Just the headings from “A Few Rules For Predicting The Future” By Octavia Butler

 When Octavia Butler was finally getting well deserved recognition for her science fiction writing, I had the nice experience of realising that I had already read one of her books years before; and it was one I remembered and thought about on occasion.

Thanks to this post by the Nap Ministry, I have been delighted by her essay giving writing advice to others interested in setting a story in the future. It is a bit of a disservice to collect only the heading here, but those alone are so thought provoking, or perhaps inspiring is a better term, that I want particularly to record them:

• Learn From the Past
• Respect the Law of Consequences
• Be Aware of Your Perspective
• Count On the Surprises

story trail

 "But housekeeping, the art of the infinite, is no game for amateurs." Sur, 1982, by Ursula K. Le Guin

I am not good at housekeeping, and feel bad about it. After reading that Those Who Stay and Fight was a reaction to one of Le Guin's short stories, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, (also referenced in a BTS music video),  I wanted to read that story as well. It is in The Unreal and the Real volume 2 Outer Space, Inner Lands, which I checked out at the library. Well worth reading. And another quote, from the end of the preface written in 2012:

"I don't know anything about reality, but I know what I like."

Another Utopia: Um-Helat

 The city in N. K. Jemisin's The Ones Who Stay and Fight, a story that made me cry, Um-Helat is definitely worth considering as a utopia. I find it a motivational story. Or, maybe it will motivate me to keep on caring, to try to care a bit more. Hmmm

Utopias, to start

心象風景: perhaps, a landscape that can only be imagined

 From Lafcadio Hearn's Japan: an attempt at interpretation (published 1904, the year he died), pages 504 to 505-

    No: the charm is made by the fact that this vision of the past represents to us much more than past or present,-- that it foreshadows the possibilities of some higher future, in a world of perfect sympathy. After many a thousand years there may be developed a humanity able to achieve, with never a shadow of illusion, those ethical conditions prefigured by the ideals of Old Japan: instinctive unselfishness, a common desire to find the joy of life in making happiness for others, a universal sense of moral beauty. And whenever men shall have so far gained upon the present as to need no other code than the teaching of their own hearts, then indeed the ancient ideal of Shinto will find its supreme realization.

More about flowers, this time, Korean

 Years ago, I tried to find information about Korean flower arrangement traditions, wondering if it would be like Japanese and Chinese traditions; but I couldn't find anything on the internet. Now I've come across loads, via Korean Literature Now's article on Korean Garden Culture.

Searching for 'Hwaam surok' brought up two very interesting theses (I have no idea if theses are usually published on line these days)

Keumhee Oh's Exilic Experiences and Creative Practice: Insights from the lives and art of Scholar-Artists Exiled on Cheju Island during the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910) is fascinating. Not really about flowers at all, but it is interesting how flower symbology is used in the art.

Sang-jun Yoon's History and Conservation of Gardens in Korea Vol. II is the appendices for their thesis which I haven't read. It has lists linking Latin names for plants with the Korean and Chinese terms.

Not yet a poem

 Going to the shops on Friday, I noticed how the wet twigs and leaves made the pavement slippery, not dangerously so, but noticeable. I failed to make a haiku from this, but later it occurred to me that 'slippery surface' may be a poetic description of the screens we read on.

Media and poetry

 The Poemgranate twitter feed shared this poem:

"Stationery" by Agha Shahid Ali The moon did not become the sun. It just fell on the desert in great sheets, reams of silver handmade by you. The night is your cottage industry now, the day is your brisk emporium. The world is full of paper. Write to me.

The poem is beautiful, and the linking of moonlight and letters from loved ones is literally poetic. But it didn't make me want to receive a letter; it made me want an email or text from a friend. Communication, knowing someone thought of me, is more important to me than the media it comes by. But I can't think of a poetic way to describe an email.