John Crowley's Blog, page 39

Pork Pie Hat

 
Just in time for Halloween appears a very nice small work by Peter Straub, "Pork Pie Hat", about a jazz saxaphonist and Halloween.  It's from Cemetery Dance Publications.  You see how all this goes together neatly.  

Peter is an ardent jazz fan.  I wrote to him that I thought this project was a bit like mine in "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines"  -- a chance to dwell on wonders discovered long ago.  

Those who do not not need to be told which great musician was called Pork Pie Hat will want the book, of course -- a beautiful vision of an artist at the end and yet in full flower -- and those who don't know will learn.

And of course we all know why a certain style of hat was so called?

Victoria Nelson

 Friend  joculum  asks on his site for information/evaluation of the critic and author Victoria Nelson, her place in criticism of the literature of the fantastic.  I know nothing of her personally but I knew the wonderful title of one of her works, "The Secret Life of Puppets".  

Remarks anent Nelson here or at  joculum.livejournal.com/278677.html 

Somewhat disreputable and unfortunate long-ago me

From "Cases in Bankruptcy," Volume I (1820) by John William Buck, a rather shaming appearance or reappearance I made before the Bankruptcy Commission in Guildhall, 1815, "for not answering to their satisfaction the questions put to him," as the record states.  I was apparently supposed to bring to the Commission my records and business papers, but did not produce them, giving instead a long and hard-to-follow story about having given them to somebody named Hamilton for safekeeping, who (I claimed) refused to give them to my messenger.  This Hamilton is reported to have said "He knew what was wanted, but all these proceedings are illegal, and there's an end of it."   

The Commission then questioned me:

"Have you any accounts now to produce to the commissioners, or any further reason to give why you do not produce them? Answer: I have no accounts to produce. I have no further reason to give why I do not produce them except that I have two petitions before the Chancellor to supersede this commission, the first upon grounds of a commission being now in force against me bearing date in 1 808, and the second of no act of bankruptcy to this commission, but still I am ready to render every account possible in my power to the commissioners; which answer of the said John Crowley being not satisfactory to us, the said commissioners, these are therefore to will and require and authorise you immediately upon receipt hereof to take unto your custody the body of the said John Crowley and him safely convey to his Majesty's prison of the King's Bench and him there to deliver to the marshal keeper or warden of the said prison, who is hereby required and authorised, by virtue of the commission and statute aforesaid, to receive the said John Crowley into his custody, and him safely keep and detain without bail or mainprise, until such time as he shall submit himself to us the said commissioners, or the major part of the commissioners, by the said commission named and authorised, and full answer make to our or their satisfaction to the question so put to him as aforesaid, and for your so doing this shall be your sufficient warrant."

I then later (1818)  got a writ of habeas corpus and was brought before the Lord Chancellor, who noted that the writ was written wrongly, but it was allowed anyway on appeal from my solicitor, Samuel Romilly.  And I got off! The Lord Chancellor convinced I couldn't be held for not producing a deposition.  

Well!  This Samuel Romilly, a very famous barrister, friend of Mirabeau, legal reformer, etc., etc, was, in the very year I was imprisoned, acting as negotiator between Lord Byron and his wife in their separation .  Byron thought there was something wrong with this, as Romilly was under contract to him as well as to the Noel family (his wife's).    Romilly was so devastated by the sudden death of his wife later in 1818 that he committed suicide -- slit his throat.  Byron was not sorry.  If I can find it online, I'll quote his notice of Romilly's death in his diary.

What a lovely sort-of coincidence.

Eat You Up

 No, not that topic again.  This is just a note regarding the introduction that Art Spiegelman wrote for the Library of America edition of (what we would now call) the graphic novels of Lynd Ward,  Spiegelman teaces the origin of the graphic novel to Will Eisner, "creator of the voraciously inventive ‘Spirit’ comic book of the 1940s".  

Inventive it was, or he was, but "voraciously"? Did his Dragon Naturally Speaking program hear "ferociously?" Hard to guess what a voraciously inventive comic book would be without the example.


www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/books/review/Heller-t.html

The paradox of suffering

 
(I promise this will be the last corollary posting on the issue.)

The central premise of the McMahan/Singer/utilitarian argument whereby predators should be prevented from killing prey or eliminated from the living world is premised on the reduction of total suffering in the world.  This has distant roots in Bentham's arithmetic of suffering, though modern utilitarians make perhaps more sophisticated claims.

But I think there is a paradox here.  Suffering does not seem to me to be quantifiable in this way, so as to be reduced like (say) the deficit (which is hard also to quantify, I guess) or the birthrate.  This is not only because what counts as suffering for one sentient being does not count the same for another, and the same experience is not suffering in some conditions but is in others.  It's because suffering is can't be abstracted from the sufferer.  All suffering is unique and can only be experienced individually.

I first understood this paradox when I read George Bernard Shaw's response to a young woman who was working for peace or the alleviation of suffering in the world in some capacity, and wrote to Shaw that she was simply overwhelmed by what she experienced, how terribly vast the suffering she observed was, and how little her efforts meant:  she was ground down to hopelessness by her knowledge.  Shaw responded by pointing out to her that in fact the amount of human suffering in the world is not more than one human being can bear.  To an observer, it would seem that two persons tortured suffer twice as much suffering as one; but in fact your being tortured doesn't increase mine, or if it does it is only in a psychological sense, and only if I am in a realm of torture possibility, and know of it.  Work to relieve suffering, he told  her, because it is the human charge to do so; but don't suppose that there really is any such thing as ALL suffering.  

This paradox -- that the amount of suffering in the world is not greater than one sentient being can suffer -- is resolved, I suppose, for religious believers:  God can add up and experience the suffering of all in his own bosom.  For the non-religious, the paradox remains, and it IS a paradox:  it doesn't really relieve us of any duty, nor does it mitigate our anguish in perceiving mass suffering.  But it eases the heart.  Mine anyway.  Some days.

More Jeff

 Jeff McMahan answers critics in a new post on the NY Times:

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/predators-a-response/

AMong his considerations are these thoughts on the extinction of the Siberian tiger:

"If their number in the wild declines from several hundred to zero, the impact of their disappearance on the ecology of the region will be almost negligible. Suppose, however, that we could repopulate their former wide-ranging habitat with as many Siberian tigers as there were during the period in which they flourished in their greatest numbers, and that that population could be sustained indefinitely. That would mean that herbivorous animals in the extensive repopulated area would again, and for the indefinite future, live in fear and that an incalculable number would die in terror and agony while being devoured by a tiger. In a case such as this, we may actually face the kind of dilemma I called attention to in my article, in which there is a conflict between the value of preserving existing species and the value of preventing suffering and early death for an enormously large number of animals."

How many herbivores does he suppose a Siberian tiger kills in the course of a year? And how does he know that they "live in fear" and "die in terror and agony"? (See my last post on the topic for my thoughts on that.)

I post all this here rather than in comments to McMahan's posts so that they don't get lost among the hundreds.

He also reemphasizes his qualifications in the original column that of COURSE he understands the dangers of herbivorous population explosions in the absence of predators, and that he had made EXTENSIVE QUALIFICATIONS of his remarks, that they would ONLY apply if and when the (peaceful and gentle) extinctions of predators could be accomplished without unwanted consequences.

To which I replied:

"We should also engage in carefully controlled and subtly thought-out wars to remove harmful and counterproductive governments that harm their citizens and threaten the world -- but ONLY IF we can be absolutely certain that no one would be harmed by such a venture and that all consequences of our action would be benign. It is absurd to posit hypotheticals such as that. What can be learned by contemplating impossibilities?"

Ralph Vicinanza

 Apparently the news has reached print in some locations, so I can speak here about  my longtime agent and friend Ralph Vicinanza, wjho died just a few days ago in his sleep from a burst aneurysm, a very sudden and unexpected thing -- all his friends and clients and colleagues assumed he'd live forever.

Ralph was an enormous factor in my publishing life.  He was the foreign-rights agent for Kirby McCauley in the 1970s, when I was Kirby's client.  For those who know Kirby's story nothing need be said, and for those who don't nothing should be; but  when continuing with Kirby became impossible, Ralph separated me from Kirby and at the same time maintained my relations with the publishing world in a truly gentlemanly manner, and I will be forever grateful.  It's fashionable to despise agents as cold-hearted deal-makers out for self first, client after, but Ralph was a man of honor, and a genuinely good person.  Which is not to say he did not strike deals by which clients benifited over publishers.  For years he maintained my "advance point" at a level my publishers were sure was undeserved (they were right).  I baffled him at times with the choices I made in writing, but he would work to sell whatever I wrote.  When we met we'd talk about writing and books, but we'd talk a lot more about the spirit, the nature of the universe, God and other things, and laugh a lot.  As his agency grew larger and his attention went elsewhere, and as I was less often in New York, I saw him less -- and it has been more than a year now, maybe more than two.  I very much regret that now.  He knew, I think, in what esteem I held him, and how much I feel I owed to him, but it would have been nice to have been able to say that to him.  

May any and all of you who have need of a literary agent be as lucky as I was.

Fore-bear

 
Reading Chesterton's Orthodoxy because I'm advising a student who's studying Chesterton, I came upon this:

"But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance: the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure."

Which is what my story Novelty asserts, except for describing the combination as a pull of contraries, only partly reconciled in the end. What's odd -- or maybe not at all odd -- is that my story turns on a man trying to make something strange out of his secure and comfortable childhood Catholicism; Chesterton was trying to win through to a similar strange/secure kind of Christianity on his way to becoming a Catholic (for him an ideally strange/secure kind of Christianity.)

Hey Konrad

 

If you're reading this Journal still, a message for you -- New York's lost touch with you -- either you don't get their emails or they don't get yours -- the London thing is on.  You can send a Private Message on this LJ (I think) if you have new contact info.

Meat for Thought

 It's possible Jeff McMahon just wanted to get people's um goat, and raise a ruckus -- he almost says as much in the last paragraph -- and certainly getting 569 comments is quite a ruckus-raising; but still, this is so hilariously wrong-headed and odd that it can't just be that, it has to be serious:

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/the-meat-eaters/  

His conclusion, which is so bare that it does really resemble a Swiftian modest proposal, is this:

"Here, then, is where matters stand thu...