John Crowley's Blog, page 45

Glass Bead Game

 
My article on Hesse's book and other things, in the new issue of the lavish and thick Lapham's Quarterly, is now also on line:  www.laphamsquarterly.org/reconsiderations/blossom-and-fade.php 

Bugattis

The suggestions having dried up as to the guessing game in the last post, I think the game's over (I could leave it up for months and years, I suppose).

The two words I was thinking of are expensive and valuable.

After the crash, my expensive car was no longer valuable.   After the market crash , I could see my valuable car was no longer expensive.  

I was thinking about these two words because of an article in the Sunday Times Magazine about Watson, the IBM supercomputer that is learning to pla...

crowleycrow @ 2010-06-20T16:56:00

Driving the highway the other day, I passed a car-carrier truck parked on the shoulder -- one of the small car carriers carrying one car -- and though I passed it quickly I could discern that the car it carried was a Bugatti, I thought probably a 1930s Type 57, and maybe even a 1937 Type 57S Atalante. It was unpainted, or painted in gray primer, but still -- no mistaking that panther shape. It reminded me of the sad tale of my own matched pair of 57S's. One of them, the best-beloved, I nev...

crowleycrow @ 2010-06-20T09:02:00

 
A new bird in the neighborhood -- a very loud and persistent call that (I now learn) is variously transcribed from birdish into English as Teacher! Teacher! Teacher! or Tea-kettle! Tea-kettle! Tea-kettle! but that sounds lo me like Chew it, chew it, chew it!  or with more emphasis on the second syllable, To wit! To wit! To wit?.  I saw the bird -- it likes to sit on the post of the deck railing -- and it is a wren, or seemed to be, a bit larger though, but still amazingly tiny to produce suc...

New Yorkers try to find North

  The NY Times has an interesting article on spatial sense:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/201...

As readers here may know, I have myself almost no spatial sense. I have lived in the townships around here for over twenty years, and yet when we drive the twisting roads, I continue to be surprised at what we come upon. Who knew THIS was HERE? (My wife, that's who.) I believe it is actually a disability, and has got...

Reading 4U

 

I will be giving a lecture or paper, actually, not reading, at the Otis Memorial Library in Norwich, Connecticut, an event stage-managed or impresario'd by  negothick  , on June 30 at 630.  I'm sure everyone following this journal will want to come, and it couldn't be more than a few hours travel for most of you.  Here are the details:

otisprograms.blogspot.com/2010/06/jim-lafayette-memorial-series-of.html 

Heroic

 There ought to be -- and perhaps there is -- a piece of software, or an option in Photoshop, that will turn a photograph of a person into an image of the full-size bronze classically executed statue (with choice of pedestal) that it might but never will be.  Of course with a graphics program it could be immediately be made three dimensional and able to be seen from all sides.  Is this an app that should be created?  I want a nice green patina with just the minimum of birdshit stains to give ...

Everett Bleiler

 
In researching for my Chemical Wedding edition, I came upon a 2009 article by Everett Bleiler that actually pre-empts an idea that I had formulated about how to describe the book.  Looking for information about Bleiler with an eye to contacting him abou this, I learn (from Wikipedia) that he died three days ago.  

Does anyone here know for sure that this is the case rather than one of those Wiki things?

Simplifying publishing

 Perhaps this is what Google eventually will offer -- this is from the Rosicrucian text Fama Fraternitatis (1616) as quated in Everett F. Bleiler, Johann Valentin Andreae, Fantasist and Utopist:

Would it not be a precious thing if you were able to find in one book everything
that has appeared in every book that has ever existed, that does exist, or will
exist, everything that has been found out and may be found out, to read,
understand, and have it as your very own?

Well, yes it certainly would, I...

Imaginary Individuals

Having successfully refuted the concept of individual death [see my article in Lapham's Quarterly, www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/in-the-midst-of-death.php] , I now move on to my next metaphysical conquest, over the illusion of individual consciousness, or rather the demonstration of how individual consciousness is created by historical forces (including our history as organisms) and the impossibility of consciousness without those forces.  

An interesting prologue to such considerations is i...