John Crowley Little and Big

Howdy neighbor

Sun, 13 May 2012 10:23:36 GMT

If it seems inconvenient or operose to look over the fence and wave to the lady in her garden, or exchange a few words in the elevator with the tenant next door, or swap news with the other locals shopping at the bakery or getting theri mail, here's the solution -- SOCIAL MEDIA!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/business/on-nextdoorcom-social-networks-for-neighbors.html?ref=technology

O Canada

Sun, 13 May 2012 01:28:13 GMT

I enjoyed my visit to Boreal, the Canadian Francophone SF/Fantasy convetnion in Quebec City. The city (my first visit) could in its old center and river battlements be mistaken for a European city, but actually it doesn't feel the same. Maybe because, old as it is, it's still actually new -- nothing older than 1600. I attended a couple of panels with an English-whisperer at my side, and participated in one too, with several smart and funny speakers, including the guest authors Heloise Cote and Jeanne-Philippe Jaworski, whose work has of course not been translated, shame on us. The conference was held in a bastion of Anglophone Quebec, a former (very former) prison turned into a college and then a Literary and Historical Society with pictures of bewhiskered worthies offering lectures and improvement. It now houses the only Anglophone lending library in Quebec. I walked a few blocks to the Chateau Frontenac, an absolutely enormous hotel, like a Sleeping Beauty castle blown up to vast size; I had wanted to go there because my parents had their honeymoon there in 1938.

The panel topics and discussions were, in general, much like those of similar cons I've been to (as far as I could tell) -- witty and contentious and a little inbred and a lot well-read. But it didn't have a panel like one that apparently is to be offered at Readercon (to which several of the wtiters and readers at Boreal often come) this July; I don't think the COn will mind if I quote a sentence from the proposal:

"..as the romance genre becomes more welcoming of both the erotic and the undead, how will weird erotica maintain its identity as something separate from paranormal porn?"

How indeed? I will be there to learn.

Aurora borealis

Tue, 01 May 2012 01:34:48 GMT

Hope it's not too late for anyone interested in coming that I'm going to be the guest and keynote speaker at Boreal in Quebec next weekend. That is, this weekend. Why con I never remekber to post these things in a timely fashion?

Your Next Book (Or Mine)

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 19:57:56 GMT

From an article in the TLS about wild and rowdy 18th century London:

"Fairs, spas (or "spaws"), gardens, gambling, drinking, prizefighting (including by women), cock-fighting, bear- and bull-baiting, and so on."

Seems to me you could get a publisher's advance with a single paragraph about a book that stars a bare-knuckle female boxing champion, her trials and tribulations and successes as she meets opponents and kicks ass in Merry Olde England. Actually I'm serious. Wouldn't that be great? The book could be inflammatory and the movie would be more fun that Scorsese's Gangs of New York, with a pre-sold audience, even larger if you put the right stars into... well, what DID women boxers wear in 18th c. London?

The book, which sounds terrific, is "London in the Eighteenth Century" by Jerry White (who's already done ".. in the Nineteenth Century" and "... in the Twentieth Century," working his way backwards.

Hard Questions

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:54:57 GMT

You'll see on the left hand of this page the sites I visit or like -- they haven't been updated lately, and some may be gone -- but the Perpetual Interview attached to the 25th Anniversary Edition is still happening, and I've lately posted answers to some surprisingly tough questions there; also posted from earlier are Harold Bloom's questions to me, and other inquiries.

Newtopia 2

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:12:53 GMT

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions of Utopian novels to put on a student reading list. Some may have to be promoted to the required reading syllabus. I am ashamed of course of my own ignorance of many of these, but there's nothing new in that. ANd as Samuel Joihnson (him I've read) says, “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” I know where.

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 15:49:38 GMT

Readers of the Aegypt cycle may remember (or may well not) the ceiling fresco by Fumiani in Venice that is cut up in four parts to cover the new edition of Fellowes Kraft's history tomes and which I (like Pierce Moffet) wanted for my own works, for the beauty and the metafictional thrill. I wrote about this before and of my search for an adequate image on the internet, finfing none, nor in the art libraries around me. joculum also tried with apparently little success.

But the Web keeps webbing, and look now at this:

Soffitto

Here is the passage in Aegypt when Kraft records his firat sight of it:

“There is, in Venice, in the church of San Pantalon, one of the most remarkable works of art I know of. It is a Baroque ceiling painting done in eye-fooling perspective by one Fumiani, whom I have heard of in no other context. His work covers the entire ceiling and its coffers as though it were one enormous easel painting; it must tell the story of the Saint, though what that story is I have never learned. Despite the convincing upward leap of its perspective, it doesn’t have the vanishing lightness of Tiepolo, it has a hallucinatory dark clarity, the figures distinct and solidly modeled, the pillars, flights of stairs, thrones, tripods, and incense-smoke so real that their great size and swift recession from the viewer is vertiginous. Most remarkable of all is that, except for a central flight of angels, there is no obvious religious import to any of it: no Virgin, no Christ, no God or Dove, no cross, no haloes, nothing. Nothing but these huge antique figures, associated in a story more than portraying one; pondering, judging, hoping, seeing, alone. The flight of angels ascends not to a Godhead but to an empty, white-clouded center of the sky.

“Just before he finished this huge work, Fumiani apparently fell from his scaffolding and was killed. Imagine."

Words to Live By

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 11:05:41 GMT

"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."-- Groucho Marx

(Posted as a comment by a reader to an NYTimes Dick Cavett article about Groucho. Noam Chomsky, chomp on that one.)

Newtopia

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 20:42:54 GMT

Maybe because of the long and fascinating (and learned and witty and wise) conversation held here a while back, but I thought that once upon a time I asked for suggestions of utopian novels. I am going to be teaching a course (of my own devising, how nice) in Utopia as Fiction, a topic I've long pondered. Students will be asked to write their own utopian fiction in the course of the class, and also read and critique a utopian novel or fiction selected from a list.

I gave something like this course the very first time I taught at Yale (or anywhere), in a program called College Seminars, where students in the Yale colleges chose their own course to sponsor from many applications.

I gave them a list then that now looks a bit stodgy and old-fashioned, though the new class would certainly still be offered Herland, Lost Horizon, maybe Walden Two or Robert Graves's very peculiar Watch the North Wind Rise. But I need hipper and more contemporary offerings. (The Dispossessed will be on the main reading list.) A Kim Stanley Robinson one about California was mentioned herein in connection with treatment of disabilities in Utopia. Any others we can think of? Remember, Utopia not Dystopia (or at least Utopia out of Dystopia.)

Probably by using the Power of Prayer

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:42:04 GMT

From Slate:

Santorum To Make SCOTUS Stop During Health Care Hearing

Nothing

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 11:39:33 GMT

A rather hilariously outspoken but on balance entirely correct demolishment of another village-atheist attempt to account for everything -- in this case, everything including nothing -- in "rigorous" sceintific terms, thus eliminating a creator or Creator. The author is David Albert, and he certainly doesn't write like the philosophy professor he is, and the review makes me want to read his book. I once asserted that there was one basic philosophical question -- why is there anything and not just nothing? and one basic scientific question -- why is everything the way it is and not some different way instead? Quantum-field theory is a fine new answer to the second, The first can have no answer. ("God" is simply a name for the answer.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html?src=recg

Hungry

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:44:29 GMT

I haven't read, and will wait for the crowds to thin before seeing, Hunger Games. But like Harry Potter, it seems a work that strikes (young) people as a sudden astonishment, but which actually has many precedents, in books and films. The Tenth Victim was one, but certainly there are others going back to The Most Dangerous Game. It's possible that the idea of teenagers killing each other is new -- is it? Logan's Run?
.

Totalitopia hovers

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 18:03:02 GMT

Beautiful and strange, and reminiscent (on closer consideration) of those fabulous covers of Popular Mechanix in te 1930s of gorgeous red-and-yellow machines that were never to be. But who knows? The comments are fascinating.

http://torrentfreak.com/worlds-first-flying-file-sharing-drones-in-action-120320/

Tin Ear

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:24:27 GMT

From NYTimes today, about Catholic Church attempts to embroil SNAP, a support group of those abused by priests, in legal complications: The spokesman for a Catholic Church advocacy group:

Mr. Donohue said leading bishops he knew had resolved to fight back more aggressively against the group: “The bishops have come together collectively. I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys.”

Well thank goodness for that.

Barswoon

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:30:01 GMT

I may never get around to John Carter of Mars -- it seems to have missed the sweet spot of affection, subtle parody and genuine thrills that the first Star Wars hit exactly -- but it did generate this masterpiece of Finnish disappointment and full-on English appropriation that will live, noted in a a comment ot the NYTimes review:

http://mankabros.com/blogs/btp/2012/03/09/john-carter-review/

It almost seems as if there is dawning a language in which we can all join, in which sense can be made in despite of grammar and vocabulary -- a pidgin of the future. Try writing a futurist novel in this.

I See a Bird

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 01:09:41 GMT

Lucky that I caught this lovely creature, whom I have in fact never seen:

http://gazebonews.com/2012/03/09/colorful-pheasant-still-around-lake-forest/

Pointless beauty

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:58:08 GMT

A nice article in the March 12 New Yorker about Christian Marclay and his creation of "The Clock," a 24-hour long digital art piece that combines images of clocks, watches, steeples, and people calling out the time, taken from the whole history of movies, and edited in such a way that each clock image or time statement comes at exactly that time point in the 24-hour show. I loved this idea when i read about it, and it's been hugely successful; the article shows that it is an intensely considered and wittily crafted work of art. I hope to see it one day. I believe there are certain works that are transcendently beautiful and heartening while being (because being?) entirely pointless; they are my touchstones, though I may never create one. Among them I class this one, provisionally, along with Georges Perec's La Disparition, a long novel written without using the letter e; Last Year at Marienbad , a puzzle without a solution, or as it's said somewhere in the Aegypt books, "a key to which the lock is lost;" the ceilings of Tiepolo, mostly because the plots -- the archbishop being apotheosized, etc., is forgotten and irrelevant, and all that exists are clouds, nymphs, river-gods, angels and heroes.

Nother lost story

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:32:20 GMT

... with not very helpful description. A reader sends me this:

I know this is a silly request, but given the vast literary knowledge that you and those that comment on your LiveJournal posts have, I thought I'd give this a shot. I'm trying to find an anthology of short stories for a friend -- or a specific story that appears in the anthology. He believes it can be found in an Esquire collection from the 1970s or earlier, and describes the story thusly: "One story will be about a guy that buys a salt-shaker sized device that, when rubbed over text, will add or subtract words." Does that description ring any bells of something you've read? If not, would you consider posing the question to your readers. I certainly understand if not, but would be grateful to you for any assistance you could provide.

[Post here if you have a clue.]

My John Birch self

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:03:20 GMT

Maybe I'm not a member, but myself in Des Moines is liked by the Iowa John Birch Society, who posted my remarks on their page:

http://iowajohnbirchsociety.com/2012/03/05/john-crowley-of-dm-has-brilliant-lte/

Actually except for the wrongheaded snark about the seventh century (see the wonderful post about Bucky Fuller and the King of Afghanistan attached to the recent Buckyballs post) I would agree with myself.

Note that there's a link on the page showing you how to join the John Birch Society yourself. Founded in my sorta home state of Indiana, in a room at the Claypool Hotel in Indianapolis.

JC

Well may be

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 11:37:32 GMT

A Times article about yoga and sex lists some links between yogic postures and sexual arousal includes this:

Czech scientists working with electroencephalographs have shown how poses can result in bursts of brainwaves indistinguishable from those of lovers.

Sometimes I think that there's a thick crust over medical science in the present era that's not different from the excitements of mesmerism and phrenology. Unsaid here is what other "bursts of brain waves" yogic ones resemble. Heaving a trunk? Road rage? Yelling at the kids? Who knows? And what is this class of "lovers" and how is it defined, how are the subjects chosen? Are they having sex? Only the Czechs know.

Weird

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 01:21:19 GMT

A sort of semi-legal download site promises free e-book (or PDF) downloads of the Aegypt books with this wonderfully zany pitch, apparently robo-aggregated from a dozen reviews or puffs or blags of other books -- would that at least some of it were so ("weather vane for the publishing industry", "sacred totem". I've removed the links (find free copies on your own).

full ebook for ipad, kindle and pdf HERE
It`s no surprise that book reviews of Aegypt series by John Crowley -- everybody's have great reviews about it. LA Times and NY Times reviews gave the book Aegypt series by John Crowley 5 star rating. The B&N Review by top critic spends most of the time describing the plot, and delineating the differences between Aegypt series by John Crowley and other books as well as offering tidbits of dialogue. Washington Post said that it is best book of the year for sure. And the were right! Aegypt series by John Crowley gets best reviews from everyone. It seems like this book has superseded its own status of book, and become more like a weather vane for the publishing industry as a whole -- a sacred totem, because readers of Aegypt series by John Crowley go crazy about it. Could it be that massive popularity on this scale trumps any kind of literary merit? People are just going insane and stand in line for Aegypt series by John Crowley. It is very interesting, that even who criticize it change they view about Aegypt series by John Crowley and after that give book better reviews. The tone, overall, has been near insane. The criticism is spoken in a quiet small and that is mostly about marketing or other things that is not in concern of book. Fans follow Aegypt series by John Crowley on Facebook, author on Twitter and other social portals, on release date buzz was so big, that book run out of copies. But that's such a horrible position for other books to be in -- as readers in bookshop probablly will choose this book. I know that you have to review Aegypt series by John Crowley, but there is nothing bad to say about it, I read it 3 times already. Now reading forth time on my iPad. Trust me, it is so easy to read Aegypt series by John Crowley on iPad, it`s just perfect. Even pictures look good. Anyway for summary if you don`t have Aegypt series by John Crowley then it`s time to download it on iPad! I mean who in this day and age keeps books in dust, digital copy is the way to go if you ask me. You can download Aegypt series by John Crowley at [ ]

Smart me out there in Detroit

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 01:21:50 GMT

From CBS Detroit website:

So, what are the hottest issues? Most Republican voters speaking to WWJ’s Ron Dewey said the issue of government help for General Motors and Chrysler was not a factor in deciding their vote.

But Democratic voters including, John Crowley of Redford Township, say that is very much an election year issue. “If they had let the auto industry flounder it wouldn’t have just been the big three, it would have been their supplier and everybody that’s involved,” said Crowley. “All of the empoloyees, even the guy at the five and dime store or mom and pop shop.”

I'm sure I meant to mention the local independent bookstore also, and forgot in the heat of the moment,

Where are they going? What do they want?

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 21:35:31 GMT

NASA telescope detects massive cloud of 'buckyballs' hurtling through space

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0223/NASA-telescope-detects-massive-cloud-of-buckyballs-hurtling-through-space

I laughed, for no good reason.

Tense about moods

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 17:12:31 GMT

Can a French speaker or reader remind me of the name of the tense or mood whereby actions recounted using "would" (in English) are considered as repeated: "Often he would go to see his Maman and she would listen to his little woes" (yes, it's the thing Proust is always doing).

Something with "progressive" or "contnuous"?

Learn to Write in 2 Weeks

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:35:36 GMT

If you have ever thought you'd like to take a writing course with me, here's your chance:

http://www.yale.edu/summer/writing/faculty.html

Several other good writers teaching and guests, publishers, agents, etc. This is the first year for the program, but it looks good. Those who remember the Summer Session program I ran myself should put those memorioes aside, This is the real thing.