John Crowley's Blog, page 24

Newtopia 2

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions of Utopian novels to put on a student reading list.  Some may have to be promoted to the required reading syllabus.  I am ashamed of course of my own ignorance of many of these, but there's nothing new in that.  ANd as Samuel Joihnson (him I've read) says,   “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” I know where.

crowleycrow @ 2012-04-01T11:49:00

Readers of the Aegypt cycle may remember (or may well not) the ceiling fresco by Fumiani in Venice that is cut up in four parts to cover the new edition of Fellowes Kraft's history tomes and which I (like Pierce Moffet) wanted for my own works, for the beauty and the metafictional thrill.  I wrote about this before and of my search for an adequate image on the internet, finfing none, nor in the art libraries around me.   joculum  also tried with apparently little success.

But the Web keeps webbing, and look now at this:

Soffitto  

Here is the passage in Aegypt when Kraft records his firat sight of it:

“There is, in Venice, in the church of San Pantalon, one of the most remarkable works of art I know of. It is a Baroque ceiling painting done in eye-fooling perspective by one Fumiani, whom I have heard of in no other context. His work covers the entire ceiling and its coffers as though it were one enormous easel painting; it must tell the story of the Saint, though what that story is I have never learned. Despite the convincing upward leap of its perspective, it doesn’t have the vanishing lightness of Tiepolo, it has a hallucinatory dark clarity, the figures distinct and solidly modeled, the pillars, flights of stairs, thrones, tripods, and incense-smoke so real that their great size and swift recession from the viewer is vertiginous. Most remarkable of all is that, except for a central flight of angels, there is no obvious religious import to any of it: no Virgin, no Christ, no God or Dove, no cross, no haloes, nothing. Nothing but these huge antique figures, associated in a story more than portraying one; pondering, judging, hoping, seeing, alone. The flight of angels ascends not to a Godhead but to an empty, white-clouded center of the sky.“Just before he finished this huge work, Fumiani apparently fell from his scaffolding and was killed. Imagine."

Words to Live By

"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."-- Groucho Marx  

(Posted as a comment by a reader to an NYTimes Dick Cavett article about Groucho.  Noam Chomsky, chomp on that one.)

Newtopia

Maybe because of the long and fascinating (and learned and witty and wise) conversation held here a while back, but I thought that once upon a time I asked for suggestions of utopian novels.  I am going to be teaching a course (of my own devising, how nice) in Utopia as Fiction, a topic I've long pondered.  Students will be asked to write their own utopian fiction in the course of the class, and also read and critique a utopian novel or fiction selected from a list.  

I gave something like this course the very first time I taught at Yale (or anywhere), in a program called College Seminars, where students in the Yale colleges chose their own course to sponsor from many applications.  

I gave them a list then that now looks a bit stodgy and old-fashioned, though the new class would certainly still be offered Herland, Lost Horizon, maybe Walden Two or Robert Graves's  very peculiar Watch the North Wind Rise.  But I need hipper and more contemporary offerings.  (The Dispossessed will be on the main reading list.)  A Kim Stanley Robinson one about California was mentioned herein in connection with treatment of disabilities in Utopia.  Any others we can think of?  Remember, Utopia not Dystopia (or at least Utopia out of Dystopia.)

Probably by using the Power of Prayer

 From Slate:

Santorum To Make SCOTUS Stop During Health Care Hearing

Nothing

A rather hilariously outspoken but on balance entirely correct demolishment of another village-atheist attempt to account for everything -- in this case, everything including nothing -- in "rigorous" sceintific terms, thus eliminating a creator or Creator.  The author is David Albert, and he certainly doesn't write like the philosophy professor he is, and the review makes me want to read his book.  I once asserted that there was one basic philosophical question -- why is there anything and not just nothing?  and one basic scientific question -- why is everything the way it is and not some different way instead?  Quantum-field theory is a fine new answer to the second,  The first can have no answer.  ("God" is simply a name for the answer.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html?src=recg

Hungry

I haven't read, and will wait for the crowds to thin before seeing, Hunger Games.  But like Harry Potter, it seems a work that strikes (young) people as a sudden astonishment, but which actually has many precedents, in books and films. The Tenth Victim was one, but certainly there are others going back to The Most Dangerous Game. It's possible that the idea of teenagers killing each other is new -- is it?  Logan's Run?
.

Totalitopia hovers

Beautiful and strange, and reminiscent (on closer consideration) of those fabulous covers of Popular Mechanix in te 1930s of gorgeous red-and-yellow machines that were never to be. But who knows? The comments are fascinating.


http://torrentfreak.com/worlds-first-flying-file-sharing-drones-in-action-120320/

Tin Ear

From NYTimes today, about Catholic Church attempts to embroil SNAP, a support group of those abused by priests, in legal complications:  The spokesman for a Catholic Church advocacy group:  

Mr. Donohue said leading bishops he knew had resolved to fight back more aggressively against the group: “The bishops have come together collectively. I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys.”

Well thank goodness for that. 

Barswoon

I may never get around to John Carter of Mars -- it seems to have missed the sweet spot of affection, subtle parody and genuine thrills that the first Star Wars hit exactly -- but it did generate this masterpiece of Finnish disappointment and full-on English appropriation that will live, noted in a a comment ot the NYTimes review:

http://mankabros.com/blogs/btp/2012/03/09/john-carter-review/

It almost seems as if there is dawning a language in which we can all join, in which sense can be made in despite of grammar and vocabulary -- a pidgin of the future.  Try writing a futurist novel in this.