John Crowley's Blog, page 19

LJ and me

I replied to  sertay 's comment on my previous post asking me not to abandon ship (to mix the metaphor a bit): 

Oh, I won't leave. A moment of petulance is all that was. I will try to figure out how to make it easier for me and you and everyone, but I'll still be here in the old manse, with the mice in the stuffing of my armchair but the old books still on the shelves.

Spamalot

I am beginning to think of abandoning my LJ.  Like an old and ill-maintained house it is becoming riddled with vermin.  My last post had more spam than it had comments -- 18 to delete.  Of course you don't see them, and I suppose I could just ignore them, but I regard the journal as a sort of archive (vanity?) -- anywya I've often gone searching in it for wise or clever things you or I have said, or points of interest.  Now I go back to older posts to find them infested, as though I opened an old drawer and found mouse-nests in the linens.

Do we all have this?  Or only the oldest tenants?

Two new words for today

Both somewhat unsettling in their Latinate coolness in nameing dreadful things:

Lapidation:  stoning to death as a punishment.

Excarnation:  The funerary process of allowing animals or birds to strip the flesh from the corpse,  (It also means simply "removal of the flesh" but since a word was needed for the funeral process it was put to work.)

I like these because the Latin source is so easily seen as soon as the word is used:  She fled with her lover rather than risk lapidation.  Excarnation of the saint's body went on for many days.

Downward to darkness

I remarked a while ago on how literate the NY Times seemed to be getting, with non-ordinary buried quotations for the cognoscenti to chuckle at.  I couldn't at that time actually produce examples, and still can't, but here's a beauty from Slate.  It's the continuation of a story where Tippi Hedren, who was famously abused verbally at least by Alfred Hitchcock responds to an interview question -- Is Hitchcock difficult to work with?

The pause Hedren takes before delivering her answer is so very brief that it is likely imperceptible to viewers innocent of the more difficult truths about Mr. Hitchcock. But it is there. “Is Mr. Hitchcock a difficult man to work with?” Nanopause. “Not at all …” Hedren then proceeds to bang out boilerplate as convincingly as any good starlet at a dumb junket—until a casual flock of pigeons ambiguously undulates behind her. Deeply startled, she must fight back a grimacing giggle before hacking out a conclusion: “He’s wonderful to work with.” And then—and this is evidence that Hedren is not an actor of the first rate—you see her throat cluck: She visibly swallows the lie.
:

Here's the link, with video:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2012/10/hbo_s_the_girl_tippi_hedren_and_alfred_hitchcock_movie_reviewed.html

Rushdie and me

Salman Rushdie's book about being under a fatwa mentions the moment in 1988 when, with his book about to be banned in India by the Rajiv Ghandi government, he went to Toronto for the Harbourfront Festival of Authors.  As it happened, I was at the same festival.   How I got to be there is a story for some other day if ever. It was at that time officially called the Wang Festival of Authors, being funded by Wang computers, developer of the first or at least the first very successful "dedicated" word processor.  It was an amazing gathering of world authors -- Michael Ondaatje,  James Fenton, D.M. Thomas,  Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, A.S. Byatt, on and on.  (One of the side perqs of the festival was a trip to Niagara Falls.  I went under the falls with A.S. Byatt, among many,)   At a cocktail party I heard Rushdie talking with Desai about what was occurring in India, the book was to be officially banned.  "Oh that foolish Rajiv!" Desai said, in the manner of a good but strict teacher disappointed in a pupil.  "I shall speak to him as soon as I return to Delhi.  This has to be stopped."  Of course it wasn't.

Rushdie read a piece from Satanic Verses at the festival (which was, basically, a series of readings).  The piece was about a mad Islamic revolutionary ayatolla brooding in his apartment in France about the revolution he intends to bring about, the infidels and faithless officials who will die, the pure new world that will be instituted.  "Wine will flow like blood" was one line I remember. It was evident even from this small excerpt that the fatwa had nothing to do with insulting Islam or the Prophet and everything to do with insulting Khomeini.  Who did not seem to be the type to suffer insults gladly.  It seems to me that less was made of this at the time than I would have expected.

I read from my book "Aegypt," the first pages.  I shared the evening with D.M. Thomas.  There were hundreds of people in the audience.  It was truly an astonishment. 

Who is the Who

From  Pete Tonshend's just-out autobiography:

“I wasn’t trying to play beautiful music,” Mr. Townshend explains. “I was confronting my audience with the awful, visceral sound of what we all knew was the single absolute of our frail existence — one day an aeroplane would carry the bomb that would destroy us all in a flash. It could happen at any time. The Cuban Crisis less than two years before had proved that.” 

I know that this aspect of the band -- the smashed guitars and shrieking feedback -- was central to their status, and the social negation and nihilism was how they were understood, but I loved the band for things that to me were just as large a part of their work, which was I believe Tonshend's mostly:  the delicate wit, the careful crafting, the tenderness.  "Mary Anne with the Shaky Hands." "Armenia, City in the Sky." "So Sad About Us."  Above all, "A Quick One While he's Away," which as much as "Blonde on Blonde" convinced me that rock-based music was capable of being a personal art form (it already was and long had been an enormous force, of course.)   When the Who was to play the Fillmore East in 1968, I made up buttons that said "You Are Forgiven" and planned to hand them out (yes, free, 1968) at the concert, but it was canceled because of Martin Luther King's assassination.  I still marvel at it.  Watch the woman's grief enlarge in this stanza (if that's what you'd call it:)

"Along this street your crying is a well known sound --
This street is [quite?] well known throughout this town
This town is very famous for its little girl
Whose crying can be heard all 'round the world."

Which Roger Daltry sings in an obvious Bob Dylan parody mode.   Then there's "Ivor the Engine Driver" and the mock Grofe horse-cloppings.  Wikipedia calls the piece "a medley" which is absurdly reductive.

Marina Keegan

Readers may remember my account of Marina Keegan, a student of mine at Yale who was killed in a car crash not long after graduating -- one of the most promising (and already accomplished) students I've been privileged to know in a dozen years of teaching.   She'd interned at the New Yorker the summer before, and now the magazine has published one of her best stories,  

 http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/cold-pastoral-by-marina-keegan.html 

Prescriptive v. descriptive

A subtle and friendly (but also incomplete because friendly) debate about language rules in the Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/09/27/which-language-and-grammar-rules-to-flout/?ref=opinion 

My response -- which may soon be buried in a long list of responses:

The distinction between useful and useless prescriptions always hinges on loss or gain in meaning. If the distinctions between similar words are eroded, language richness is lost; if "disinterested" and "uninterested" come to mean the same thing, the language has lost an easy way to state an important idea. "That" as restrictive is important to meaning; in written English "which" works all right as restrictive if there's no comma, as in the Thurber and the Lord's Prayer. Erasure of distinction IS the consequence of ignorance -- not of the rule, but more importantly of the distinction itself. We writers and teachers fight for distinctions not because of a fusspot love of rules but because of a love of the inestimable value of the gift of meaning descending to us from our forebears. We are conservative, not prescriptive. And like good conservatives we accept slow and useful change -- the kind that made a distinction between "continuous" and "continual" and added subtlety to language, thus to the possibilities of communicated meaning.

His Best Hook

On the back cover of the paper edition of the New Yorker (you may have seen it) is an ad for a new thriller.  There's a noirish picture of James Patterson all in black, and a picture of the book, "Zoo."  The copy reads:  "Once in a lifetime a writer puts it all together.  This is James Patterson's best book."   The cover of the book shown is entitled ZOO, with the authors listed in equal-size letters as James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge.

Since there's no suggestion in the copy that Michael Ledwidge has also put it all together once in a lifetime, I found it hard to make sense of the pitch, until I thought perhaps they were saying that James Patterson had put it all together (himself, a plot, a co- or surrogate writer) and the result was the best "James Patterson" book.  A rather profound move in the anti-author post-post-modern writing world.  Maybe.

No, just an innocent mistake

Not a plot for a paranormal thriller or modernist tease -- today's Times subhead:

Russian Oligarch Boris Berezovsky Loses Court Battle Against Ex-AssociateBy REUTERS 37 minutes ago

The Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky on Friday lost a multibillion-dollar legal battle against a former partner, Boris Berezovsky, in a London courtroom.