John Crowley's Blog, page 38

crowleycrow @ 2010-11-06T15:42:00

  lizhand  sends me this link to a story about my near-namesake's death and the long history of the Cottingley fairies:

www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/world/europe/07crawley.html 

I can't say I really grasp what is said to have been done to the images that made them at first so convincing and then able to be shown up as fake.  Copy negatives can't produce more information from a negative -- it is what it is.  More contrast maybe.  You could make better prints but that's not what happened. 

Mean as can be

 

Any statisticians among us?  I read in the New Yorker in an article about the history of cancer treatment ("Cancer World" by Steve Shapin) that the apparent increase of cancer is in part a result of increased longevity.  "At the beginning of the twentieth century,life expectancy at birth in America was 47.3 years... The median age at diagnosis for breast cancer in the United States is now sixty-one; for prostate cancer it is sixty seven; for colorectal cancer it's seventy."  

What does this median actually mean, and how does it relate to longevity?  What is the median?  Does it mean th fewer people are diagnosed before and after that point? That doesn't seem likely.  

Ah-dio

 Lapham's Quarterly has issued a podcast of an interview with me conducted by a Lapham's editor, Aidan Fax-Clark.  We discuss Hesse, games, books, me, and the competitive nature of writing, and writers.  Some of this my friends and others will have already heard (I have only so many funny anecdotes and wise sayings to purvey, after all).  Anyway, if liked, here is a linky-dinky:

laphamsquarterly.org/audio-video/

Same difference, or not

 

Here is a famous quote from E.M. Forster:  "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."

This is also famously contentious, or at least unsettling.  I was thinking about it in the context of political persuasions, and the anti-government but pro-America current stance.  I doubt if many of those voting on such principles, right or left (there is a version of the sentiments for each) would automatically endorse Forster's statement.  But what if you recast it slightly:

"If I had to choose between betraying the State and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray the State."

In that version, the guts required would not be so much moral courage as the courage to risk the consequences the State is capable of inflicting.  

Essay question:  Do you agree with either, or neither, or both?  What is the difference, if any, between the two versions, and is it a substantive one?

My Best New Job

 

I seem to have diversified a lot lately (soccer coach, attorney, etc.) but this is the best lately:

http://cgi.ebay.com/LENOX-STARS-HER-EYES-JOHN-CROWLEY-COLLECTOR-PLATE-/290493898613#ht_500wt_860

Shakespeare, again

 

I've been watching (in segments) the recent Patrick Stewart Macbeth that was aired on PBS.  I think it's terrific, wonderfully inventive and original not only in its scenic and setting updating (sort of Eastern Europe 1930s) but in the performances.  Stewart is compelling, and whether the idea is his or the director's does something I haven't seen in other performances -- or rather makes something clear to me that hadn't been before:  how Macbeth after the murder grows in certainty of power and thuggish ruthlessness while his wife loses her grip, reversing their earlier positions.  The whole production is based on (what would seem to be) a modern ruthlessness:  the death of Cawdor at the beginning is shown in a quick scene of  a figure in a tiny prison chamber tied to a chair with a bag over his head; a soldier enters, shoots him in the head forthwith; the end.  Which makes Malcolm's speech about "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it" just disinformation or pandering to the King:  not really justified, however effective.  But the horrid sinks and tiled kitchens and hospital scenes -- and that elevator! -- are revelatory.  I haven't got to Banquo's murder yet nor the second witch scene.  

But I am more and more attracted to Shakespeare on film and TV.  It resembles in my mind the shift in how we regarded classical music with the coming of LPs in the 50s, and on into tape and CD and MP3 and iTunes.  No longer was it tied to specific performances you went to see and sat through attentively; now it was there whenever, played and listened to with whatever degree of attention you chose, the good parts replayed and the boring parts skipped.  Of course Shakespeare could be treated that way if you leafed through a Complete Plays.  But the power of embodiment is all, and bodies and faces (and voices, muted, whispering, cajoling, muttering, so hard to do on stage) are so much more present in film and video.  I once saw Olivier on Broadway ("Becket") and could hardly see his face, and remember nothing of it.  I'm sure that's not generally true, but the movies are great revealers -- and because the movies that DON"T work are the straight old-fashioned ruff-and-pantaloon ones, a work of reimagination is required, that sometimes succeeds (Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet, Ethan Hawke's Hamlet) and sometimes fails(ditto, both in parts.)   Stewart's Macbeth works.  The way he feeds the two murderers a sandwich, getting more antic all the time, was truly new and really worked.  It was chilling to watch a mass murderer hit his stride.

CPSIA

 

A reference on another blog where I made a comment made reference to this, in connection with books, and I didn't know what it was, but now I do. 

overlawyered.com/2009/02/cpsia-and-vintage-books/ 

This is just amazing.  Ever since the nanny state began back in the progressive era it has been given to spasms of protectiveness like this.  The discovery of bacteria actually led to public-health campaigns for the elimination of pets (you could get germs!) or at least wearing gloves when touching them.  Do we all have to petition the government and tell them "I read those books, I handled them for years and years and inhaled their odors gratefully and licked their pages and here I am a college graduate who earns a living and shows not a tremor nor a deficit, at least not more readily traceable to lots of other causes that loom far larger ."   (Not a really effective battle-cry, I guess.)

The story of public health is a heroic one overall, really, so successful that we almost ignore its triumphs and can only see its absurdities.  Still, let's march on this one!

The link is to a site over a tear old.  Maybe all this has changed?

Guccione

 Just as I was posting my note on Bob Guccione's Caligula,  Bob Guccione was dying at  84 -- here is his NY Times obit:  

www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/business/media/21guccione.html 

I have reasons to feel kindly toward Bob, and not only for those early issues of Penthouse, fondly remembered; he was indirectly responsible for my first and so far only appearance in a real slick magazine (Snow, published in Omni in I forget what year; it may well have been bought by Ellen Datlow, who edited the fiction there.)   The only other in my bibliography is a story called "The SIngle Excursion of Caspar Last," which was published ion a sorta slick magazine -- semi-slick -- called Gallery, which was in fact a sub-Penthouse bare-naked-lady magazine.  I was glad to be able to list it in my list of achievements, which I might have been more hesitant to do if it had appeared in a magazine with a different name, say Juggs.

Bob's story seems a sad one of great wealth and indulgence followed by a long grim slide, but somehow doesn't make you sad to read.  Maybe I don't know enough.  Why did the inveterate and lifelong New Yorker die in Plano, Texas?

Penthouse is remembered for its breakthrough anatomical explicitness, and the vaseline on Bob's lenses that mitigated it.  But thinking back on those pictures, I remember another thing.  The 70s models very often if not always had distinct pale areas where their bathing suits had been, sometimes strikingly white against their tans.  This seems over now.  Either prospective models are not sunbathing, afraid of melanoma?, or they are not wearing suits.  Fashions in nudity.  One remembers, way farther back than that, the girdle and bra-strap marks on broad areas of skin displayed in black-and-white:  intriguing, perhaps to some.

New (to me) 3D Fact

 "Bwana Devil," the first big general-release 3D feature, was directed by Arch Oboler.

Caligoola

 The Instant Play feature on Netflix leads in strange directions.  Looking for something else I found that I could with a mouseclick watch Bob Guccione's Caligula, which I never got to see back in the innocent 70s when it was scandalous -- too expensive?  Too unhip? I can;t remember.  So I watched it now.  I get to.  

It was remarkable for a couple of things.  One was how little sex there was in it.  There are a lot of naked people (including Malcolm Macdowell) and many orgy scenes that included a certain amount of wriggling and squirming, but no actual sex scenes that I could see.  (I admit I didn't watch every minute.  That's the other thing about Instant Play.  Just push ahead at the least sign of tedium.)  Another was how actually not bad it was.  I thought it would make a good double bill with Fellini Satyricon, and I don't know who'd win.  Caligula often looked like some monstrous silent movie -- some of those pre-1920 epics had a lot of nudity too -- not only in the over-the-top acting but the strange editing, as though the film had been cut before modern rules of continuity had been worked out.  The jokey tone often taken (especially by MacDowell and a splendid Helen Mirren, who keeps her clothes on mostly) is maybe understandable, but also seems reminiscent of the uncertain tone in silent epics like The Last Days of Pompeii.  

So glad to have seen it!  Now need never look at it again.