John Crowley's Blog, page 36

iTunes Past

 Here's a question, one I know I should address to iTunes directly but have no idea how to.  In my recent hard drive crash, all my iTunes purchases (which I neglected to include in my auto-backup) were corrupted and are unrecognizable by iTunes.  It would seem that, since I paid for these, I ought to be able to re-download them, if iTunes kept a record of what I purchased.  (The iTunes program lists nothing in my library.)  All the iTunes items I bought are in my computer, but none are playable.

Any suggestions from the tech-savvies about what sort of question I could ask, of whom, to get an answer about this?  Or is the answer just Sorry?

Oxford Comma

   That, for some reason, is what my daughter Hazel has learned as the name of what I would call the serial comma, that is, the comma separating the last item in a list of comma-separated items from what follows, usually a verb.  It was one of the things that we discussed last summer on the Punctuation Panel at Readercon (which I hope they make a yearly event, so we can all be busily storing away horripilating examples thorughout the year) and again here not long past.

I guess the serial comma is unnecessary for sense in many sentences, but not all -- here is one by Paul Krugman on Chinese currency problems:

But for whatever reason — the power of export interests, refusal to do anything that looks like giving in to U.S. demands or sheer inability to think clearly — they’re not willing to deal with the root cause and let their currency rise.  

There's no way to avoid the fact that this can mean that Chinese refusal to deal with their currency has something to do with U.S.'s  sheer inability to think clearly.  U.S. inability to think clearly on so many things recently reinforces the (unintended) message.

Someone pointed out in our comma discussion here that the Brits are stingier that we are in the US with commas, and it's true they often forego that necessary last one.  So why "Oxford comma"? 

Another Fine Skill for Me

 
Vide: 

www.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/garden/20online.html 

A box in the bathroom consorts better with my actual skill level, but I am happy to see myself being so ingenious.

Cloud Atlas

Did I mention I was reading this? It's very engaging so far, though (so far) I don't see a reason to be thrilled -- I have not, however hit the main gimmick or revelation, which people I have spoken to who've read it (incl. my daughter H) find either a remarkable whoosh/slingshot or a letdown

One facet of it, though, continues the questions raised about a hypothetical a Reader's Guide to Little, Big concerning allusions and references. I don't think I will spoil any thing and may increase the interest of it to note that one of the several successive stories told in it is about a high-born but caddish and self-serving young aristo who in the 1920s, broke and fleeing his gambling debts, goes to an isolated Belgian chateau where he knows a grand master of English music lives in retirement, dying of syphilis and having produced nothing in years. the young scoundrel, an Oxford grad and aspiring composer, offers his services as amanuensis and secretary. After some grumpy rejections by the old man he is taken on, and begins to try to take down some of the old man's music by dictation, which consist of a toneless humming and da-daing interlaced with notes about color and chord changes.

Well this whole story is in fact, in general and in detail, the story of the relations of British composer Frederick Delius and his secretary Eric Fenby. The main difference is that Fenby was devoted to Delius, an innocent and sweet-natured man who served him selflessly, and went on after Delius;s death publishing his manuscripts and promoting his music.

SO th equestion is: are readers expected to know this and make something of it? How would it affect a reading? DO you think less of the writer for adopting a historical situation wholesale, or admire the cunning? Guess you'd have to read the book to see.

(BTW the Delius/Fenby story was told beautifully in Ken Russell's film "Song of Summer," with Max Adrian as Delius -- one of a number of wonderful film bios that Russell did in the sixties -- Isadora Duncan, D.G. Rosetti.)

Smile at this time

LJ alerts me through Google when someone replies to even a along-ago post, usually a spammer.  This is one I got today, written perhaps by Jonathan Safran Foer or his imagined aspirational English speaker.  Can't resist sharing.  I have removed the URL to whatevcer it is he's promoting. I think I will adopt "Forever identify what appears to be unsurpassed" as a motto.

Subject: Have oneself equipment rental software?
While on the most recent trip toward Lincoln I stumbled over Claud while on my way. This guy advised my person, he was open to get an innovative Software system here this Notebook Store at this area. Right, what a luck, I was on the way to take off to the identical store, but for a dissimilar purpose. We determined that we travel together, therefore we both be capable of give out advice to each other.
In this day and age I infrequently buy Software in a stockroom. I choose getting in the World-wide-web because almost permanently there appears to be the plus to see a sample or even try the thing over a limited while otherwise through limited features. I can not perform that in the superstore! My pal opposed me, saying he has learned precisely what he wishes. This guy tested before now on his fathers apparatus and the thing is the top he has ever encountered so far!
At this juncture in USA in spite of this it is not dangerous to buy within the Network. The thing arrives along with every assistance one require. Certainly it certainly is nice, when you give everybody merriment and this so greatly considered necessary entertainment, when you control a venture that is correlated to Weddings, Events and Celebration, however yet this kind of producing cash still wishes to make cash (smile at this time). Hence hold it all together and be in no doubt you have a first-class program to control every one of your transactions plus retains you up to date!
For me, the thing is your most vital bit of equipment one can have!
Forever identify, what appears to be unsurpassed!!

Reader's Guide

 It was noted in comments to a previous page that no Reader's Guide exists for Little, Big, and a reader wonders what such a Guide would contain.  The ones I've written for other books contain provocative (plainer sense) questions, mostly.  What do you think it might  or should contain?

Issues

 

Somehow I inveigled myself to update my started-and-abandoned Facebook page.  I have actually added nothing to it myself, but I instantly have many friends, many of whom are actual friends -- Hi, Terry!  Hi, Mikhail!  Hi, Liz! -- all of whose lives are displayed to me as soon as I open my page.  I did not expect this.  Half of the pictures of people displayed to me by other people are actually people I know, who have their own Facebook pages, whom in an instant I could also friend, which makes sense since they are actual friends of mine in actual actuality, but does it?  I mean I am friends with them under self-and-other selected circumstances, nit really with their whole selves, their nephews' birthday parties, their building's Christmas tree.  I found myself -- almost before I could comprehend all this -- in an online conversation, a chat, with the person known once as T-Ruth, a dear (real actual) friend, and got so flustered I sent her away.  I cannot write to talk; I can only write to be read.  

Liz tells me she posts nothing herself and just visits now and then to see the panoply of her busy friends' postings.  Mine's going to be like that.  I do have some pictures of sagging birthday cakes and toddlers with pointy hats on you might like... Oh and thanks  jenlev  for the profile pic.  

Meanwhile Paul Park's page (friend actually!) led me to this very interesting interview:  fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/the-fantasy-author%E2%80%99s-handbook-interviews-x-paul-park/ -- who knows whereof he speaks -- but more on that in a further post.  Here, I mean, not there.

Meanwhile also, the new issue of the Yale Review, old-world to the max, is now out, the hundredth anniversary issue or actually one of three such, this one featuring work by current Yale faculty.  I have an essay called "My Life in the Theater, 1910 - 1960", which a small number of you heard me give with illustrations at Readercon last year (?) here in the plain-text version.  Not available online, I think.

End of SF

 
Where is it possibloe to go with SF when things like this are now actualities -- though even David Pogue, tech guru at NY Times, didn't believe it at first:

"WORD LENS When a reader sent me a video of this iPhone app, I wrote back: “Very funny!” I was convinced that the video was fake.

But it wasn’t. You point the iPhone’s camera at anything written in Spanish — say, a sign, headline or restaurant menu — and you see, on the screen, the English translation.

The crazy mind-blower is that you see the original sign — same angle, color, background material, lighting — with new writing on it! Somehow, the app erases the original text and replaces it with new lettering, in the same type size and spacing, but in English. (Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish are each $5. The free version demonstrates the fundamental magic by rewriting the sign’s text sdrawkcab.)"

I suppose the only further step would be to miniaturize it so that you could implant it and read not only signs but texts.

Literary Reportage

 

An associate at Yale informs her colleagues that she has gone to NYU to be part of the program in Literary Reportage.  I had never heard of this and marvelled at the idea that an entire University program could be devoted to reporting about literary matters.  Took me but a moment with their website to understand that the program was in "creative' or "expressive" or "personal" journalism, not in reporting about books or writing, a large field but hardly one that needs a Program.  Ah well,  I might have joined up.

In further Literary Reportage -- 

I have discovered (or have come to understand) that in the book reviews of the Times Literary Supplement – now simply called TLS -- “ambitious” in the opening description of a book is usually a sign that the reviewer will find the book overlong, misguided, shapeless or incoherent.   The Brits are so good at theses codes (if it is good).  

In an earlier post we were discussing the working methods of Spanish novelist  Javier Marias -- he types (on a typewriter) and has a pact with himself that he will not rewrite, at least in any substantial way:  what he sates on page 1 as happening is fixed, even if on page 100 it would be convenient if it hadn't.  In th NYRB thismonth, a long article about Cesar Aira, Argentine writer, whose method (or "procedure") is even more extreme.  Aira writes his novels (more than 70 of them, all of them short, published at a rate of one or two a year) in public, at a cafe table, with a fine writing instrument -- a Mont Blanc or Vuitton pen -- on heavy paper which he gets from the same company  that makes the paper for Argentina's currency.  He writes a page or two a day.  He calls these pages "written drawings" and they are the book.  No changes.  His stories begin at the beginning and always move ahead, never backward -- Aira calls this "la fugia hacia adelante," the flight forward.    

In the same NYRB, in an article about Robert Darnton's new book about pre-revolutionary popular culture in France (cf. The Great Cat Massacre),  Peter Brooks quotes from Carlo Ginzburg's essay on "Clues"  (in his book Clues, Myths and the Historical Method) tracing  our narrative/historical sense to our long training as hunters following prey:  "In the course of countless pursuits he [Man; this is not about the gatherers] learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of his invisible prey from tracks in the mud, broken branches, droppings of excrement, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odors..."   This builds  a knowledge "characterized by the ability to move from apparently insignificant experiential data to a complex reality that cannot be experienced directly... expressed perhaps most simply as 'Someone has passed this way.' Perhaps the very idea of narrative .. was born in a hunting society, from the experience of deciphering tracks."   But of course though the narratives that writers construct may resemble those strings of clues, they differ from those left by prey in being left on purpose to be deciphered. The reader's "Aha!" is the beginning of the end for the prey, but the constant goal of the book. 

Don't get 'em like this much any more

 It can't be a loss, really, that spam has become far more controlled than it only recently was.  But even in decline come some gems.  This is the sole content (besides a website I am sorely tempted to click on but won't, not on my computer) of one I got today:

 Your williie will saty rock-like
Gevi girls more sntisfactioa 

Makes me imagine some entrepreneurs somewhere, maybe at an internet cafe in a faroff land, deciding this is the way to bring in the money, and getting hold of the one guy they know who claims to know English.  Or is it clever code that security systems can't read?  What if nobody else can either?