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I noticed a feature of the Amazon listings I hadn't before. I was looking at the Little, Big page, checking (purely for comparison) its Amazon ranking (665,000something), and saw a listing at the bottom of the page a list of "books that cite this book." One was the Notebooks of Northrop Frye. This was exciting! Frye is a hero of sorts of mine; his book The Secular Scripture, a study of the structure of romance, is a key text in my understanding of what my writing,, and much of what's called fantasy literature is about -- but I don't have to tell this crowd that. Anyway, I went on over to Amazon's page where the Notebooks are listed, and found I could look in to the book, and search in it for my name. This is the reference I found:
"John Crowley’s Little, Big, a book the author handed to me when I was lecturing at Smith College, seems to move in and out of this world with considerable expertise. I notice one of his sections is headed “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.” Bruno gets linked with Giordano and memory theaters."
(He's talking about fairy worlds, Celtic mythologies, etc.)
In the Introduction to the notebooks, and on the same topic, the editor says:
"An important literary fantasist who caught Frye’s interest in this context is John Crowley, who made Frye a gift of his novel Little, Big (1982), about the otherworld of the fairies."
A footnote to the passage where Frye mentions Little, Big notes that “NF presented ‘Framework and Assumption” at Smith College, in Northampton, Mass., on 24 October 1985.”
How wonderful that Frye remembered that I gve him that book! I had not long before come to live in Northampton, and L. and I sometimes went to lectures and readings at Smith. Of course I wouldn't have missed an appearance by Frye, and the chance to give him a book that was so influenced by his thinking.
The only trouble is -- I don't remember this at all. Not the lecture, not attending it, not the giving of the book. None. Nothing. Nada. He remembered and I didn't. I am stunned, slightly. What other great men and women have I met, given books to, in whose memories I persisted? I'll never know.
remembering nada
But you know.
Nine
I've had this happen, though with personal acquaintances, rather than with an author I respected.
Could be it happened in his timeline and not in yours, and at some point the two timelines merged.
.
Or something.
.
.
If the many-worlds model of quantum mechanics is valid, it would seem to me that realities resulting from such splitting would again be merged through some principle akin to conservation of energy when the distinctions that separated them became sufficiently trivial, leaving only small anomalies of memory to indicate such had occurred.
Realities that fork into wild disparity, of course, may remain separate, known to each other only through brief glimpses that might occur in consciousness as daydreams or fantasies, giving rise to speculative fictions in which one world-track is described to another.
I wonder if anyone is actually studying such possibilities, or whether one could get a grant to do so.
If you get this same snarky response again, or many such, they will be coming from other loser tracks like, but not the same as, ours.
Myrrh
I have done extensive experiments with myrrh and extracts from myrrh and (one of) the effect(s) that it has is to give you a set of memories from one or more alternate time tracks. You go into this sort of half-sleep where you have 'opium dreams' regarding what your avatar is up to in the other time-track, and when you come out of the state you retain the memories. This can be problematic, as if you do this enough you may become confused as to which time-track you are actually inhabiting.
.
non compos mentis
In reading through this thread I'm reminded of A.E. Van Vogt, who if he were at hand might just spin for you an explanation of an alternative-universe You giving the book to an alternative-universe Frye. So how many more of (each of) you might be out there on the loose, one wonders.
By the way, I'm in the midst of Four Freedoms and wish I could stay home from work to read it all day. Thank you.
Re: non compos mentis
The explanation that you gave it to someone to give to Frye has legs, IMO.
- Genevieve
(May I complain here by the way about the fact that I will surely miss the yet upublished text from Little, Big that is schedulded to appear in the deluxe version of the anniversary edition, an edition that my finances won't allow me to purchase, even if I'd like to? Sorry about that.)
Was exceedingly sly.
He performed his metamythical heavy lifting
By concocting anecdotes of authorial gifting.