“I always thought they were fabulous monsters!” said the Unicorn. “Is it alive?”
“It can talk,” said Haigha, solemnly.
The Unicorn looked dreamily at Alice, and said, “Talk, child.”
Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: “Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too! I never saw one alive before!”
“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.
—-Joseph Campbell
Metal bas-relief in a stairwell at Union Station, Dallas, Texas
There is amazing art all around you, where you least expect it. All you have to do is look.
It was cold and raining tonight as I left the DART train line at Union Station to walk over to the Bishop Arts Streetcar… but I stopped and took a photo of an amazing bas-relief… it looked like aluminum over a concrete wall over a stairwell leading to the underground tunnel under the station platform. It’s an obvious reference to Pegasus – one symbol Dallas uses to refer to itself. I don’t know the history or the artist – will have to do some research.
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”
—-Neal Stephenson, Anathem
Starship Pegasus Italy, Texas
Starship Pegasus Italy, Texas
Starship Pegasus Italy, Texas
If you drive down I35 from Dallas to Waco, Austin, and San Antonio, you can’t help but remember the Starship Pegasus, at the exit to Italy. A bilious representation of the famous Starship Enterprise reimagined as a roadside attraction. At one time, it was a greasy spoon restaurant and entertainment venue, but for years it has been a weed-infested patch along the highway with a slowly deteriorating doomed spaceship made of concrete and galvanized sheet eternally earthbound.
A while back, I drove down there to visit the open house at the Monolithic Dome Institute (and realized that the Starship was made with one of their domes), stopped and took a few photos.
Now I read that the thing has been demolished – the plot bought by the McDonalds across the street and served up to the wrecking ball.
Mark A. Mandel, linguist (i.e., language scientist and researcher), PhD in linguistics
The original was Greek, but we adopted it in English in the Latin form, ending in -us, not the Greek -os. So we use “pegasi”, not “*pegasoi”. We can and do also use “pegasuses”, as we say “campuses” and “calluses”: Eunji Choi is right about expressions like “the Mickey Mouses of the world”, but that’s not relevant here: “pegasus”, like “atlas” and “medusa”, is proper only in origin.
“When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes. ”
― William Shakespeare, Henry V
“…as the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned, the sea birds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too. Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Birds and Other Stories
But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men
Bill Chance 