avoid that fate."
Yes.
And always with plenty of the "fifth element", love, woven in with earth, water, air and fire.
I'll return to 'Earthsea' another day. In the meantime, keeping a decades-overdue promise to myself, I embarked last night on 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson', to be both highly irritated and occasionally laugh at the pretentious, unfathomable, wearisome and wise man G.I. Gurdjieff was.
Tom Cochrane (at Amazon) describes this massive tome as "masturbatory theosophy of the most boring kind", while Fabricio E. Bouza reckons it's "one of the most important books ... ever."
Open-minded, I intend to plough on.
In today's occasional escape from African affairs into the blogosphere at the Factory, I browsed through those listed on the left, to find that the current preoccupation of many of them, on this side of the Channel and the Atlantic as well as the others, is sex.
Lynn was even wondering whether to transform 'Bacon, Cheese and Oatcakes' into 'Belts, Chains and Orgasms.'
Nathan at E/B/T/B (Fr) and me this week began a desultory bilingual discussion of why women, more than men, seem to have "asses of fire" when you sit where one has just been sitting on the Métro.
My colleagues consider this to be a worthwhile matter for scientific probing.
As for Joe, I really wouldn't even go to his book. I mean that! Not unless you want to share his graphic and deeply retarded delight in morphing Sheryl Crow into porn star Inari Vachs.
She who shall never be mentioned has ... almost disappeared. That's what comes of taking eight days, this time, to write a billet d'amour and then actually sending it (after a further week's reflection).
So, Francesca, take note! I shan't be participating in 'Project Blog', but it's an intriguing idea and I'm glad somebody has stepped in to help you push that elephant up the stairs.
As for the Withheld Wildcat, she's not blogging about sex, but she's writing what may turn out to be a novel about it. She claims that it isn't, but the only bits she wanted to read me on the telephone reminded me of a modern-day Anaïs Nin.
I don't know that she'll like the comparison, but if she doesn't it serves her right for being right for once, when she suggested that to send anything like what I envisaged giving to the only woman who interests me all over was "lovely, romantic ... and unwise."
9:30:36 PM link 
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