Local Flavor: Texas Falls Again


Earlier this week we took another walk at Texas Falls in that perfect light time. By all rights, this place should be popping with fairy folk and water spirits... but I'm too dense to see them, I suppose.



I've been reading the latest Murakami novel and it's unsettling in that usual way his books are. It's vaguely about a 36-year-old portrait painter who's figuring out how to paint art instead of product after a long spell just producing. It's pretty hard to ignore the parallels, hah hah. I play instruments all day while I'm working and yet I don't really play them all day. It's easy to go through the motions, isn't it?

My last long read was the latest Kim Stanley Robinson one. Sci-fi-realist futures, no matter how shaken-up and fascinating, don't get into my head the way any Murakami novel does, though I do love KSR novels. Murakami is very much like reading Vonnegut, but with narrators that have more of a passive sense of humor.


So I'll leave you with this bottom-side portal to the Falls' parallel dimension. Don't step too near.
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Jeff Todd Titon said…
There is a Norwegian legend about a water spirit that turns a fiddle player into a virtuoso musician in exchange for daily visits and food from the fiddler. The legend continues: the fiddler captivates all the people in the village with his music, and the dances have never been so good. But the fiddler forgets to feed the water spirit, and the spirit takes revenge by forcing the fiddler to play continuously for days on end. In some versions the fiddler remembers to go back to the waterfall, feeds the spirit, and all ends well. In others, the fiddler finally exhausts himself and dies. So, Jake, if you brought some food and a fiddle next time you visited Texas Falls, that elusive water spirit might show itself!
April 11, 2020 at 9:54 AM
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