Adventures with your tongue in the bush

Flowers flowers everywhere, to drink from and to eat.

Will you have hollandaise with that?

This Lomandra longifolia has a quiet sense of humour. Both its flowers and the base of its strappy leaves are said to be good tasting. They should be. It is a member of the family Asparagaceae.

Bottlebrushes are tongue-friendly. Some birds such as the Honeyeaters and Rainbow Lorikeets have specially adapted tongues—variations of brush-tips—the soaks.

Melaleuca hypericifolia

Listed as "Red-flowered paperbark" and "commonly known as Hillock Bush", say many quoted sources. Balderdash! Almost every Australian who sees these calls them bottlebrushes, though bottlebrushes belong, maybe, to another genus sent to try us. Botanists are studying them to decide how to best argue classification. In the meantime, Red Bottlebrush describes quite a few native plants that are currently foudroyant.

Utterly delicious — the rain-nectar cocktail, sucked straight from the flowers.

Feral leprechauns! Read and see "Undine Love" by Kathleen Jennings

Great minds, some might say. Minds, shminds. It's a case of observation.

When Kathleen Jennings and I both wrote about those feral migrants—leprechauns in the paddock—neither knew the other had been spying on them too. We didn't look from the same point of view (or maybe the sun was in her eyes) for as she writes:

"Our two stories touch on almost exactly the same theme in similar settings from opposite standpoints – in some cases, down to sentences which directly contradict the other story."

Nobody's perfect
Get your eyes to "Undine Love", a story not only written by her, but illustrated by her too. As I've said before, her art is a joy even if she's overendowed with talent. She paints with words as fluently as she tells stories with her paintings. So, so what if she contradicts the only correct standpoint? So does every mapmaker brainwashed by the blood-in-the-headedness of those upside-down Northern Hemisphereans.

"Undine Love" appears in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (ASIM) issue #52, just "released from captivity". I've only mentioned one story but the whole issue is a mesmeriser.

Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine Issue 52 edited by David Kernot. Authors: Sean Monaghan, Dominik J Parisien, Nicky Drayden, Kathleen Jennings, Brenda Anderson, Felicity Pulman, Liz Colter, Ray Tabler, Melanie Typaldos, Linda Jenner, Rachel Kolar, GR McLeod, LK Pinaire, Margaret Karmazin, Pam L Wallace, David Conyers and John Goodrich, Peter Cooper, Natalie Nikolovski, and Ken Liu. Poetry: Alexandra Seidel , Jack Horne. Features: Jacob Edwards. Artwork: David Conyers, Kathleen Jennings, and cover by Olivia Kernot.

Trap yours here (available in many formats, including instant-gratification)

Kelp

Not only delicious picked straight from the beach, but in my opinion, a great model. If I were a science-fiction magazine designer, this would be a cover shot.

Recommended standalone short story ebooks

"This month, infinity plus launches the singles series, cheap short stories you can read in a single sitting at lunch or in the evening, an opportunity for readers to discover unfamiliar authors, and maybe a chance to breathe life back into the short fiction market."
– "Infinity Plus Singles: a new line of standalone short story ebooks"

The first five releases:
#1 One Step Closer – Iain Rowan
#2 Has Anyone Here Seen Kristie? – John Grant
#3 The Time-Lapsed Man – Eric Brown
#4 Head Shots – Keith Brooke
#5 Old Soldiers – Kit Reed

Full details and purchasing links at infinity plus singles


And my not-so-secret favourite,
Blaft Publications, is at it, too, with "an e chapbook, a very short ebook"
Eating Sugar, Telling Lies by Kuzhali Manickavel, a writer of great power, wickedly accurate satire, and no patience with long-windedness.


Confessions of a dead-tree addict, an addict to smell, touch, and the beauty of text on a page
I do admit that I thought "Who will want to buy a single story to read as an ebook?" But then I also thought, "Who would want to read a novel as an ebook?" Possibly I would have thought once, "Why would anyone want to convert a picture to thousands of symbols that people have to learn to decode to understand?"

I hate reading fiction I can't drop crumbs into, rip a hangnail in tension over, and bleed onto.
I hate the current level of aesthetics in typography.
But they are cheap.
And they're gloriously self-indulgently instantly accessible.
Horrors, but hooray.

As for me, I still don't have an e-reader. They don't work here in the bush. But even if they did, these now are primitive. I'm hanging out for the e-book with illuminated dingbats.

Portrait of Clover

Detail of a scene on moss

Is one passport too much to ask for?

M. isn't anyone noble. He's a sweet, weak sort of guy trying to make a decent life for his family. He would like to live where he grew up, in the land of his father and mother and forefathers and foremothers. But ten years ago, he asked me if I could help him move here, or to some other country where I have friends: Turkey, say; or the USA–somewhere that his children wouldn't have nightmares of being shot, somewhere with a chance for his family to live in dignity and his children could dream of a different future—somewhere that, when you look up in the sky, you only expect to see stars, not starbursts. He told me that he felt guilty wanting to escape, but he didn't see any other way.

I tried hard to help him, but couldn't. Legally, his kind isn't wanted anywhere.

"I'll do anything," he said. "Wash dishes for the rest of my life, dig holes. Work every day. I don't care what I'm paid. Can't you sneak me in?"

Righto, an illegal immigrant who's a Palestinian. If he got caught, he could look forward to quite a future.

We're still friends though I as a Jew, am encouraged by Israel to live in his land, while he is expected to grasp the short end of history. He once told me that he felt that he was a victim of antisemitism.

As Gideon Levy has just said: "The Palestinians are The New Jews . . . The great powers supported partition at the time, the great power is now opposed to a state. But the moral validity remains the same, there is no longer anyone in the world who can seriously claim that they don't deserve what we deserved, without being a racist, a chauvinist or a cynical opportunist."

M. also said that he found it odd that he as a Palestinian, has no passport, while many of the Israeli "settlers" have two.

We still "hope" together, but to be asked to be "patient" now, in a speech that never even mentioned the euphemism "settlements", is to be asked told to, well, Steve Clemons put it best in his column in The Atlantic: Obama Tells Palestinians to Stay in the Back of the Bus


Also recommended:

Robert Fisk: A President who is helpless in the face of Middle East reality

"I couldn't believe what I heard. It sounded as though the Palestinians were the ones occupying Israel. There wasn't one word of empathy for the Palestinians. He spoke only of the Israelis' troubles."
—Hanan Ashrawi, quoted in Haaretz

Israel's Anti-democratic enterprise

Israel's anti-democratic impulses grow

Lime pickle, dried squid, vegemite, halvah, dates in space

Further to my questions to you the other day, more queries.

From Star Wars to Avatar, to the freshly published Robert Reed novella "The Ants of Flanders" in Fantasy & Science Fiction, the food we eat in space seems to have been designed by McDonald's and British Airways. There's an assumption that it's all hard going, and as textureless as the foamed lobster 'molecular gastronomy' joke pawned off on today's luxury-weighted diners with more money than sense.

But what if these assumptions of bland untasty spacefood are wrong? What if people in space are going to be very different to the assumed? What if they have, for instance, taste? And what if they did not necessarily grow up sucking on Mac's teats and the products of companies that put the ic in artificial?

What do you think people off-earth will eat? What would you propose that they should be offered?

Lime Pickle - the perfect space food?

• Reduces nausea
• Digestive
• Adds taste to everything
• Can be eaten alone
  
• Sugar free
• Indestructible
• Gets better with age
  

What would you pack?

Animalians, Vegetalians, Minerinvasivans - Non-humans who people fiction & other arts

At next week's Conflux conference that I mentioned (so I could pick your brain about a banquet for overspace guests—and your advice, menus, and reading recommendations) here, there is yet another panel that I'd like to get your input on, whether you are human or not.

Animalians, Vegetalians, Minerinvasivans—Non-humans who people fiction & other arts
A discriminatory exploration of non-humans in fiction (humanoids will be shunned, even if they threaten to bite and are called 'The Doctor'). Many non-humans have been the good bones, uh, flesh and, uh – living substance – of a great story. Who are they? And in our age when few humans interact with other species willingly, are real non-humans (with complex personalities) endangered? Panelists: Marilyn Pride and Anna Tambour. Participation from the floor will not only be encouraged, but if everyone sits like inanimate objects, they should expect to be stimulated by the odd non-human animal and tendril.

What do you think? What would you recommend?

Starting the discussion with a list of 5 great stories—creepy, haunting, fun, outrageous, and all published recently —

Explanations are Clear by L. Timmel Duchamp (in Never at Home)

Fjaerland by Rudy Rucker and Paul Di Filippo (in Flurb #12)

The Bird, the Bees, and Thylacine by Thoraiya Dyer in the Andromeda Spaceways #51)

Leng by Marc Laidlaw (in Lovecraft Unbound)

Fossil by Angelo R. Lacuesta (in A Time for Dragons)

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