John Crowley's Blog, page 34

McSorley's redux

 

McSorley's Saloon was the sole survivor of the anti-saloon laws of the pre-Prohibition and then the 1960s.  It served only beer, in a brightly lit ugly but inviting space unchanged since the 1880s or so.  The laws in NY prevented any place from calling itself a saloon (defined as a place that served liquor but not food) or being a saloon.  The actor Patrick O'Neal opened a restaurant/bar around Lincoln Center called O'Neal's Saloon. and even though it was in fact not a saloon (it served lots of food), it was forbidden by law to use that word, and O'Neal in a fit of pique (or good humor) renamed it O'Neal's Baloon.  

No food was served at McSorley's in the days I went there -- I rarely did, because it also, in those far off days, excluded women, at first by law and then by a general attitude of rejection, and a bar that has no women in it is charmless to me -- nothing but plates of Saltine crackers and "cheddar" cheese.  But at some time in its past it must occasionally have served turkey, because hanging on the crossbars of the overhead hanging lamps were dozens and dozens of turkey wishbones, hung up there and left for years, for decades, untouched and gathering an astonishing fur of dust.  (This display in itself might have helped keep out those unwanted women,)  This wonderful grotesquerie has no been cleaned up.  Here is a link to the NY Times article that describes it, which I wish I could read, but I've hit the pay wall with 23 days still left to go in the month.

www.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/nyregion/07wishbone.html

Gorey at the Athenaeum

 The Boston Athenaeum is a place like those small Roman shrines or temples you can visit that seem almost homey, certainly unpretentious, with statues and other ritual objects that connect the place to a long history, and where once a small priesthood or group of virgins did duty.  On the walls are paintings of old Bostonians whose names are still prominent in the Commonwealth (not to mention attached to towns and villages from Allston to Adams) and copies of classical statues of goddesses and gods.  It's still a private library and club, and hoi polloi are not admitted to the inner rooms.  But they have a small gallery, and it's now devoted to a small show of the very small pictures of Edward Gorey.

I first discovered a little Gorey volume in about 1960, when I was looking for a birthday present for my older sister.  The book was The Willowdale Handcar ("or,  The Return of the Black Doll") and I thought she'd like the funny drawings and the weird story.  Through it we went on to find "The Doubtful Guest" and "The Fatal Lozenge."  We were fans.

Pictures from all those books were in the show, and many more.  The most astonishing thing -- it's actually unbelievable till you see them -- is that the originals are the same size as the printed pictures.  They are tiny.  The delicacy of the pen work is astonishing (bring a good magnifying glass if you go.)  The checks on checked suits, the patterns on dresses!  It was like looking at a series of excellent mechanical reproductions, obviously beyond human skill at that size.

More fun lay in the drafts and notebooks.  It seems that Gorey drafted some of his things before coming up with those ininitable titles.  A typescript of verses about "the something bird" will eventually become The Osbic Bird,.  The Gashleycrumb Tinies are just Tinies in an otherwise quite full first draft of the title page.  Also -- we know that Edward Gorey (aka Ogdred Weary, Dogear Wryde etc.) was a lover of anagrams, but here was a page of tryouts for one -- and it looked just like my own similar pages, the letters worked around, checked off as used, etc.  I was thrilled.  

Busy New Me

 If there's anything we Crowleys know, it's pig slurry:

www.independent.ie/farming/assessing-better-crop-development-2598118.html

In Albany

 

I don't think I remembered to post notice of this  -- I'm reading tonight at 7PM in Albany, NY, at the New York State Writers Institute, or as their guest anyway; the reading is at the art museum.  

I should rush over and slap this up on my Facebook wall, right?  Late though it be.  I've never done that.

www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/crowley_john11.html

I don't just write them

...now I learn from Google's Alert feature that I'm in one, and not only one, but one with a magic book and a mysterious disappearance.  I don't know if I survive.

www.edmontonjournal.com/news/escape+from+plot+brutality/4509792/story.html

Speculation

 

Well, I seem to have missed the chance to submit a story, and we've all now missed the chance to vote on the best, but if we read these we'll be ready for next year:

www.soa.org/professional-interests/technology/2010-speculative-9th.aspx 

The link showed up as one of those weirdly not-quite-random paid links that Gmail places next to supposedly relevant emails you get or send.  I am glad to have it, and glad to know that the actuarial business is interested in actuarial Sf speculations.  Who knew?  I don't myself have time today to look at these today, but the titles are intriguing.

I'm reminded of a Ray Bradbury story (not really SF but sort of specualtive) about two actuaries on a hot day watching the temperature rise toward 98.6, at which more murders and violence occur than at any other temperature, while in the neighborhood they walk in tempers are rising.  (October COuntry was the collection, I think.) 

OChruadhlaoichs foregather

 

You may want to attend this if you are, or know anyone who is, a Crowley.  My Google filter for the imperialist/racist fiction of my true name brought this to me.   I'm made a little doubtful by the heraldry; I find it unlikely that the clan had such arms in reality (as opposed to the imagination of Kings-of-Arms) but the blue bore I mean boar is perhaps not inappropriate.

www.crowleyclan.ie/

Mixed-Metaphor Tutti-frutti

 Retrieved from the NYTimes review of Michio Kaku's "Physics of the Future".  The sentence is the author's not the reviewers:

"Like a kid in a candy store, he delights in delving into uncharted territory, making breakthroughs in a wide range of hot-button topics."

This COULD happen in a physics breakthrough of the future: you enter an online VR candy store, pop a future yummy in your virtual mouth, find yourself transported to a far planet whose climate and topography have been studied by bots moving at near light speed, and where you can learn to help reduce disastrous climate change on earth by "pressing" the right virtual "button." I guess that's what he meant.

BTW I seem to be getting far more spam replies to older topics than ever before on this site. Is that general? Or am I doing something? I don't want to restrict access. I need the world to know .. whatever it is I need the world to know, you know.

Goodness

 

I've been reading Walter Kirn for a while -- "Up in the AIr," quite different from the movie, but mostly his commentary.  I just lit on his blog, which here is discussing Charlie Sheen, a topic in which I have no interest, but the flagrantly good writing almost transcends the strangely unworthy occasion:  

walterkirn.blogspot.com/2011/03/three-uses-for-charlie-sheen.html 

My comment is down the list -- mainly an evocation of George W.S. Trow and his milestone essay "In the Context of No Context," still far above all the meta-commenting on pop phenomena.  Kirn's more baroque but lots of fun.

crowleycrow @ 2011-03-06T08:41:00

Maybe you noticed -- I'm alerted by  thatmakesmemad   of the existence of a novel by S.J. Parris, just out, called "Heresy" and starring (it does sound like a movie) Giordano Bruno, who like other fictionalized historical figures, becomes a detective in the story, solving a murder in the course of his famed visit to Oxford to debate Aristotle.    (It's often claimed that Bruno espoused Copernicus in this lecture, but the Galileo scholar Ernan McMullin studied the records of the debate in detail and couldn't justify this; his account influenced my own account in Aegypt.) Ms. Parris also seems much influenced -- hard to tell in a brief review -- by John Bossy's detailed and interesting but in my opinion wrong-headed study "Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair," It would seem that this is to be the first of a series featuring Bruno.  According to this review the book avoids boringly accurate representation of historical speech and ideas, which should aid sales:

www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/13/heresy-sj-parris

Father Ernan McMullin, a good man and a fine scholar, was a friend of my family during the time we lived in South Bend, Indiana and my father was director of the student infirmary (and the only doctor).  Father McMullin (as we all called him though he never except officially called himself that) married two of my sisters -- the nicely ambiguous common way of describing that service once, I wonder if it's passe.  He died last week at 86 in retirement in Ireland, where he was born and became a priest.  

Harper Collins (my publisher!) has apparently spent a lot of money acquiring "Heresy" and seems to hope for great things from it.  So do I.  If people get to like one fake Bruno it may develop a taste for another.  

But  thatmakesmemad   also asks an interesting question about fictionalized real people: " I wonder if there are any other characters where you can effectively go from Dan Brown to Herman Hesse by reading different authors takes on them."

I can think of a movie-and-novel pairing:  "Shakespeare in Love" and "Nothing Like the Sun."  Others>?