John Crowley's Blog, page 22

Movies

Two movies in three days -- unusual for me.  (In theaters, I mean.)  Best Exotic Marigold Hotel -- remarkable collection of PBS warhorses, Judy Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith -- all able to win you over even if you resist.  I was won, though it has to be said the thing itself was shallow, trite, wildly sentimental and with every loose end tied up happily, like four sentimental comedies mashed into one (even one ending where the man who loves the woman is on his way to the airport with the woman he doesn't love, only to turn back at the last minute to go and Seize Life.)

The Moonrise Kingdom. I think there are Wes Anderson people and not-Wes Anderson people.  I rarely hear mingled judgments.  I am a Wes Anderson people, and this one is extraordinary:  Like "The Life Aquatic" it's an imaginary world in which all the thought and feeling as well as all the things and actions depend on a pre-existing template of imaginariness:  in "The Life Aquatic" it came from the imaginary world of Jacques Cousteau (as rendered in TV land long ago.) In "Moonrise Kingdom" its a projection of the possibilities imagined by a twelve year old of 1965:  not a twelve year old imagining other worlds of knights or monsters or spacemen, but what that child's mind imagined the possibilities of this world to be.  It's hilarious and touching and rendered with -- well, you couldn't call it fidelity, but fidelity to those possibilities.  Watch for the moment when Sam recounts how he burned down a shed by accident at his old foster home: it's three seconds long, entirely unnecessary, voice-over that could be simple dialogue, and instead Anderson creates a moment chockfull of information at every level and funny.  I can't explain how it would work, but I think Wes Anderson is the man to make films of Nabokov novels.  None of the existing films carry anything like the fairy-tale wonder at the world and its contents, the absolutely hand-made world, that Nabokov and Anderson can build. 

New Link

I'm adding a link over on the left to a Wordpress blog conducted by a passionate and insightful reader of books - So Very Very.  Her latest post is about my book The Translator, but also look at her other posts about a rather amazing variety of omnivorous reading.

Fussbudgeting

Even the redoubtable Gail Collins, master of the plain style, can muddle up a sentence.  Her memoir of Nora Ephron makes a striking historical claim:

We talked about the grand saga of how the bad old days gave way to the women’s movement one afternoon while she was cooking lunch in the apartment on the East Side where she lived with her husband, Nick Pileggi. 


Rather sudden for a movement, wouldn't we say?

One More for the Robots

First Jeopardy, now this:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/06/27/rock_paper_scissors_robot_from_ishikawa_oku_laboratory_wins_100_percent_of_the_time_video_.html 

The tag line on the article: Nobody knows what will happen when two of these robots play each other.

crowleycrow @ 2012-06-26T11:57:00

So hard to make language window-pane clear.  Headline in Slate:

Despite Causing Some of the Worst Wildfires in Years, Utah Can’t Regulate Target Shooting
It means what you think it means, but not what it says.  It says that in a desperate attempt to regulate target shooters, Utah has caused the worst wildfires in years. It means something else.  We may be puzzled for a moment, but we get it.  So does it matter?   

Making myself shudder

I seem to be the author of a nastily shudder-making Goreyesque poem.  What else have I written in the gore-poetry-in-tetrameter mode?

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/severed-head-2/ 

Notice that on the PoemHunter site where my poem appears, you can rate it, and also answer the question "What do you think this poem is about?"  Merely re-entering the poem with changed pronouns would not be sporting.

Fairy tales

Thanks to everyone for the large number of references to what we would now call disabled people in folk tales and legends. I hope that it will be a help to researchers dealing with these questions,  The history of the disability experience and the forms in which it has been cast (two different things) are ways for people with disabilities, especially young people, to understand their own circumstances, how different yet not totally different they are.

teaching otherwise

Just wrapping up my stint at the Yale Writer's (Writers'? Writers?) Conference, first instance.  A very interesting experience working with mostly older writers (one was 67) and a couple younger (one 18) than in my semester classes..  The conference was so successful that further instances will certainly be MORE successful.  Many were turned away.  The eagerness of people to write! Wonderful and widespread.  

I was given a room in Calhoun College, one of Yale's dormitories, which was fine if austere (oak-panelled walls and (non-working) fireplace, but prison-like shower and, of course, no air conditioning, which I usually don't mind, but it was 97F in New Haven yesterday and sleeping was like hell.  (I mean rather as sleep must be in hell after a long day of torments.)  

Sign up now to be schooled next June!  

Also go right over to the Lapham's Quarterly site and get a subscription -- I have an essay in the new and very engaging issue on Magic.  (You can read it for free online, but you wouldn;t want to; you'd want to have the thing itself.)

Epigone

Did you know (very likely you did) that "epigone" has the connotation of "second-rate" and not just "imitator, follower, esp. in the arts"?  This means that for years I have been sneering at folks I didn't mean to sneer at (though some, yes).

Bradbury

You might be amused by my comments on the life and work over at the Boston review Online:

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.3/john_crowley_ray_bradbury_science_fiction.php