John Crowley's Blog, page 28

Katchor Caught

My review of Ben (Julius Knipl) Katchor's latest work, The Cardboard Valise, is now available at the Boston Review online for nothing:  

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.6/john_crowley_ben_katchor_cardboard_valise.php  

Gorgeous

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/02/science/space/20111202-planetscapes.html?ref=science#1 

Beautiful created images of the planets and earth contrasted, and other views.  Somehow makes the possibilities for life at once more vivid and more remote.  Even the bleakest views of Earth are rich with life compared to Mars or the rest.

Retronaut

Ever heard of it?  Probably the images can't be used for much.  Here's a set.  My favorite:  Run over by a truck while hiding in a pile of leaves.  Apt warning for this dangerous time of year!  

http://www.retronaut.co/2011/09/its-great-to-be-alive-vintage-safety-manual/

Non-light speed

No, the link to the podcast of my story doesn;t work, at least from that entry, but you can just type it in to your browser and it will -- lightspeedmagazine.com  My story s featured on the front page.

Snow

The nice SF site Lightspeed featues my story "Snow," read aloud -- podcast -- by a fine reader, better than me, whose voice has a bit of Robert Ryan cynicism that works well.  

www.lightspeedmagazine.com 

(Please let me know if the link doesn't work -- something's weird with LJ.)

National Book Awards

It's hard not to view the NBA awards and nominations this year as a triumph for diversity in the arts.  The awards in fiction and poetry went to African-American women, and the Young Peoples award to a Vietnamese-American woman.  In the past, choices like that would have shown a sensitivity on the part of judges to the struggles for recognition such writers faced and to a degree still face.  But I am clear that the panel on fiction at least chose its nominees on the basis of perceived merit alone.  Salvage the Bones is perhaps not the kind of book that readers of my books might expect me to favor, to which I can only say Read it.  It is astonishing, and more wondrous and strange and fearsome than almost any fantasy, a world so fully rendered in words as to become something other than real, while never losing its handholds in a specific place and time and life.  Read all the others too:  The Tiger's Wife, which could be put up for the World Fantasy Award; The Sojourn, a flawless work of art and a work of human history too (and a sort of fairy tale in the Grimm mode at bottom, constructed by means of that swerve from romance into actuality that Northrop Frye terms "displacement;") and Edith Pearlman's life-work collection of stories -- some of her pages could teach you how to write fiction if you could only copy them, which you can't; and The Buddha in the Attic, a rare prose-poem covering a century in a hundred-odd pages, with a first-person-plural narrator.  Reading through the year's fiction was a chore, sometimes a pain, but I am illuminated and moved by these books and many  others that I'd have voted for too if the list could be longer.  

Worker bees

At what point (it was recently) did "drone" change meaning?  When I was young, drones were layabouts, lazy do-nothings -- cf. Wodehouse's "Drones Club" with Bertie Wooster as typical member.  Now it seems to mean robotic workers, mindless but endlessly busy -- cubicle drones, office drones, etc.  One new example I noticed and have lost used it for masses of some sort of genuinely hard-working workers -- "construction-site drones" or similar.  L. says she's always thought of drones as busy workers -- the housebound equivalent of worker bees.  I say no -- not that it matters to the metaphoric use what reals bees really do.  They are simply males waiting around for a chance to fertilize some eggs.  

Me in the usual trouble

From Hints from Heloise, this week:

Dear Heloise: My wife said she has seen your suggestions for how to unscrew a stubborn light bulb from a very tight fixture cover. Any suggestions you can give will be a blessing! — John Crowley, via email  

I don't know what I meant by a "fixture cover," but Heloise's answer, her patented mix of the perspicuous and the unlikely, I'm sure helped me greatly:

http://amarillo.com/lifestyle/advice/2011-11-17/heloise-use-rubber-remove-bulb#.TsaFycMr27s

Engines

NY Times reports on the efforts of the Science Museum in London to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine for solving mathematical problems through a series of small steps prgogrammed by punch cards:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/science/computer-experts-building-1830s-babbage-analytical-engine.html?ref=science&gwh=6D33E46F90DF48EA42A1B46497EAF539 

This is the machine that would have made Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's Victorian computer world possible, rather than the simpler Difference Engine (already built by the Science Museum and curator Doron Swade).  But of course the earlier machine had by far the more resonant name.  This is the one for which Ada Byron wrote her brief algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers, in a translation and expansion of an Italian account of the Analytical,  The Times article says her notes "were signed only with her initials because at the time women were not thought to be authors," a somewhat knee-jerk reaction, or maybe a scientist-writes-history take -- of course Jane Austen, the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, etc., were pretty open about being authors; Ada was being modest, as merely an annotator of someone else's work, and because she was not only a woman but a Countess, and the wife of a Lord:  that's a better (though not a universal) reason to avoid having your name in print.

Himalaya and more

The Rubin Gallery is at 17th St. and 7th Avenue, the building where Barney's was -- iconic fashion store of the 70s, where Issey Miyake's  windows one year taught me that fashion design is or can be art:  hers were as much an art of escape and the creation of unknown worlds of beauty and strangeness as any novel or movie.

Anyway an interesting lineage for a gallery devoted to Tibetan/Himalayan art, apparently acquired by Mr. Rubin in  a lifetime of searching and then now installed in a beautiful place, beautiful and useful.  Liz Hand, Paul Witcover and I examined the Buddhist narrative wall paintings and scrolls, attempting to grasp what we were involved in.

The format for the evening was for each of four us (Liz was exempted as moderator) to tell a story out of our different trraditions (our own traditions or those we study.)  Andrew Quintman (Yale Religious Studies) told the story of the youth of Milarepa, wreaking vengeance on evil relatives who had enslaved him and his mother (later he gives up violence and teaches compassion and renunciation).  Hammid Dabashi (Columbia, Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia) told a gripping tale out of epic Persian literature, featuring a tyrannical king with serpents growing out of his shoulders and (he claimed) the world's first recorded populist revolution.  I told the story of Jesus's childhood -- causing his little playmates who offended him to drop dead, then relenting at his mother's insistence and bringing them back to life, etc. Paul told a shaman fable that eventually revealed itself as an allegory of the quest of Freud.  All this took so much time and was so interesting that we didn't get a lot farther.  We agreed that often heroes are uncontrollably violent in youth and only learn wisdom and compassion later, but we still love the early stories.  We noted that except for Liz we were all men, and tried to examine our different traditions for powerful woman shaman/sorcerer figures.  We answered some questions.  Next up at this splendid place (there were tables within the audience seating so you could eat and drink while listening!) is Camille Paglia talking about Bollywood.  Yipes!