John Crowley's Blog, page 43

Mightier than the sword

 

Maybe "Seduction of the Innocents" was right after all -- comics do cause violence:


www.comicbookresources.com/

The Waxwing Slain

 

I suppose it's not unusual really, just more apparent to me because I've followed it, but it seems to me odd that Vladimir Nabokov of all writers seems to attract critics and commentators who are themselves rather crude, sometimes slapstick-crude.  The rather strange Ron Rosenbaum, who had strong (but successively contradictory) opinions about whether the Nabokov fragment "The Original of Laura" should have been published, now weighs in on whether an equally elaborately produced stand-alone ...

Nostalgia Now

 

IPhone and computer apps for making photographs look like old Polaroid or Instamatic photos (the "Hipstamatic"), websites look like they were "made by a 13-year-old in 199^" (the Geocities-izer) and making flawless digital recordings sound like dusty warped old vinyl albums:  

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/mag...

As the article wittily puts it:

Images from the Hipstamatic have “an instant haze of memory,” according to one endorsement. And really, who ...

Pack of lies

The Irish novelist Colm Toibin (there should be an accent on the second i) reviews a biography of E,.M. Forster in this Sunday's book review, and  makes this interesting observation.  The biographer discusses "Maurice," the only novel of Forster's that is openly about a homosexual relationship -- Forster did not publish it.  All his other novels were about heterosexual romances (at least in good part.)  Toibin believes that Forster (who stopped writing novels after five of these) poured his r...

1491 and All That

  An astute reader finally did come up with exactly the book about pre-European Discovery America I had noticed somewhere and forgotten title and author of :  it was "Paradise Found:  America at the Time of the Discovery" by Steve Nicholls (thanks to Robert Brown.)

Meanwhile very many readers thought I must be looking for "1491" the best seller.  I wasn't but in the face of all these recommendations I went and got it.  What a wonderful read -- I tore through it.  It resembles, or rather its ef...

The sound of one dime dropping

Paul DiFilippo, who is a contributor to the Weird Universe site, presents us with the ur-mention of the ghostly dime droppers thereon, all the way back in 2008, with all subsequent comments thereto, up to the most recent, which makes clear that to really count, the dime encounter must include the actual sound of the dime being dropped by the agent of the other world.  So encounters on the beach, for instance, or in bed, would maybe not be decidable:  

http...

The End-of-Everything Watchdogs

 

It's good to know these guys are on the watchtower:

bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/the-lifeboat-foundation-battling-asteroids-nanobots-and-a-i/ 

The money that Google and Sun Microsystems are giving show they are troubled, too:  Google gave $450 to the organization.

And I take the point that chairman Eric Klein makes:

"I also realized that there is no sign of intelligent life out there in the universe. You wonder what happened to all those intelligent civilizations, and one of my potential th...

the Ghosts and FDR

 At Readercon the subject of ghosts came up -- I'd given a lecture about New Ghosts in fiction, as advertised herein, where Paul diFilippo and others were in attendance -- and Paul told me about the underground or at least unofficial mania (that's not the right word, what is?) regarding the dead and FDR dimes.  It's going around that if you think of a dead person dear to you, or wish you could talk again to such a person, and if in the next minutes or maybe longer you come upon a dime -- spec...

Little guys

 

A bunch of neat robots in the NY Tijmes, with reader links to many more.   pdf   sends me lots of these, so, here's some for YOU, Paul!  Mostly nice and friendly though the one that assembles itself out of separate modules is rather creepy.  None fall into the Uncanny Valley of being too like humans or animals but NOT humans or animals, which I find literally nightmarish, or bad-dream-ish anyway, as I have often dreamed of things that move and somehow see or sense without any cognition or any ...

Linn-gwistik eck-sess

I very much enjoy trying to represent hard or foreign words in unmistakable phonetic form, but I will never equal this little description of a well known book and it's less-easily-pronounced source:

Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason’s The Rule of Four is already a bookselling phenomenon. The 28-year-old Ivy League super-achievers drew upon an authentic 1499 Renaissance text to create a thriller about two Princeton undergraduates who try to unravel the mysteries in an ancient book titled...