John Crowley's Blog, page 2

Revenge of the Metaphor

Treating metaphors as merelycolorful ways of saying things can irritate them, and sometimes they bite. In a local arts & culture magazine, an aricle about how hard it was to restore Emily Dickinson's house. It was helped by the discovery of some fragments of wall paper still adhering to surfaces. "Discovery of the wall paper fragments...lit a a fire under museum directors and the board of governors," the article says. "Not that the fire was quick to burn," he continues, giving us time to beat out the metaphorical flames consuming Emily's home.

Not feeling myself

I have every sympathey with myself here, thinking perhaps that my perplexity arose from the fact that I was actually not there at all.  Still I have to admire the grace, self-possession and dry wit with which I conducted myself.  I hope I was let off.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/71521770/mystery-man-tells-court-i-am-just-myself

What I didn't do in the war

If I read this right, you can get my new Harper's  "Easy Chair" essay (about how I did not go to Vietnam) for free as an inducement to subsribe. Enjoy!

http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/selective-service/

Little and big

Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker about Max Beerbohm, the paradigmatic beloved minor writer. "Beerbohm found so many ways to be modest that when he had to try and be major he couldn't." (Max assembled materials for a big Jamesian novel he got nowhere with.) "Still," Gopnik writes, there is no such thing as a minor writer, because--there is no such thing as a major writer. As Max wrote, considering Whistler, even Shakespeare occupies shockingly little of our attention -- shocking, that is, for those of us who are trying to occupy it too. (Boswell, one of Max's favorites, said the same thing about Voltaire: no had ever been more talked of, and look how little, really, Voltaire was talked of.) This means that bigness is a mirage, but it also means smallness is a kind of illusion too. Anyone who is read at all is more or less the same size."
I think that's a wonderful insight.

Childish things

From an article in the 0online NYRB by Glen H. Shepherd about photiographs of the now-nonexistent Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego: "There is something bewitchingly surreal about his photographs of the Hain initiation ceremony, in which young Selk’nam men are hazed by a pantheon of spirits that are revealed, in the final moments (forbidden to women), to be kinsmen in elaborate masks." An African people I read about have an inititation for young men in which weird sounds are heard in the bush, and the young men are dared to follow the sounds. When they have sufficiently faced their terror of the spirit world the elders appear and show them how the sound is made, with what in English is called a bullroarer. Basically the older men induct the younger into the facts of the world: we are the gods you fear. It's like a child being told there's no Santa Claus, it's Dad in the red suit, but don't tell the younger ones.

Women aren't part of these intitiation ceremonies -- theirs turn on menstruation and other secrets -- maybe they already guess these male secrets, or maybe they don't care.

Wouldn't it be interseting if our churches worked the same way -- you believe and pray and have magic helpers and angels and speak to Grandma in heaven, and then when you grow up your "confirmation" is actually to learn it's all not so; it's a means or a divine game but not a set of facts, and we ourselves are its origin. "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

Me not being wealthy

I'm glad to know that despite being a former cover star (whatever that is) I have not slaved uselessly as a wealth manager only to find it is not the way to riches

.http://citywire.co.uk/wealth-manager/news/hawksmoor-s-crowley-becoming-a-wealth-manager-is-not-the-way-to-survive/a829807

crowleycrow @ 2015-08-03T16:16:00

The old, old question of Who are you? to one's own self grown strangely evasivein the gloaming, and to God's world around to which one has never been reallyintroduced.

Reading "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" for reasons that will be clear when my Harper's essay-after-next (November) appears.  It's the best example I know -- there are many -- of the novel that contains summaries or selections of novels written by a character, to varied effect.  (Nabokov's mostly to discharge ideas that sound wonderful but really couldn't be written.)

Rough magic

Watched Julie Taymor's Tempest last night. It was wonderful throughout, though (as is common now) a bit darker-hued than you'd expect. I was reminded of Max Reinhardt's 1930s film of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in the casting, assembled as in a dream -- Alfred Molina, David Strathairn, Chis Cooper (!), Alan Cumming, Tom Conti -- all doing classic strong Shakespeare verse-speaking. ANd of course Helen Mirren as Prospero -- sorry, Prospera -- giving one of the most moving performances in a Shakespeare film I've ever seen. Somehow her exchanges with Miranda were more touching and intimate as mother-daughter than as father-daughter, and her concern for both her lost power and her child were enriched. Her great last speech ("This rough magic I here abjure") had me in tears, maybe because I feel myself to be an old (would-be) mage in the same condition.

TLS

I enjoy the Times Litereary Supplement for a lot of reasons.  It reviews books that wouldn't be noticed in any general weekly.  It reviews books in languages other than English and quotes from them in the original, which even if I can't read is pleasant to encounter.  And it furnishes me every week with examples of how different British and American English are, both in older  locutions and in new-fangled ones -- despite the fear in my youth that the two would become an indistinguishable slew they have actually drifted farther apart in recent decades (I think).  Older locution of the week, in a review of a Antonia Fraser's autobiography:  her mother's brother "contracts polio:  from his propinquity to the Oxford poor in Cowley or the bran-tub of the Countess of Jersey's lucky-dip?"  

Readercon

Hello all after long absence.  I'm posting my Readercon schedule here for you all to keep in your wallets:

Thursday July 09
9:00 PM    ENL    How to Write for a Living When You Can't Live Off Your Fiction.. Leah Bobet, John Crowley, Michael Dirda, Barbara Krasnoff (leader).You've just been laid off from your staff job, you can't live on the royalties from your fiction writing, and your significant other has taken a cut in pay. How do you pay the rent? Well, you can find freelance work writing articles, white papers, reviews, blogs, and other non-SFnal stuff. Despite today's lean journalistic market, it's still possible to make a living writing, editing, and/or publishing. Let's talk about where and how you can sell yourself as a professional writer, whether blogging can be done for a living, and how else you can use your talent to keep the wolf from the door. Bring whatever ideas, sources, and contacts you have.
Friday July 10
6:00 PM    F    From the French Revolution to Future History: Science Fiction and Historical Thinking. Christopher Cevasco, Phenderson Clark, Jonathan Crowe, John Crowley, Victoria Janssen (leader). Arts journalist Jeet Heer wrote, "It's no accident H.G. Wells wrote both [The] Time Machine and The Outline of History (one of the most popular history books ever), [and] it's no accident that science fiction writers are also often historical novelists: Kim Stanley Robinson, Nicola Griffith, etc." For Heer, science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and horror can all be grouped under the meta-genre of fantastika, and all emerged from the "epistemological rupture" of the French Revolution, which "forced us to think of history in new way, with new emphasis on ruptures and uncontrollable social forces." Is Heer right to see these commonalities? Is it useful to think of historical fiction in fantastika terms? And how do speculative genres borrow from historical ones?
Saturday July 11
2:00 PM    G    Imagining the Author. John Crowley, Natalie Luhrs, Kate Maruyama, Kathryn Morrow (leader), Diane Weinstein. Is it possible to read a piece of fiction without keeping in mind that the author has a gender, an age, a profession, an ethnic identification, a height, a weight, or a race? And if it is possible to truly do away with assumptions, without inserting one's own characteristics as a supposed neutral state, is it a good idea? How does assuming that the author is like or unlike the reader influence the reader's experience of a piece, or a critic's analysis of it? Is imagining the author a necessary starting point for any deep read or critique, or is this all ultimately a distraction from addressing the work itself?
3:00 PM    F    Shifting the Realism Conversation. Leah Bobet, Michael Cisco, John Crowley, John Langan, Yves Meynard. In a 2014 interview, James Patterson, not generally thought of as a fabulist, declared, "I don't do realism. Sometimes people will mention that something I've written doesn't seem realistic and I always picture them looking at a Chagall and thinking the same thing." Meanwhile, the SF/F world is engaged in ongoing discussions about the value and meaning of realism in epic fantasy, particularly the variety that uses claims of realism to justify portrayals of violence, bigotry, and misery in cod-medieval settings. What shifts in these discussions if we adopt Patterson's framing, setting modernism and abstraction in opposition to realism? What would abstract, modernist, Chagall-like epic fantasy look like? And would it work, or is some adherence to the real necessary in stories that explore the unreal?
8:30 PM               Reading. John Crowley reading from his now completed but unpublished novel KA: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr.