Flex Mentallo

‘Pitched past pitch of grief…. O the mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’ Gerard Manley Hopkins The book is a meditation upon death, suffering, loss, memory and healing. Matthiessen's wife, the poet Deborah Love, had died of cancer the year before at the age of 44.

“The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow...These rocks and mountains, all this matter, the snow itself, the air- the earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light.”

The sacred mountain of Dolpo is called She-Re Drug da, which translates as "Dolpo Crystal Mountain of The Dragon's Roar".

The high Tibetan valleys are sealed off from the rest of the country by mountain passes over 17000 feet high, and its people exist in a time warp of Tibetan culture little changed in a thousand years.

Their ultimate destination is Inner Dolpo, an area of Nepal occupied by people of the Tibetan culture and ethnicity.

The Himalaya above Pokhara is the Annapurna massif. Annapurna I is the world’s 10th highest peak. Although climbers had reached 28,150 feet (8,580 metres) on Mount Everest by 1924, Annapurna I became famous in 1950 as the first peak above 26,000 feet (8,000 metres) to be ascended to the summit.

“After midday, the rain eased, and the jeep rode into Pokhara on a shaft of storm light. Next day there was humid sun and shifting southern skies, but to the north a deep tumult of swirling grays was all that could be seen of the Himalaya. At dusk, white egrets flapped across the sunken clouds, now black with rain; on earth, the dark had come. Then four miles above these mud streets of the lowlands, at a point so high as to seem overhead, a luminous whiteness shone- the light of snows. Glaciers loomed and vanished in the grays, and the sky parted, and the snow cone of Machhapuchare glistened like a spire of a higher kingdom. In the night, the stars convened, and the vast ghost of Machhapuchare radiated light, although there was no moon.”

Schaller is one of the only two westerners who had seen the snow leopard in its natural habitat, twenty-five years earlier.

In 1973 Peter Matthiessen accompanied zoologist George Schaller on a five week quest to the sacred Crystal Mountain in Nepal with the intention of studying the Himalayan Blue Sheep; and in the hope of glimpsing the rare and semi-mythical snow leopard.

The Snow Leopard ‘You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars…’ Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation The 28th September 1973, "Two white sahibs, four Sherpas, fourteen porters" assemble to make their way up the Himalayas.

"You are as the yellow leaf. The messengers of death are at hand. You are to travel far away. What will you take with you? You are the lamp To lighten the way. Then hurry, hurry. When your light shines." Buddha

Nice! The Cheetah sales thread is always with us. It certainly feels that way! I've only got 122 boxes of GA books left! You actually counted them?

Busted! Oddly enough, on eBay I go by 29dukedog. Same name I use here. It's just easier to remember, on account of I'm a-stoopid. I knew you on Ebay first. Meerkats R Us From way back in the good old days, when people were allowed to know each other on eBay. K***9 Simples

Busted! Oddly enough, on eBay I go by 29dukedog. Same name I use here. It's just easier to remember, on account of I'm a-stoopid. I knew you on Ebay first. Meerkats R Us

AS I recall TRoR lacked the plangent resonances of his earlier work. Firebird I've never read but now I must. Great cover too! Speaking of cat ladies, do you know The Ballad of Lost C'mell? Or The Pride of Chanur?

I wish I'd seen this post sooner. "The Rose" is an absolutely stunning piece of writing unlike anyone else. If one blended the best qualities of Alfred Bester and Cordwainer Smith one might get something like Charles Harness, but his is a unique voice. His characters are as doom-laden and fated as any in mythology. Harness has a fascinating take on the seeming appearance of handicap leading to transformation. I wont spoil the -unforgettable - ending of "The Rose" by revealing it here, but I cant recommend it highly enough. Very powerful and heartbreakingly moving. "The Paradox Men" has strong echoes of "The Rose" and is almost as emotive. [font:Book Antiqua]'She was standing alone on the steps of the Geographical Museum regarding him gravely. A light cape was thrown about her shoulders and she appeared to hold it together with the fingers of her right hand, or possibly a barely visible metal clasp. 'The lamps on the museum porticoes threw an unearthly blue light over her bloodless face. Her translucent cheeks were drawn and lined and her body seemed very thin. There was now a streak of white in her hair, which was knotted unobtrusively at the side of her neck. 'To Alar she was completely lovely. For a long time he could only stare, drinking in the moody, ethereal beauty of the composition of light and blue shadow. His tortured frustration was forgotten. "Keiris!" he whispered. "Keiris!"[/font] How much we lost when he gave up writing for so long - but at least we have these, and they are to be treasured.

Yeah, bad Jon.

Nah. She'd sell off Jack and keep the books. Then I'd marry her. we use corrective lenses in the states. I thought you called them correctional facilities.

Nah. She'd sell off Jack and keep the books. Then I'd marry her.

Her eyebrows alone could launch a thousand ships.

G.A.tor should know. I hear he is an "expert". that's demeaning to put it in quotes; the man has an ask g.a.tor column, for godsakes! He's an "expert" in "demeaning" of life. As for "your face"...that's just demeaning.

Wonderful - and soooo not mine. I love 'em all.

.. and here is a bit more from the same extract... [font:Book Antiqua]"Or an alien Spider-Man. This is where things get a bit uncanny. Spider-Man, after all, is the humanoid insect par excellence. Moreover, his iconic wraparound eyes—created in 1962 by Marvel monster artist Steve Ditko in Amazing Fantasy #15—reproduce, almost perfectly, the classic almond eyes of the alien. With the exception of Superman's S, there is no superhero symbol more beloved and more iconic than Spidey's eyes. "Is it possible that Ditko's Spidey eyes informed the later abduction accounts of the mid-1960s, '70s, and '80s? The dates certainly make this possible. The first major published study of an alien abduction, Saturday Review columnist John G. Fuller's classic The Interrupted Journey (1966), recounts the September 1961 abduction of Barney and Betty Hill, complete with multiple descriptions of the aliens as possessing large foreheads, slits for mouths, and bluish gray or metallic skin. Most of all, though, especially for Barney, there were the awed descriptions of those haunting, vaguely Oriental or Asiatic "slanted" eyes. "Barney drew these eyes from within a hypnotic trance state: the sketch looks like a child's drawing of Spider-Man's head (with pupils now). In another passage, he describes how everything disappeared except a single eye, like, he points out, the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland: "this growing, one-beam eye, staring at me, or rather not staring at me, but being a part of me." These eyes did strange things too. They "spoke" to him telepathically and told him not to be afraid. They carried a subtle smile. They "pushed" into his eyes as they came closer and closer. And they "burned" into his senses and left "an indelible imprint."Such descriptions were drawn from hypnosis and therapeutic sessions that took place the first six months of 1964, well after Spider-Man's first appearances, month after month, on the magazine racks of America. So the door of influence is left open here... "Whatever we make of the ultimate iconic origins of the alien's eyes, we can well posit that the influence eventually went the other way, that is, from the alien abduction experiences to the representations of Spider-Man, since some of the later artistic renditions of Spider-Man look more and more like an alien. This later "Ultimate Spider-Man" (created by artist Mark Bagley at the turn of the millennium, in 2000) approaches an almost archetypal or spiritualized form, as it moves further and further away from the human body of Peter Parker to the lithe, thin, huge-eyed, "subtle body" of the classic alien Gray. "Or Black. Consider also Spidey's famous black suit, which first appears in 1984 in Secret Wars #8. Not only does this black suit appear at the height of the abduction narratives, and not only does it make the wall-crawler look even more like an alien, but we quickly learn that the black suit is an alien, that is, a sentient alien symbiote that can take on and exaggerate, inevitably in violent and aggressive ways, the personality features of anyone with whom it bonds (read: abducts). In the film Spider-Man 3, the alien symbiote even bonds to Peter in a manner eerily similar to the classic alien abduction experience, that is, in bed while Peter is sleeping on his back. This, I must add, is the classic physical posture and scenario of what folklorist David Hufford has called the "old hag" or "supernatural assault" tradition and tracked around the world, including through the modern American folklore of the alien and the physiology of "sleep paralysis." Such universal experiences coded in local forms, Hufford shows, are usually terrifying experiences but also, strangely, sometimes possess ecstatic or spiritual dimensions.Rather like the blue and black Spideys... "Superman and Spider-Man are by no means the only coded aliens among the superheroes. The simple truth is that, of all of my proposed mythemes, Alienation is probably the most central to both the science fiction and superhero genres."[/font]

First copy I've ever seen.

Congrats Bill. A great book. And now you don't have to pester me anymore! Yahoo! This one arrived today. Not an easy book to track down "Cool" is an overused word around here but not in this case.