John Crowley's Blog, page 16

crowleycrow @ 2013-02-08T07:54:00

L. says "This is why the world is becoming secular."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/08/nyregion/lutheran-pastor-explains-role-in-sandy-hook-interfaith-service.html?ref=us

Does not compute

The NY Times story about how many iPads were sold over Christmas has this lead:

If you count tablets as computers, iPads far outsold personal computers in the fourth quarter worldwide.

And if you don't count tablets as computers, did iPads still outsell personal computers?  Abraham Lincoln asked "How many legs does a horse have if you call the tail a leg?"  Answer, of course, is four:  calling the tail a leg doesn't make it one.

What Lies Beneath

Wonderful, the discovery and then authentication of the bones of the last Plantagenet under the paving of a parking lot, or car park as the British say.  To be interred (one hopes) with his ancestors and rivals in the appropriate tomb.  The last English king to lead forces into battle.  Paul Murray Kendall (whose biographies of Richard, King Louis XI, and Richard Beauchamp, the "Kingmaker" Earl of Warwick I read and re-read in high school) believed it likely that Richard did have the princes in the Tower done in:  he supposes that Richard feared that another minor king would simply result in the same chaos as the minority of Henry VI had led to.  Of course Dorothy Sayers in "Daughter of Time" and others too make a good case for Henry VII having eliminated two very dangerous rivals (who did in fact threaten him, in the form of the fake aspirants, or pretend pretenders, who popped up regularly).  Kendall's Richard is basically a good man, a worrier, somewhat gloomy and private (compared to his six-foot golden-boy brother Edward) and haunted by his deed -- a character for a later Shakespeare to handle.   

Book of Kells

Reading about the great masterpiece of what I have learned is called "insular art"  (i.e. art of the British Isles in the early medieval period) -- and looking at a site where the entire thing can be looked at page by page -- 

DRIS Trinity College Library Dublin

-- I found myself fascinated by this one (even set it as my home screen picture):  It's the incipit or title-page of the Gospel of John.  It shows the evangelist, holding up what appears to be his book, which you are about to read, but which he is in -- a nice metafictional touch.  But odder is that at the bottom of the page there is a tiny pair of feet, just like the Saint's; and on the left and right, two tiny hands, gripping; and above -- though the page has perhaps been worn away or wasn't completely copied -- what looks like a coat and tie and a faint nimbus above it.  Who is that and why is he standing behind the saint?

Wisdom of the ancients

Re-reading Plato's Republic for my Utopia class this semester and came upon this, which I paid less attention to when I first read it. The passage contrasts the way Asclepius treated diseas and the way the moderns (of Plato's day) treated diseases of the wealthy.  Asclepius treated the immediate symptoms (of a wound or an illness) with a straightforward treatment, a bandage or an emetic, and sent the warrior or the worker back into action; if the treatment didn't take and he died, well, he was out of his misery.

But a doctor named Herodicus had a new plan for a more self-indulgent age "by making his dying a lengthy process:"

"Always tending his mortal illness, he was, it seems, unable to cure it, so he lived out his life under medical treatment...  If he departed even a little from his accustomed regimen, he became completely worn out, but because his skill made dying difficult, he lived into his old age."   This treatment, suitable only for those wealthy enough not to need to work, involved prescribing "a regimen, drawing off a little here and pouring in a little there, in order to make their life a prolonged misery."  

I read the other day of  a new drug for pancreatic cancer, one of the worst, that held the promise of prolonging life.  It seemed likely to prolong life for as much as two months.  This progress came as a result of a years-long research effort. Two more months hooked up to your machines in the hospital, "drawing off a little here, pouring in a little there" -- well I know that there are reasons for some to want and very much need an additional two months, but "prolonging life" in this fashion wouldn't have pleased Plato or Asclepius much.  Or me.  

The readiness is all

I was asked to be a panelist at the yearly conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and because I had to be a member to participate, I signed up for a year to see what it was like.  (Many universities have institutional memberships, but not mine)  I'll be talking about new fairy tales, along with Jane Yolen and Kelly Link and others,  That's March 7 in Boston.

Meanwhile, as a perq (yes we've had that discussion), I get a subscription to the association's journal, the Writer's Chronicle, wherein I got news of a Kickstarter program that might interest you.  It's a "choose-your-own-way edition" of  Hamlet (or, not wanting to exclude anyone whose interest might be aroused, the site calls "Shakespeare's tragic play, Hamlet").  Ryan North went to Kickstarter to raise money for an illustrated book featuring different ways for the various characters to die, or not, each illustration by a different artist,  "You can do a lot in a book like this," North says.  "This is a book written for adults who like only the most awesome of things."

So fine.  The remarkable thing is that North, who hoped for $20,000 for his project from Kickstarter to pay for a small edition and have it illustrated, has now got $300,000 and counting.  I haven't visited the site page  ("To Be or Not to Be, That is the Adventure" if you want to contribute).  

My hockey photo

A nice shot I apparently took of the lake Forest women's hockey team on the ice.  I am glad to know there are women's hockey teams.  I don't know what the large white item upper right is -- a specific obstacle in women's hockey rules?  it looks like a hoop skirt. This appeared in the Lake Forest - Lake Bluff Gazebo News. 

Aiken and the Wolves

My essay on Joan Aiken is now available in the online Boston Review, where you can read it for free--
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR38.1/john_crowley_joan_aiken_wolves_fiction.php

-- though I'm sure the the editors would prefer you to buy a copy, or even a subscription, to their fine journal, full of information and other good things.

(I should point out that the title of the piece is not mine, and I don't think I would have given it one quite so contentious.)

Today's Times ambiguation

It may be my advanced age and incipient MCI, but I cannot make any sense of this.  Google won a USA Today contest for most imaginative print ad, which everyine found amusing/appropriate/contradictory.  Larry Kramer, publisher of USA Today, found it "hysterical" that Google won:

As for the japes about Google as a destroyer of print media rather than a supporter, Mr. Kramer said, “Everything we say about Google, the nice thing is that they have to search something.” 

The Times obviously understood this remark, or they wouldn't have printed it, but I don't.  Can someone paraphrase?

Back from Lose -eeana

A wonderful and weird week.  I am sorry to have been so feckless as not to have asked y'all before I left for suggestions about things to do and see (and eat) -- by the time I asked and got them it was about time to go home.  (Though we did make it to the Napoleon for lunch, thank joculum .) 

We did eat splendidly -- I'm sure there are lots of great funky cheap home-cookn places that we couldn't distinguish from horrid funky cheap home cookn places, but we went high-end mostly -- turtle soup, gumbo etc. at the Commander's Palace in the Garden District, just wonderful, almost as many waiters to a table as diners; all the waiters lined up as the place opened and we early birds walked in, all in their long white aprons and black vests and ties -- like Stahf lined up to greet his lordship on Downton Abbey.  And coffee with chicory, unbelievably bitter (I didn't know it could only be drunk as a kind of cafe au lait sweet as can be).  

At the Carousel bar (at the Hotel Monteleone, where Truman Capote and Faulkner and Tennessee all stayed and drank and wrote, po'-boys with fried oysters and Abita Amber beer, wonderful but maybe one of those things that are only wonderful there -- I remember a cheap pale brandy I drank in Ibiza that an Irish bartender told me not to bother trying ot bring home -- "You'll only pour it down the loo" -- but good there,  The Carousel bar is painted like a caroussel, -- it goes around.  (Yes, there is or was one in Queens, too, buit this was here.)

Olivier's for blackened catfish, barbecued crayfish tails, and jambalaya.  Muriel for ... what did we eat in Muriel?  Have to ask L -- but we did go up into the decadent Belloc chambres separees pstairs where the ghost lives.)

Other notes -- Everyone in NO lives basically within a black cultural environment, it seems -- there isn't necessarily a larger percentage of African AMericans than in New York but in NO you are in an African AMerican world,  SO it felt.

More ancient bicycles than anywhere.  Not fast messenger or cyclist bikes:  people young and old sitting upright on the broad seats of old gearless Schwinns, high handle bars that had lost their  rubber gloves, thumb-bells ringing.  

We hardly got out of the Vieux Carre, and still didn't see it all.  We'll go back,