John Crowley's Blog, page 26

Blind in Utopia

Thinking anew about Utopia -- I wonder if there are Utopian schemes that can accommodate people with impairments.  I am sure there are Utopias where impairments are fixed; and there are dystopias where perfect bodies are required and those who don;t measure up are disposed of.  But what about Utopias where impairments are accepted and dealt wisely with?

Conversation Hearts

Here's a nice thing  that came my way:  a rare review of my little book Conversation Hearts by Paul Kincaid at SF Site:

http://www.sfsite.com/09a/ch279.htm 

Seems long ago I wrote it.  Longer since I thought it up.

Tasks

Antique tasks day.  I cleaned out the wood stove, and poured some ashes on the driveway ice, then fired up the stove again.  I cleaned mouse droppings (what a nice delicate word, like spoor or fewmets) out of the kitchen cabinets after executing the last mouse with a Victor guillotine trap, still the most effective.  They or it had made a mess chewing open a bag of high quality cocoa powder and distributing it (mixed with feces) in amid the pie plates and canned goods.  

Then I installed, with the help of EM at the WordPerfect Universe site, a copy of WordPerfect 5.1, which he had so constructed as to be able to run under my 64-bit Windows, using something called DosBox, with modifications.  And now I have it, as pretty as it used to be on my Compaq 386, the only computer program I ever felt true affection for.  I recovered my old massively modified WP keyboard, though i can't remember what several of the keys actually do. One allows me to turn, with a keystroke, two clauses joined by colons or semicolons into two sentences.  I wrote the macro.   I've written a few macros, something I can't somehow do on  later WP versions, and forget Word.  I will type up the book I am just setting out on with it (though I will write the book on some beautiful long yellow pads I got by special order from Rhodia, like legal pads in excelsis.)  I have decided against dressing in a wadded dressing-gown and monogrammed slippers for this task.  

Why all the fuss?  Thoreau says "The art of life -- of a poet's  life -- is, having nothing to do, to do something."  I think he meant something deeper than just fooling around, but it's true that a vocation that consists mostly in staring out the window and mulling over imaginary things needs something to do -- sharpen pencils, square up paper, find nice journals, load WP 5.1.  Whatever.

crowleycrow @ 2012-02-03T16:11:00

  This Fox News headline glimpsed in Google News actually gave me tiny pause:

Does Donald Trump support matter?  
Well what's the alternative, thought I.  Denouncing matter?  Indifference to matter?   The Gnostics used to argue over it..

Darn fool

So I take pen in hand to apologize to whoever got an unwanted or annoying e-vite from me to join my LinkedIn network. It's not that I don't WANT you all to join my network, whatever it might mean to be so joined (I haven't really figured that out) but I should certainly have been more careful than to let LinkedIn send a message to everyone on my email list -- it may be everyone I've ever received an email from, I can't tell. Most simply didn't respond, fine. No one really got mad, but some were surprised and, well , a little sad.

Like the Justice League?

A local community access TV station broadcasts out-of-copyright television shows from the pre-Golden Age.  The other night an unbelievably low budget half-hour about the invasion of America by what are in effect drones (robot airplanes) form an unnamed power, that will blow up in a certain number of hours unless the US capitulated and became a subsidiary of the Foreign Power.  The show was one of a series called Tales of Tomorrow (it was set in 1960, and made in 1950, I guess.)  Zachary Scott was the surprise star.  But the interesting thing was that it was produced by the Science Fiction League of America.  What was that?

Ewige weibliche

Friend EV, frequent contributor here and longtime friend, sends me this absolutely beautiful and almost supernaturally touching montage.  It misses the old and the atypical, but it's so exquisitely done:

500 years of Female Portraits in Western Art

http://www.angelfire.com/ak2/intelligencerreport/portraits_women.html 

What could you use instead?

It's sad when words that over time acquired specific and useful meanings lose them again.   Here's a quote from the right-wing Weekly Standard:

You see, the problem in Europe isn't just that their tax rates are so high. It's lots of other things, too. To pick just three other causes: (1) European culture has elevated cohabitation to a nearly equal status with traditional marriage. (2) Religiosity has been replaced by secularism among native Europeans... 

I am certain that Weekly Standard deplores this trend -- but when did "religiosity" lose its negative connotation of "hypocritical display of religious behavior"?  My definition; Oxford Universal has "Affected or excessive religiousness" and dates to 1799 -- but only as a second definition, after "religiousness, religious feeling."   I wouldn't have thought "religiousness" was a word.  I don't want the word to lose the meaning I give it; it is so sweet to see it in contexts like that one.  "America needs more religiosity."

Daily Times

From today, in an article about the Leap Second and whether to forget about it.

The problem is a distinctly modern one. Only a few centuries ago, people set their watches by the clock in the town square, and the time in each town was different from the next. That mattered little, since there was no need or ability to communicate with anyone elsewhere in the world.

Most startlingly alliterative headline of the week

From the NYTimes today:

Hikers Find Human Head in Hollywood Hills