Pic of the Day: Featured in Niwot!
I have written on the benefits and importance of planting flowers in the yard. Here are some astonishing photos adding to my original list of the benefits of planting annuals in the yard.
Biff Warren, a fellow member of the bar, had the presence of mind to take all of these bear pics on a Saturday night at 7:45 PM. In addition to his photo skills and presence of mind, he brilliantly serves as Managing Editor of the Left Hand Valley Courier. While he had the experience and calmness to take these pics, I would have been stunned and immobilized like Jacob Horner, an early John Barth character.
Since the pictures speak for themselves, I’ll use them as an excuse to write about John Barth, one of my favorite authors.
Jacob Horner is the protagonist in John Barth‘s first and seminal novel, The End of the Road (1958). Barth went on to write some of the finest and funniest fiction extant. Jacob Horner suffers from a form of existential paralysis, which leads him to becoming immobilized both physically and mentally. His condition is a central theme of the novel, which explores the absurdity of life and the paralysis that can result from an excess of possibilities. We of the present can certainly understand being paralyzed by having too many choices facing us and the resulting paralysis.
Later works include The Sot Weed Factor, (a laugh-out-loud work of historical fiction), and Giles Goat-Boy. IMHO (in my humble opinion), while both are mandatory reading, for anyone either going to college or in college, or for anyone who wants great reads and loud laughs, The Sot Weed Factor is just simply mandatory reading.
Giles Goat-Boy tells the tale of a Goat-Boy going through the University of Pennsylvania. It could be any college, but I think of it as U of P.
Giles Goat-Boy (1966), also known as The Revised New Syllabus of George Giles, our Grand Tutor, is a complex and satirical novel that blends elements of myth, allegory, and science fiction. The novel is set in a fictional universe that functions as a vast university, known as the “West Campus,” representing the world. The story follows the protagonist, George Giles, who is raised by goats after being abandoned as a baby.
Believing himself to be a human-goat hybrid, Giles embarks on a quest to fulfill a prophecy that he will save the world by becoming the “Grand Tutor.” This role is essentially a messianic figure destined to teach humanity a better way of life. As Giles navigates the university, he encounters a series of bizarre and often surreal challenges, encounters, and characters, each representing various aspects of society, religion, politics, and philosophy.
The novel is a dense and richly layered work, often described as a “campus novel” taken to an extreme. It explores themes of identity, education, power, and the nature of good and evil, all while using a mix of absurdity and irony. The narrative structure is unconventional, with the story being presented as a found manuscript that has been “edited” by unknown figures, adding to the metafictional quality of the work.
Overall, Giles Goat-Boy is a challenging but rewarding read, filled with Barth’s characteristic wit and narrative inventiveness. I found it to be a “page turner” and could not put it down. And that is no mean feat when the hard-cover edition is about 800 pages long! Oh, for a Kindle then.
Lenny Lensworth Frieling
Shared Knowledge Is Power!
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