Fairy tales – by Anthony Steyning novelist, essayist, playwright, critic.

It’s funny what you find when you let your mind run wild. I just set up an iGoogle home page, which, like IE or Netscape, offers a variety of widgets to enhance the personality and useability of our homepage.

You can set up a theme for the home page, along with a huge variety of little boxes filled with useful or useless toys, links to blogs, news, weather, quotes, art, etc.

You can also set up other pages in tabs. So I set up a news page, a blog page, a literary page and a philosophy page. Each time I set up the page, the ubiquitous “Google” search box inquired if I felt “lucky”, meaning if I would let it set up a series of widgets in that particular category for me. What the heck. I let it. And it came up with some fun sites. One was called “Literary Eruption”, certainly an intriguing title.

Apparently it is linked to the site (at least today) of a Spanish philosopher and novelist named Anthony Steyning.

This fellow seems to have a grip on both the relevance of history and the playful spontenaeity of the Internet. If I were you, I’d check him out. I already did, but since I’m not you, I can’t do it for you, too.

Here’s a quote from his essay, Fairy Tales: A Narrow Escape!.

Antonin Artaud said it allwhen he wrote Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu, asking us to stopthis nonsense with our imaginary friend. For if man needed to createmyth to step out beyond himself so he could look down upon himself andheal himself or give himself that extra bit of courage and strength inthe face of mostly cruel and often endless setbacks, then for a timethis was fine. But by beginning to believe his own inventions, imposingthem as if they were the truth, he created the beginning of his owndegradation. Because myth is a series of pretty fibs and an elaboratelie however well meant, however well told, represents the seed ofdestruction that every grand falsehood carries within itself.”