John Crowley's Blog, page 31

LookYourself Up, 1690 - 1800

 



Aanyone with a vaquely Anglo-Saxon name -- and no date many other sorts, though they will be rarer -- can look themselves up in the London Lives archive, which is , as the site proclaims, "A fully searchable edition of 240,000 manuscripts from eight archives and fifteen datasets, giving access to 3.35 million names."  

www.londonlives.org/index.jsp 

Of course that would be a trivial use of a magnificent archive (there were only 7 John Crowleys in the records anyway) and you will want to look at all the stuff, and think up cool research projects, and ponder how the past rather than shrinking with distance seems to grow larger the farther away we get.

I and my git-box draw in the ACLU!

 

A proud moment.  I can now sing "Proud Mary" and all the Beatle hits as once I used to on the streets of Wilmington.  "Inappropriate content" my eye! Since when was "Talking James J Garfield Blues" inappropriate? (It does tak a long time of course, but what else does one do in Wilmington?)

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/4cd1bb82732f4c00a5768a5f05cee57c/DE--Street-Performers/

Me on guard in the Old Country

I am glad I am being of service, though I think my warning might have been better put.  "Recipe for danger" is not a phrase I'd ever thought I'd use.

"THIEVES who are stealing warning road signs from Cork County Council and selling them on as scrap are putting drivers lives at risk — Kanturk gardai warned this week.

"A warning sign being stolen has the potential to cause a serious accident or worse a death. If someone is unfamiliar with the road, this can further be a recipe for danger," said Kanturk based community garda John Crowley."

Crowley is a Cork name and they are thick on the ground there.  The one in the picture run in the newspaper (The Corkman) looks a bit like my father, but then so did Bing Crosby and Lou Costello (my father was a man of moods).

www.corkman.ie/news/road-sign-thefts-potentially-lethal-2815063.html

Cursed cursive

 

This topic came up earlier in the year -- here's the latest:  
 
slatest.slate.com/posts/2011/07/07/indiana_cursive_writing_public_schools_curriculum_indiana_ends_c.html 

Indiana! My own (adopted) state, where the nuns had us practicing our perfect ovals in the seventh and even eighth grade.  Why I bet the desks don't even have inkwells any longer.

Beauties of the new spam

There's a new spurt of spam that's as much fun as the old stuff, which was based on random texts assembled to fool anti-spam programs into thinking sense was being made. The new spam seems to be based on translation programs that get gloriously weird results. You might all have gotten this one:

Subject: i am looking so gifted profitably twinkling of an eye after i done this

this is in unison of the a-one things i rhythmical done to myself, i'm so contented and you can be also if you fair-minded work this
do not pull a emotionless to x all the details so you be subjected to jollity .... no photos but stillness

I don't beleive these exclamations are related to an episode of self-abuse, but what they are related to I don't know, since I didn't follow the links (which had text in Hebrew).

Dostoevsky and Prediction

Where did Dostoevsky make the claim that mankind was so ornery that predicting what people would do was impossible, if the prediction was announced and known about -- they'd do the opposite just to retain freedom? The Grand Inquisitor, Notes form the Underground? I'm finding it hard to formulate a Google query that gives me the answer.

Object Lesson

In Virginia Heffernan's NYTimes' column about technology, an article about content farms -- pseudo news-and-information sites that game the Google rating system by creating headlines and page names that include popular search items and then cobble up articles out of mostly nothing. People actually work at writing these non-articles, often about things they don't know about. Then this dreadful Object Lesson I must impart to my students:

"So who produces all this bulk jive? Business Insider, the business-news site, has provided a forum to a half dozen low-paid content farmers, especially several who work at AOL's enormous Seed and Patch ventures. They describe exhausting and sometimes exploitative writing conditions. Oliver Miller, a journalist with an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence who once believed he'd write the Great American Novel, told me AOL paid him about $28,000 for writing 300,000 words about television, all based on fragments of shows he'd never seen, filed in half-hour intervals, on a graveyard shift that ran from 11 p.m. to 7 or 8 in the morning."

If one were simply slaving in the salt mines of the Net, that would be one thing. But with an MFA! From Sarah Lawrence! Too grievous to contemplate.

Medtronics Bone Growth Product Problem

 

From the NY Times on line:

"Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, said reports that doctors on Medtronic's payroll might have hidden side effects were "deeply troubling."'

I think doctors on medical company payrolls often have troubling hidden side effects.

Sins of the Fleshapoids

 

One of the great creepy/funny underground filmmakers I used to love in the mid-60s when I first came to New York.  Late night screenings at the Bleecker Street or far lesser venues.  I could not remember the name of this feature (half an hour long or so I guess) because I had "Creation of the Humanoids" (just rented from Netflix) stuck in my head.  But a little search brought it up.  For years I have been repeating the narrator's opening line, spoken with that wonderful solemn newsreel shout:  "The Time is a Million Years in the Future!"  Perhaps the single best underground-SF voiceover line EVER.  I see where a documentary about the Kuchar brothers is out, or coming out.  Great.

Messing about in books

 

My experience as an NBA judge has been interesting and somewhat onerous (I am told it will get worse for the next weeks as the deadline for publishers to submit appears -- June 30 -- and then when books arrive at my place.

Of course I am under a vow of omerta in regard to my opinion, even a hint of it, but I have gleaned a couple of things of interest about 2011's book s and maybe more.

It seems t me that publishing is in good shape, really.  Along with the dozens of novels sent in by major publishers, I have got even more dozens of books from small-to-micro presses.  And I'm not talking about what used to be called vanity presses or about self-publishing -- though it may be that a publisher has only one book, still it's a publisher and not a self.  (The NBA  rules declare self-published books ineligible.) Cover art continues to be spectacular.  Beautiful and witty designs on books from small presses and a profusion of full-color (or artfully suggested full-color jackets.  I have never got my publisher to spring for full-color though the jackets of my books have been fairly handsome (sigh). Epigraphs abound.  Two or three to a book, often.  One book in galleys has a (maybe standard-format) page that says "Epigraph" on it, though the author has apparently not yet chosen one.  Epigraphs are of two kinds, in my mind:  ones that draw out the point of the book, its moral in the largest sense; these tend to be drawn from great poets or philosophers or religious texts.  And there are oddities, an indirect glint off the book or a secret hook.  Each is I guess okay in its way -- what's your favorite epigraph, there's a good game  -- but in my mind they cancel each other out.  I prefer the second type, if I can find a good one; but none if I can't. Acknowledgements and thanks have now grown nearly universal, either at the beginning or the end. To friends and family, the literary grantgivers without whom this book, etc., the agent and the publisher.   The first novels seem to have more of these than the novels of older writers.  On the other hadn I see fewer straight dedications than in other times (I think.) Anyway, back to work...