John Crowley's Blog, page 32

Future is now. as always

 Simon Ings posted this to his Facebook page:

io9.com/5808723/see-the-evolution-of-the-us-militarys-robotic-hummingbird 

This will take two further steps to be exactly the Wasp I imagined in my story Snow:  it has to be considerably smaller, and it has to be controlled by some sort of implant in a person.    Hardly impossible.  Watch video to the end to see its surveillance work.

Ready-made novel

Bet you can't think up one as good.  Down to the names.  Bob Lucky!  The Toye Hunters!  (My choice for a title.)

www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/us/08forgery.html

Me doing some weird research

 
I am glad to see myself digging deep into the red clay for this stuff.  I am reminded of the Gnostic sect I described in Daemonomania.

www.valdosta.edu/news/releases/crowley.060611

Hayfoot Strawfoot

Today's Google searches began with the origin of the Ripley's Believe it or Not parody called "Strangely Believe It" -- who was responsible for that? Mad Magazine? Harvard Lampoon? It was -- of course -- Ernie Kovacs, with pictures by Wally Wood. You could look it up.

Then "Hayfoot Strawfoot" -- supposedly a command to raw rural recruits who did not know the names for their left and right feet, but did know the difference between hay and straw; drill instructors tied some of each to the appropriate ankle, and got the results required. Was this true? were there actually people who didn't know the terms "right" and "left"? Search quickly yielded the Language Log:

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/


What a great site.  There was an elaborated discussion of left and right naming, leading in fascinating offshoot directions into troubles with identifying right and left and whether this is due to a language problem (yell "Left!" at me and I will take a while processing correctly to which hand or side this word refers, and if I have to respond immediately will choose rather randomly) or to a problem of proprioception or spatial recognition (which I also have).  

These notes continuing an ongoing discussion or minor obsession taken up herein before.

John dee in America

 

Paul DiFilippo sent me this weird and wonderful link:

http://www.projo.com/opinion/columnists/content/CL_brussat2_06-02-11_QJOD0LK_v12.50db6d8.html

I wrote back:

"That's fascinating. I wonder what mystic emblems he's referring to. As far as I know he's right about the Gilbert expedition and certainly about Dee's lobbying for a British claim on what he called "Atlantis," meaning North America (too bad that didn't stick). I don't know anything about Brigham. It does seem a little strange that Dee never mentions the plan in his diaries -- but they are missing for some years. One passage in the diaries does suggest that Dee went with Gilbert -- it's assumed he did in a slapdash biogrpahy by Richard deacon -- but it can't be so. (The tower claim is in the year he might have met Bruno, btw). And Dee's Monas hieroglyphica was the personal emblem of John Winthrop, Pilgrim father. I'm personally going with this. Next visit to RI, we'll go to Dee's Tower!"

crowleycrow @ 2011-06-02T12:09:00

 Though wary of reinforcing Anonymous's comment (or sneer) to the last post that my only readers are would-be, was-once, or current Catholics, I want to post here a well-written take on Little, Big I found on a  sort of thoughtful High Church blog:  

asinusspinasmasticans.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/john-crowleys-little-big-an-exercise-in-horizontal-transcendence/ 

I like the idea of horizontal transcendence.  Is there something sexy about that?  Maybe not in context.

"Terrifying juggling machine can toss around five billiard balls at once"

 Terrifying is right. The sound! Meaninglessly juggling into infinity, or until the grid fails.

Within the story there are videos that make the article clearer.  Also comments, one or two noting that the machine drops a ball at the minute mark, which is sort of comforting.

Long ago at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago there was a beautiful display illustrating something or other in physics. It was a small box say 3ft square with a window. from a hole on one side a steel ball dropped down to a steel plate, which was tilted at an angle such that the ball bounced high enough to put it into a hoe on the other side, where it apparently went down an inclined track to come out again from the first hole, and repeat. There were actually several balls continuing this process. I think there was more than one steel plate and more than one bounce, but I can't remember. And I thought That will go on forever and never stop. My first moment of ontological-existential terror (or delight, hard to say).

This comes to me via Paul diFilippo who likes to send me scary machines.  I mean images of them.  he has yet to send me an actual one.

io9.com/5806648/terrifying-juggling-machine-can-toss-around-five-billiard-balls-at-once

I Heart Paris

 

Went to see Woody Allen's new movie about Paris.  Cheerful and basically silly, it was also very funny -- a wish-fulfillment movie for literate people of the Allen kind; half the laugh lines depended on your being able to recognize a style (Hemingway's, Fitzgerald's) or a tag line ("All American fiction comes out of one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,"  which Owen wilson in the film hands to Hemingway.)  The funniest part was Wilson's  goofy enthusiasm for '20's Paris, his absurd complacency with finding himself there, in a world crowded with all celebs and no nobodies.  He's Allen's stand-in as a character who bases his whole life  on a sort of Viewmaster vision of high cultures and places -- making fun of himself and that stuff at the same time as indulging his love for it.  Wilson is more charming in the role but less believable.  Not that any of it is believable for a second, nor is meant to be.  Fans of complex time-slip fantasy, this one's not for you.  I did think, in one scene set amid the prostitutes standing on the corners of the  1920s Place Pigalle, with their short skirts and cigarettes, that the social meaning of a young woman in heels and short skirt smoking a cigarette while idly standing on a street corner or the doorway of a building has changed.  Spending a lot of time in Boston has made me aware of this.  They are not waiting for a john or a "date".  They are forbidden to smoke  indoors, in the restaurant or club or office, and have popped out for a smoke.  A cognitive dissonance then arises for oldsters like me.  

Week's neatest relic

 

lizhand   directs her Fcebook Firends to this notice that the Pope is closing down an out-of-control monastery in Rome, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, that was partying like 1499. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/pope-ousts-loose-monks-rome 

The church was founded to house relics of the True Cross and the Crucifixion brought home by St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constanine, and still has a bunch of neat ones, including the usual splinters and nail from the True Cross, but also a bone from the finger St Thomas pushed into the wounds of Christ. Never would have thought of that one. OH gee! Look! It's the finger of Didymus...

Mermaid

 

Can anyone help me remember the author/title of a story about a human's unsatisfactory encounter with a mermaid,  from soemwhere around 1900 -- maybe French -- I thought  it was Anatole France but searches don't bring it up.  

Thinking about Anatole France -- about whom I know nothing -- isn't here a story about a modern man falling for and getting entangled with Venus?  Is that him?