John Crowley's Blog, page 27

The Texas variant

Readers may remember the engaging discussion about the popularity of the (on the face of it) odd conversational gambit "I need you to..." or "You need to...".  In the NY Times today, this variant form:

“Mitt, we need for you to release your income tax so that the people of this country can see how you made your money,” said Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.

My (formerly) bad publisher

TLS reviews a book by Michael J. Everton called "The Grand Chorus of Complaint" which makes mid 19th c. American publishing sound like a collection of busy conmen and thugs.  Among the most hated was Harper and Brothers (now absorbed into HarperCollins).  Harper's battled Carey and Hart for the lucrative transatlantic textbook market.  There were suspicious warehouse fires, crates of books "lost" at sea.  

"Harper's ruthless approach to writers was equally notorious," says TLS.  They kept an engraving on the wall of a skull,  which a contemporary labelled "the last relic of a starved author.  The brains have been picked out and the man dead long ago."  One "aggrieved writer went so far as ro parade in front of Harper's lavish New York headquarters dressed in a sandwich board reading 'One of Harper's Authors; I am Starving.'"  (I note the distressing delicacy of the semi-colon.)

I post this in full knowledge that this was all a long time ago, and that in HarperCollins's lavish headquarters no such meanness can any longer be found; nor am I making any charge whatsoever of maltreatment or expressing any dissatisfaction with my corporate benefactors, whom I revere and whose good opinion I strive every day to earn.

Hold that metaphor

Mixed Metaphor of the week, the NYTimes collaborating with an economist talking about good unemployment numbers:

“People were very much thinking that the sky was falling,” said Tom Porcelli, an economist at RBC Capital Markets. “It’s no small victory that we’re up here, even with all these headwinds.”

Up here, Mr. Porcelli was quick to note, is none too lofty a perch.

Little, Big Aloud

I imagine that everyone eagerly awaiting a complete recording of my novel Little, Big will have already discovered that it is available for purchase from Blackstone Audio or for download/rental from Audible.com.   There is even a brief sample at the Audible site: 

http://www.audible.com/pd/ref=sr_1_2?asin=B006JQXQ3M&qid=1324994651&sr=1-2 

I think this is a better-read book than the other I read aloud, Aegypt.  I enjoyed the exercise.  I found things I would now write differently (as I read, most I forgot as I read on) and things I delighted in too.  I imagine listeners will feel the same.

Automata

Seen Scorsese's "Hugo"?  I did, in 2D at a small shabby theater in Newton, so I want to see it again in 3D.  How amazing to see all that antique technology, possible and otherwise, enshrined lovingly in the absolutely modern technology of digital media.  I didn't know watching it how closely it adhered to the life and activitioes of Georges Melies  -- he actually did build automata.  

Here's a link to the wonderful automaton at the Franklin Museum in Philadelphia story in the Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/science/maillardet-automaton-inspired-martin-scorseses-film-hugo.html?ref=science&gwh=42235E580BB259329BF80E3BC9E10368

Ignorance alone...

...prompts this question:  When you write or type in a lnguage read from right to left, yet include "Arabic" or modern Western numerals  in (say) statistics and mathematical formulas, are they also written right to left? 

Retry, Fail, Abort

Guy trying to recover the early history of word processing as a tool for writing fiction:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/books/a-literary-history-of-word-processing.html?ref=arts&gwh=0CC71CE522D30E38A7A5881B3252EF9A 

His initial lecture on the topic was titled "Stephen King's Wang."  Funny.  I never had a Wang (this is getting worse) but I was a recipient of the largesse the Wang corporation could distribute as a result of the success of its "dedicated" word processors.  Wang sponsored a glorious literary festival in Toronto for a few years to which I was invited with practically every notable writer in the world from A.S. Byatt to Salman Rushdie.  My friend Norman Kottker did own one though, because of his advancing MS, and I wonder if the novel he typed on it preceded King's.  He was amazed at the ability it gave him to "micro-edit" as he said.  

Professor Kirschenbaum speaks of the early Microsoft Word and its users, but I hope he will take up WordPerfect, the real writer's software, the most flexible tool for writing on a computer ever developed.  Even now in decline better than Microsoft's WordBorg.   And XYWrite back in the DOS days was good too -- run entirely from the command line.

A big moment in word processing fiction was in "Stand By Me," when Stephen King at the end of writing the novel tyoed the last word and reached out to turn off the machine.  Many readers (no, viewers, this was the movie with Richard Dreyfuss at the keyboard) cried out "No! Save it! Save the work!"  Funny.

Havel

Vaclav Havel is dead, age 75.  He was one of the great men of my lifetime, a model for the possibility not only of justice and common sense in political leadership but genuine goodness.  The only comparable leader (but I don;t know enough to make the claim) was also Czech, Jan Masaryk in the 1930s.  He appears for a moment in the last volume of the Aegypt series (Prague was its capital city) when Pierce visits Rosie and finds that he is to come to the new Rasmussen Center for a lecture.  Pierce opens a book of his essays that Rosie has:
 
Genuine conscience and genuine responsibility are always, in the end, explicable only as an expression of the silent assumption that we are observed “from above”, that everything is visible, that nothing is forgotten, and so earthly time has no power to wipe away the sharp disappointments of earthly failure: our spirit knows it is not the only entity aware of these failures.
 
            What other statesman, what other politician, anywhere ever, would say such a thing: would ever speak of failure, of his own failure, as inevitable as anyone’s.Pierce felt a stab of desire to have been there for real, in that city, in the days of the man’s youth and his own; to have learned a harder and a better thing than he had learned during the same years in his own bland land.  He couldn’t know that Fellowes Kraft actually had seen him — touched him even, tickled his fat belly: for the elder Havel, his father, also named Václav, had one day late in the 1930s brought his baby son to the brand new swimming pool at the Barrandov site south of Prague where the beautiful boys used to gather on summer days.  Havel Senior, builder and real-estate magnate, was himself the developer of the new district, responsible for the elegant cafes and brilliant terraces and the film studios where the future was coming to be.  One of the young men, a film actor, had introduced Kraft to the smiling fellow and his baby, and the proud papa had talked away while Kraft could only say Nerozumim, nerozumim, I don’t understand, I don’t understand, one of the few Czech words he knew, one of the few he wouldn’t forget.

You put your right foot in...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/world/europe/david-guterson-wins-bad-sex-in-fiction-award-for-ed-king.html?ref=world&gwh=F1D21750EEB5BB54B8D3ED32F80EC2B4 

This is the author of Snow Falling on Cedars, praised for its delicacy of feeling.  The new novel takes its plot from a well-known tragedy  by Sophocles (Ed King, yes, you get it.)

Beating a dead metaphor

In the NY Times today:

Push to Ban New York Carriage Horses Gains Steam
Fowler warns that dead metaphors can suddenly come alive in the right context -- "zombie metaphors"?  The image of adding steam power to the carriage horses is irresistible.