John Crowley's Blog, page 10

Major Medical

Some grumpy elder on a comment stream about Obamacare saying his twentysomething daughter and her friends would never go for it -- you paid a monthly premium and STILL had a $6000 deductible to meet!

This absurd objection reminded me of the existence, forty years ago, of so-called Major Medical insurance programs -- low monthly premiums and a high deductible.  Named because they were designed for young single people who would probably not need much care unless they needed a whole lot.  When (ca. 1978) I tried to get such a policy, perfect for me, I was told that they were no longer offered.  Not profitable enough I guess.  Now they're back.  What young person on her own WOULDN'T want one?

Me in the hands of the police

So proud to be standing shoulder to shoulder with Charles Rangel and John Lewis!  Except the name of this representative is actually not mine but my father's, Joseph.

Oddly the papers have mistaken me for him in other stories, where he's John not Joe.  Something odd at work on the astral plane.

http://cherokeetribune.com/view/full_story/23790037/article-John-Lewis--others-arrested-at-rally?instance=secondary_story_bullets_left_column

Googled

Did Google purposely put up a new opening page doodle of Yosemite National Park on the day the park will be closed because of the Gov Shutdown, or was it a sheer wonderful coincidence?

Triumph of the Weak

"Weak" verbs -- those that form their past and pluperfect by adding "d" or "ed" -- have long been taking over from "strong" verbs -- those that form tenses by changing shape in one way or another.  Here's one new to me, from a NYTimes story about renovations at the Gene Autry Museum (now Autry Center) in LA:

At stake is the mythology of the American West — a founding myth at once great and fearsome, inspiring and rived[.]

What happened to "riven"?  The verb used to decline "rive, reft, riven"  -- similar to but not the same as "drive, drove, driven."  As in Ezra Pound's great lines:

What thou lovest well remains,the rest is drossWhat thou lov’st well shall not be reft from theeWhat thou lov’st well is thy true heritage

It's a strange old word anyway -- I don't know why the writer chose it over "divisive" or "wounding" or etc.  that everyone could get; but as long as it's used, why not use the old form too?

Xfinity Me

While somewhat ashamed to be reduced to flacking for Comcast out in Illinois, I have no particular animus against the company, which provides dependable service on the whole.  I hope I'm signing up enough customers for the borg-like Quad Play to keep the VP job and feed the family.

http://www.lincolncourier.com/topstories/x1155163551/Comcast-offers-phone-service-in-Mount-Pulaski

Mt. Pulaski, Home of the Hilltoppers, is in Logan County.  I am doubtful about this claim of "hill" but I must suppose I know it well.  The 1848 Courthouse (where Abe Lincoln practiced) is on the State Register of Historic Places.  I'm thinking it could use Comcast services, if it doesn't already have them. I don't know what service Mt. Pulaski folk used to ring people up before I got there. 

Cartozia

Here's an interesting project -- maybe unique, but I wouldn't know that, little as I follow the comics world.  I think the issues so far are interesting, engaging, intriguing.

http://cartozia.com/

 If you like what's happening here, there's a Kickstarter campaign up now, with the usual gifts and stuff:


http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1765342446/cartozia-tales-ten-issues

PS

LJ's dodgy search feature doesn't allow me to find whether or not I posted this link to the video of my speech/adress/lecture about the future at the MoMA/PS1 "Speculations" event in July.  Anyway here it is, possibly again.

http://www.momaps1.org/expo1/event/john-crowley/

Holy Crap!

Christopher Beha, editor at Harper's magazine, has a long piece confuting Jennifer Weiner's now well-known complaints about the New ork Times Book Review's treatment of commercial fiction, including her own.  Respond (f a response occurs to you) either here or there, but a response there will be more widely read, and (maybe) more hotly contested.


http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/09/jennifer_weiner_commercial_writers_and_the_new_york_times_book_review.2.html

Mr. Malaprop

Friend Paul DiFilippo sent me this neat catch:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/world/middleeast/irans-new-foreign-minister-may-lead-nuclear-talks.html?_r=0

“You have to read the fig leaves from all these pronouncements — they’re talking about diplomacy,” saidMehrzad Boroujerdi, a political science professor who specializes in Iran at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Paul's comment:  Would those be the same fig leaves that the fortuneteller used to make the revelatory cup of tea?

But he misunderstands:  "Reading the fig leaves"  is an old diplomacy code-phrase for "discovering the underlying sex scandal and its impact."

At least that's what _I_ think.

John Hollander

The poet John Hollander died Saturday.  He was 83 and had been long unwell.

I first met John at Indiana University in 1964.  I was an undergraduate, he was then at the School of Letters, a summer institute featuring that summer such luminaries as George Steiner, Robert Fitzgerald, and others I can't now name.  My friend Lance Bird and I were making a student film in that year, and somehow convinced these august persons to be in it, playing the syndics of the International Anarchist Conspiracy (one scene, set in front of a huge map of the world in the lobby of a modern building.)

I used to talk to him about poetry then.  A scene in my story Novelty in which an aspiring writer talks to an established poet about poems that are meant to be written and poems meant to be talked about in bars is taken from one conversation back then.

I lost touch with him then for a long time, and though I sent him a galleys or a typescript of Little, Big I heard nothing from him.  He was teaching then at Yale.  When Harold Bloom (Yale also) took up my writing and pressed LB on Hollander, he was astonished to realize he'd known me and had not recognized the name on the MS I'd sent.  He as much as Bloom was responsible for my teaching at Yale, one of the great experiences of my life.

He was the most learned man -- and the most filled with recondite knowledge of every kind in every realm -- I've ever known.  He read a galley of my book Love & Sleep and sent me a list of small errors of this and that kind I'd made -- apologizing for what he called a "crabbed response" -- later praising the cod-18th c. poem I inserted into that volume, which was high praise indeed.