John Crowley's Blog, page 41

New query

 

My friend Pat and I were talking about the concert at Tanglewood. I812 Overture or something.  "Some old warhorse," she said.  And we both wondered -- why "warhorse" for some old often-played piece of music?  Or play?

Teeming Temes and the Future of Totalitarianism

 

I'm sure many of you were disappointed that I never concluded (or even really commenced) my ground-breaking argument that there is no such thing as individual consciousness even though we are still individuals with consciousness.  This was an extension of my theory that there is no such thing as individual death, which was greeted with a certain amount of let us say baffled dismissal or amused indulgence.

Well, maybe I will expand on those, and in fact they both may be part of a new theory of...

Inception

 

The very mixed reviews made me hesitant, but Z insisted I MUST see it, that it would be my favorite movie EVER when I'd seen it.  Well , not, quite, but I don't quite understand the animadversions.  It was enormously clever, consistently exciting (except for a certain amount of boring shoot-kill-blowup stuff in the virtual or oneiric Alps that was overlong and not very purposeful -- it seemed to resemble those ballets inserted into opera in the 1840s because French audiences demanded them.  ...

Blog Find

A lot of you may know about the Got Medieval blog "Got Medieval" -- "A[N INTERMITTENTLY UPDATED:] TONIC FOR THE SLIPSHOD USE OF MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN HISTORY IN THE MEDIA AND POP CULTURE" as it defines itself. I didn't, myself, but reading about New Gingrich (aka the Run-over Salamander) and his understanding of the Cordoba House Islamic center led me to it, and his interesting study of Newt's idea of history (and the uses to which it can be put).. A cursory look around suggests that the blog go...

New query

I am wondering if there wasn't once a novel or a movie based on Agatha Christies's disappearance in 1926 and the mass tabloid and media attention it earned. (She's run away from home after learning that her husband wanted a divorce, and holed up in a hotel where no one recognized her for some months.)

Anyone know?

Really?

 Michiko Kakutani reviews Jonathan Franzen's new novel "Freedom" in the NY Times today.  Her review includes this sentence:

"His wife, Patty, also seems "nicey-nice" on the surface, but turns out to be an ill-tempered shrew, who rages at Walter and inexplicably slashes a neighbor's new snow tires."

Is that still possible? I thought modern steel-belted radials couldn't be slashed, not without an awful lot of non-nicey-nice application of power. Maybe she used a chain saw. Or am I wrong?

Vertiginous

Z and I went to see Hitchcock's Vertigo on the big screen last night. I haven;t seen it since the first time, which was in an early re-run somewhere around 1962 I think. I thought it was extraordinarily weird then, but undoubtedly a work of personal art.  It retains all of that, and seems both more personal and more weird even than it was.  A certain part of that is the effect of time:  the way things look, the way people behave, the body language, makeup, the old (and rather inadequately r...

That all-important comma

The panel on Punctuation at Readercon (packed!) discoursed on the wrong meanings created by misplaced, missing, or superfluous commas. Sometimes what results is unresolvable ambiguity. Here's a neat example in a review of a book of mine -- it took me a while to figure out what was meant (as opposed to what was written):

"One gets the feeling that Crowley loves observing women because he captures them so precisely and so intimately."

See what I mean?

Home Invasion

I woke up this morning to find twenty comments on various older LJ posts. Flattered and interested (I knew none of the names) I looked at the first... and immediately realized they were all part of a SPam Attack, with the same format: the username is always a first name and three numbers, the picture is some glamorous person from a stock picture catalogue, and the post is a bunch of semi-nonsense interspersed with links to product sites. Has this happened to y'all?

Savage beast sooth'd

My World Wide Web experiences continue to broaden richly. Not only Netflix and Hulu (when I can remember they are available to me) but also now Itunes, or iTunes I guess it is. Having a though about a piece of music I'd really like to hear, I realized that, like a V8, I could have it. And I did. And now my library boasts a total of six pieces, and the sky's the limit!

I am going to try to share one I bought. I couldn't find John McCormack singing it, but this is Richard Dyer-Bennett, whom...