John Crowley's Blog, page 35

Animalist

 

Thanks to all for the remarkable outpouring of Animal People designations, which included dozens I had not turned up out of the rich peat of my own recollection.  With 50-plus comments containing more than a hundred unique ones (I haven't counted, actually), even discounting a doubtful digression on the meaning of "chicken hawk" it is probably a genuine contribution to the ever-expanding archive of folk linguistics.  My daughter thanks you, too.  She used a few (all she needed). 

This is not a test

 

A website called Quora, of which I have not heard, and which I have not investigated, apparently poses hard questions for visitors -- or something -- anyway Google Alerts alerted me that this was posted there:


What is the plot of John Crowley's Aegypt tetralogy?
Imagine you have a friend who just finished the first book (The Solitudes), and liked it somewhat, but not enough to read the remaining volumes. However, your friend would like to know how the story continues. How would you describe the plot, characters, and ideas in the last three books of the series?

Here is where you can add your personal answer:  

www.quora.com/What-is-the-plot-of-John-Crowleys-Aegypt-tetralogy 

I'm not quite sure why someone who didn't like the thing well enough to read the whole of it would be amused by having the plot described; I'd suppose that his or her distaste would mount rapidly the more he or she was told.

Further dangers of the dangling modifier

...or, Pleasant circumstances of British jurists pondering important cases. From Slate, today:

"After languishing for three months in a patron's patrician pile outside London, a British court has ruled that Julian Assange can be extradited to Sweden to face accusations of sexual molestation and rape, reports the New York Times." 

Incognizance

In the TLS, a review of books about Nabokov quotes, from one, a comment from the "acmeist" poet Gumilyov (13 years Nabokov's elder, husband of Anna Akhmatova, his name usually appears in English as Gumilev): "[A]n agonizingly sweet, childishly-wise sense of our own incognizance -- that is what provides us with the unknown... Always remember the unknowable, though never insult [your] own conception of it with more or less plausible conjectures." As the review notes, this "could have formed an excellent basis for reading Nabokov," which is true, and it is also a basis for other reading as well. And I try to follow it. Or rather I instinctively do. it's no trouble. I like the more-or-less-plausible conjectures, as do many of you, but I will always avoid insulting my own incognizance with adherences, and have ever since, as a child, I speculated on whether an otherwise unaccountable shape of light appearing nightly for a time in a corner of my bedroom was possibly the Virgin Mary come to console or advise me, which was at once delightful to think yet not effectively plausible even then.

Wonderful

The idea that the nonviolence theories of Gene Sharp have influenced the sudden and astonishing wave of non-ideological (so far) movements for democracy in a part of the world that (because I knew so little, and know so little, about it) was the last place I expected it, is the most assuaging and warming news in a decade. (Not hopeful or inspiring: I'll wait on those.) Combined with the major idiocies going on in my own beloved country, from attempts at balancing the budget by not paying our UN dues or any foreign aid to countries that oppose us there, all the way to... well you have your own candidates no doubt. Are we here really in decline into mess and irrelevance? Or is that thinking too much? Anyway I was gladdened by movement elsewhere. With of course a long road ahead.

As my favorite political quipster said, "Attempting to eliminate our debt problem by cutting our discretionary spending -- it's like a family in deep and unpayable debt, mortgage under water, car about to be repo'd, and Dad says, Okay this is it. We're stopping the kids' allowances."

Top dog and more

For reasons I am not yet at liberty to divulge, my daughter H. (not Z. the movie fan, though H. likes movies too) would like suggestions as to animals included in two-word designations for things people are or do. Examples would be "pool shark," "alpha dog," "grease monkey." I suggested "stool pigeon" and got a blank stare. Also on "Judas goat." Any more accessible ones?

Two Spaces

This Slate article, posted yesterday, has already garnered (if that's the word) over 2500 responses.

http://www.slate.com/id/2281146/?wpisrc=obinsite

I'm convinced. After a lifetime of typing two spaces, I will type one. I think.

Manjoo says that the two spaces inhibit the eye's and the mind's flow through the language. If that's the case, though, how much worse is the double space between paragraphs, universal now in online writing for perhaps good digital reasons and perhaps not, that is becoming very common in non-digital or non-HTML writing? My writing students write stories with double spaces between paragraphs, and I can't make them stop. I think it is ceasing to become habitual and is on its way to becoming correct. And oddly enough for the same reason as the double space after a sentence: because a technological limit demands it.

(I see that I have ended the sentences in this entry with double spaces. Also separated the paragraphs thus. Make of this what you will.)

Tin House

The new issue of this substantial literary/arts magazine or journal is subtitled "The Mysterious," and contains an essay by me called "New Ghosts and How to Know Them." Readers here may remember my soliciting suggestions for readings for this a long time ago (the essay itslef has been kicking around for some time, and its selected subjects may already be old hat). Glancing through the issue I found, to my astonishment, that Peter Straub was in the same issue! A substantial interview full of interest. Not surprising maybe for A-list celebs to find themselves cheek (!) by jowl with their peers, but literary figures of our (general) sort in literary venues, a bit surprising. Get 'em both. Oddly we both have praise for Kelly Link. I also discuss Hilary Mantel, Nick Antosca, George Saunders, Christopher Barzak and some others.

Agog

In a review of a book by Brian Greene ("The Hidden Reality"), the reviewer quotes this wonderful Times headline from 1919, when physical evidence of relativity first was observed by astronomers: "Lights All Askew in the Heavens, Men of Science More or Less Agog." Being more or less agog much of the time myself, I took to this. It also of course nicely echoes John Donne's poem about the Kepler/Copernicus/Newton universe: "Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone."

I know that readers of this blog must be very careful in handling books with a title like "The Hidden Reality," but this one does look like a great read -- and I am a believer, i.e. having faith beyond uinderstanding, in multiple universes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/books/27book.html?ref=books

Imaginary Writer Interview

 

Simon and Schuster has for some reason devoted an entire page of its Authors site to an obviously fake but quite hilariously apt Writer Interview with a supposed author of military thrillers with the positively Restoration-comedy name of Brad Thor.  

http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Brad-Thor/16591159/author_revealed

This supposed writer is an imaginary ally of a quasi-actual spy ring run by this guy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/world/23clarridge.html?ref=world

The spy ring itself sounds like something the imagined writer could actually imagine.