“I hope you get slaughtered,” the magician told him, but Cully was asleep again. Schmendrick attempted a few simple spells for escaping, but he could not use his hands, and he had no more heart for tricks. What happened instead was that the tree fell in love with him and began to murmur fondly of the joys to be found in the eternal embrace of a red oak. “Always, always,” it sighed, “faithfulness beyond any man’s deserving. I will keep the color of your eyes when no other in the world remembers your name. There is no immortality but a tree’s love.
- The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle
Kate Bush - ‘Room For the Life’
This song is so gorgeously embarrassing, if it was the first song by Kate Bush you ever heard I don’t know what you would think. But she totally makes the embarrassingness work, and makes it beautiful and intimate.
‘“It seems a strange occupation for a person from such a young country, looking after other people’s ancient treasures.” I didn’t say anything. Then he added: “I suppose you were hungry for some culture, growing up there?”
Because I had been rude before, I made an effort now. A slight effort. That young country - cultural desert stuff gets very old. Australia happens to have the longest continuous artistic tradition in the world - Aboriginal people were making sophisticated art on the walls of their dwellings thirty thousand years before the people in Lascaux chewed the end off their first paintbrush. But I decided to spare him the full lecture. “Well,” I said, “you should consider that immigration has made us the most ethnically diverse country in the world. Australians’ roots run very deep and wide. That gives us a stake in all the world’s cultural heritage. Even yours”. I didn’t add that when I was growing up, the Yugoslavs were famous as the only migrant group who’d managed to import their Old World grievances. Everyone else soon succumbed to a kind of sunstuck apathy, but the Serbs and Croats were forever going at it, bombing each other’s soccer clubs, stoushing with each other even in end-of-the-earth outback shitholes like Coober Pedy’.
- Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book
Always never had much in common with the Croatian culture of my family, even so, I kind of resented GB or her character Hanna for making this comment. Did make me think though.
Kate Bush
interview aired on UK childrens’ TV in 1981, in which Kate talks about making videos, answers questions from a giggling gaggle of children and produces props from the “Sat In Your Lap” video.
