Ellison was hired as a writer for Walt Disney Studios, but was fired on his first day after Roy O. Disney overheard him in the studio commissary joking about making a pornographic animated film featuring Disney characters.

Ellison on occasion used the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird to alert members of the public to situations in which he felt his creative contribution to a project had been mangled beyond repair by others, typically Hollywood producers or studios.
Ellison said, in interviews and in his writing, that his version of the pseudonym was meant to mean “a shoemaker for birds” or that it is of as much use as shoes to a bird.
 Stephen King once said he thought that it meant that Ellison was giving people who mangled his work a literary version of “the bird”. 

Book One of ‘A Case of Conscience’ (as I understand) is the original novella published in the September 1953 issue of
IF: Worlds of Science Fiction.
If the story had ended there I would have had plenty to think on, let alone to deal with that stunning end.
Fortunately there is a whole second book ahead of me as I devour this fantastic bit of ‘sci-fi’.

On and on the text ran, becoming more tangled, more evil, more insoluble with every word.

 Almost all knowledge, after all, fell into that category.
It was either perfectly simple once you understood it, or else it fell apart into fiction…
all knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of the noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise  again.
The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions.
The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.

 All that remained of it was a sensation, almost the taste of the words, but nothing of their substance.

 Belief and science aren’t mutually exclusive — quite the contrary.
But if you place scientific standards first, and exclude belief, admit nothing that’s not proven, then what you have is a series of empty gestures.

And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge.

Then, as the planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

 Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection.
It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity.
In such perfection, all things move toward death.

 The differences in the ways he comprehended the universe haunted him — accuracy matched with inaccuracy.
He saw it in situ.
Yet, when it was born, when it came into the pressures of reality, the now had its own life and grew with its own subtle differences.

 How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.

UMMA:
One of the brotherhood of prophets. (A term of scorn in the Imperium, meaning any “wild” person given to fanatical prediction.)

“Do you have any idea who this Muad’Dib could be?” the Emperor asked.

“One of the Umma, surely,” the Baron said.
“A Fremen fanatic, a religious adventurer. They crop up regularly on the fringes of civilization.
Your Majesty knows this.”

The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever.

“I never knew the city man could be trusted completely,” Stilgar said.
“I was a city man myself once,” Paul said.

These city people have Fremen blood.
It’s just that they haven’t yet learned how to escape their bondage.
We’ll teach them.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free.But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. 

The Fremen have a saying they credit to Shai-hulud, Old Father Eternity, ‘Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.’ 

And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning, ‘That path leads ever down into stagnation.’

Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

To stop, to rest…truly rest.
It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop,if only for a moment.
There was no mercy where there could be no stopping. 

I should’ve suspected trouble when the coffee failed to arrive.

Supernatural Horror in Literature
H.P. Lovecraft
(Introduction, 2nd paragraph)

‘The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our inmost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.’

Words that whisper to me from beneath the floorboards.

There are signs of the coming of Fall.
Canadian Geese have lit upon the lake, acorns on 
the Oaks are growing larger and I have a strong 
urge to return to the lands of Middle Earth.

I will not be able to make the entire journey this 
time but that may be just as well.
I certainly wish I could have found the other 2 books but such is the nature of thrift store finds.I will miss my favorite, The Two Towers.

The edition I’m reading is a nice hardcover reader.
Worn just enough to have that seasoned character of a second hand bookbut still remain structurally sound, a book that 
when read doesn’t requite you to fret over the condition…too much.
A goodly aged smell to the pages andthe spine, though ‘cracked’, still holds the pages 
secure and allows for a full opening of the book. Also, a paper dust wrapper with some wear but one that doesn’t disintegrate in your hands every time you handle it.
A good, solid reader.

Normally my reading copies for LotR are the 
Ballantine paperbacks from the sixties but, after 
handling this hardcover from Houghton Mifflin I may switch over?
That sounds sacrilegious for me to think and I will 
certainly not make that statement aloud…I will however, ponder on it.

Regardless, I have set of once again into Middle 
Earth and The War of the Ring…the first part anyway.