text:
urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow John Crowley Little and Big John Crowley John Crowley 2015-09-15T00:49:27Z urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:258786 Revenge of the Metaphor 2015-09-15T00:49:27Z 2015-09-15T00:49:27Z

Treating metaphors as merelycolorful ways of saying things can irritate them, and sometimes they bite. In a local arts & culture magazine, an aricle about how hard it was to restore Emily Dickinson's house. It was helped by the discovery of some fragments of wall paper still adhering to surfaces. "Discovery of the wall paper fragments...lit a a fire under museum directors and the board of governors," the article says. "Not that the fire was quick to burn," he continues, giving us time to beat out the metaphorical flames consuming Emily's home.
 urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:258531 Not feeling myself 2015-08-30T21:21:02Z 2015-08-30T21:21:02Z I have every sympathey with myself here, thinking perhaps that my perplexity arose from the fact that I was actually not there at all. Still I have to admire the grace, self-possession and dry wit with which I conducted myself. I hope I was let off.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/71521770/mystery-man-tells-court-i-am-just-myself urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:258176 What I didn't do in the war 2015-08-23T01:58:36Z 2015-08-23T01:58:36Z If I read this right, you can get my new Harper's "Easy Chair" essay (about how I did not go to Vietnam) for free as an inducement to subsribe. Enjoy!

http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/selective-service/ urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:257925 Little and big 2015-08-16T22:06:16Z 2015-08-16T22:07:51Z
Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker about Max Beerbohm, the paradigmatic beloved minor writer. "Beerbohm found so many ways to be modest that when he had to try and be major he couldn't." (Max assembled materials for a big Jamesian novel he got nowhere with.) "Still," Gopnik writes, there is no such thing as a minor writer, because--there is no such thing as a major writer. As Max wrote, considering Whistler, even Shakespeare occupies shockingly little of our attention -- shocking, that is, for those of us who are trying to occupy it too. (Boswell, one of Max's favorites, said the same thing about Voltaire: no had ever been more talked of, and look how little, really, Voltaire was talked of.) This means that bigness is a mirage, but it also means smallness is a kind of illusion too. Anyone who is read at all is more or less the same size."

I think that's a wonderful insight.
 urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:257616 Childish things 2015-08-11T23:34:05Z 2015-08-11T23:34:05Z
From an article in the 0online NYRB by Glen H. Shepherd about photiographs of the now-nonexistent Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego: "There is something bewitchingly surreal about his photographs of the Hain initiation ceremony, in which young Selk'nam men are hazed by a pantheon of spirits that are revealed, in the final moments (forbidden to women), to be kinsmen in elaborate masks." An African people I read about have an inititation for young men in which weird sounds are heard in the bush, and the young men are dared to follow the sounds. When they have sufficiently faced their terror of the spirit world the elders appear and show them how the sound is made, with what in English is called a bullroarer. Basically the older men induct the younger into the facts of the world: we are the gods you fear. It's like a child being told there's no Santa Claus, it's Dad in the red suit, but don't tell the younger ones.

Women aren't part of these intitiation ceremonies -- theirs turn on menstruation and other secrets -- maybe they already guess these male secrets, or maybe they don't care.

Wouldn't it be interseting if our churches worked the same way -- you believe and pray and have magic helpers and angels and speak to Grandma in heaven, and then when you grow up your "confirmation" is actually to learn it's all not so; it's a means or a divine game but not a set of facts, and we ourselves are its origin. "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

 urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:257305 Me not being wealthy 2015-08-05T15:07:11Z 2015-08-05T15:07:11Z I'm glad to know that despite being a former cover star (whatever that is) I have not slaved uselessly as a wealth manager only to find it is not the way to riches

.http://citywire.co.uk/wealth-manager/news/hawksmoor-s-crowley-becoming-a-wealth-manager-is-not-the-way-to-survive/a829807 urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:257096 crowleycrow @ 2015-08-03T16:16:00 2015-08-03T20:16:53Z 2015-08-03T20:16:53Z
The old, old question of Who are you? to one's own self grown strangely evasive

in the gloaming, and to God's world around to which one has never been really

introduced.

Reading "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" for reasons that will be clear when my Harper's essay-after-next (November) appears. It's the best example I know -- there are many -- of the novel that contains summaries or selections of novels written by a character, to varied effect. (Nabokov's mostly to discharge ideas that sound wonderful but really couldn't be written.)
 urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:256951 Rough magic 2015-07-23T15:56:53Z 2015-07-23T15:58:29Z Watched Julie Taymor's Tempest last night. It was wonderful throughout, though (as is common now) a bit darker-hued than you'd expect. I was reminded of Max Reinhardt's 1930s film of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in the casting, assembled as in a dream -- Alfred Molina, David Strathairn, Chis Cooper (!), Alan Cumming, Tom Conti -- all doing classic strong Shakespeare verse-speaking. ANd of course Helen Mirren as Prospero -- sorry, Prospera -- giving one of the most moving performances in a Shakespeare film I've ever seen. Somehow her exchanges with Miranda were more touching and intimate as mother-daughter than as father-daughter, and her concern for both her lost power and her child were enriched. Her great last speech ("This rough magic I here abjure") had me in tears, maybe because I feel myself to be an old (would-be) mage in the same condition. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:256573 Rough magic 2015-07-23T15:56:00Z 2015-07-23T15:56:00Z Watched Julie Taymor's Tempest last night. It was wonderful throughout, though (as is common now) a bit darker-hued than you'd expect. I was reminded of Max Rheihardt's 1930s film of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in the casting, assembled as in a dream -- Alfred Molina, David Strathairn, Chis Cooper (!), Alan Cumming, Tom Conti -- all doing classic strong Shakespeare verse-speaking. ANd of course Helen Mirren as Prospero -- sorry, Prospera -- giving one of the most moving performances in a Shakespeare film I've ever seen. Somehow her exchanges with Miranda were more touching and intimate as mother-daughter than as father-daughter, and her concern for both her lost power and her child were enriched. Her great last speech ("This rough magic I here abjure") had me in tears. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:256422 TLS 2015-07-21T11:54:37Z 2015-07-21T11:54:37Z I enjoy the Times Litereary Supplement for a lot of reasons. It reviews books that wouldn't be noticed in any general weekly. It reviews books in languages other than English and quotes from them in the original, which even if I can't read is pleasant to encounter. And it furnishes me every week with examples of how different British and American English are, both in older locutions and in new-fangled ones -- despite the fear in my youth that the two would become an indistinguishable slew they have actually drifted farther apart in recent decades (I think). Older locution of the week, in a review of a Antonia Fraser's autobiography: her mother's brother "contracts polio: from his propinquity to the Oxford poor in Cowley or the bran-tub of the Countess of Jersey's lucky-dip?" urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:256065 Readercon 2015-07-08T15:09:48Z 2015-07-08T15:09:48Z Hello all after long absence. I'm posting my Readercon schedule here for you all to keep in your wallets:

Thursday July 09
9:00 PM ENL How to Write for a Living When You Can't Live Off Your Fiction.. Leah Bobet, John Crowley, Michael Dirda, Barbara Krasnoff (leader).You've just been laid off from your staff job, you can't live on the royalties from your fiction writing, and your significant other has taken a cut in pay. How do you pay the rent? Well, you can find freelance work writing articles, white papers, reviews, blogs, and other non-SFnal stuff. Despite today's lean journalistic market, it's still possible to make a living writing, editing, and/or publishing. Let's talk about where and how you can sell yourself as a professional writer, whether blogging can be done for a living, and how else you can use your talent to keep the wolf from the door. Bring whatever ideas, sources, and contacts you have.
Friday July 10
6:00 PM F From the French Revolution to Future History: Science Fiction and Historical Thinking. Christopher Cevasco, Phenderson Clark, Jonathan Crowe, John Crowley, Victoria Janssen (leader). Arts journalist Jeet Heer wrote, "It's no accident H.G. Wells wrote both [The] Time Machine and The Outline of History (one of the most popular history books ever), [and] it's no accident that science fiction writers are also often historical novelists: Kim Stanley Robinson, Nicola Griffith, etc." For Heer, science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and horror can all be grouped under the meta-genre of fantastika, and all emerged from the "epistemological rupture" of the French Revolution, which "forced us to think of history in new way, with new emphasis on ruptures and uncontrollable social forces." Is Heer right to see these commonalities? Is it useful to think of historical fiction in fantastika terms? And how do speculative genres borrow from historical ones?
Saturday July 11
2:00 PM G Imagining the Author. John Crowley, Natalie Luhrs, Kate Maruyama, Kathryn Morrow (leader), Diane Weinstein. Is it possible to read a piece of fiction without keeping in mind that the author has a gender, an age, a profession, an ethnic identification, a height, a weight, or a race? And if it is possible to truly do away with assumptions, without inserting one's own characteristics as a supposed neutral state, is it a good idea? How does assuming that the author is like or unlike the reader influence the reader's experience of a piece, or a critic's analysis of it? Is imagining the author a necessary starting point for any deep read or critique, or is this all ultimately a distraction from addressing the work itself?
3:00 PM F Shifting the Realism Conversation. Leah Bobet, Michael Cisco, John Crowley, John Langan, Yves Meynard. In a 2014 interview, James Patterson, not generally thought of as a fabulist, declared, "I don't do realism. Sometimes people will mention that something I've written doesn't seem realistic and I always picture them looking at a Chagall and thinking the same thing." Meanwhile, the SF/F world is engaged in ongoing discussions about the value and meaning of realism in epic fantasy, particularly the variety that uses claims of realism to justify portrayals of violence, bigotry, and misery in cod-medieval settings. What shifts in these discussions if we adopt Patterson's framing, setting modernism and abstraction in opposition to realism? What would abstract, modernist, Chagall-like epic fantasy look like? And would it work, or is some adherence to the real necessary in stories that explore the unreal?
8:30 PM Reading. John Crowley reading from his now completed but unpublished novel KA: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:255997 Pot-Kettle entanglement 2015-05-22T13:11:27Z 2015-05-22T13:11:27Z Karl rove's American Crossroads super-PAC has taken on the job of diminishing Hillary CLinton in the public mind. A quote from the NY Times about the Rove process:

"In recent weeks, Crossroads has begun carving a niche for itself in attacking Hillary Rodham Clinton, the presumed Democratic front-runner. The group will use polling data and opposition research to paint her as "a typical politician who would say or do anything to get elected," said Steven Law, president of Crossroads." urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:255521 crowleycrow @ 2015-05-18T17:26:00 2015-05-18T21:24:59Z 2015-05-18T21:24:59Z Slate magazine informs me (what you all knew) that Twin Peaks where the bikers shot one another up is a "breast-themed" restaurant. Worst breast-themed restaurant name since Hooters, which I have never been quite able to say aloud, much less visit. ANd here I thought the Waco one had something to do with David Lynch. But no -- just Grand Tetons.

I haven't got around to re-establishing my paid account after it was cancelled because of an out-of-date credit card I forgot to reset. It has given me a moment to wonder if I want to.  urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:255334 my busy week 2015-05-16T12:04:33Z 2015-05-16T12:04:33Z Somehow I managed to solve some repellent problems in Canada while thinking big thoughts at the UN.

http://www.canadiancattlemen.ca/2015/05/15/breeders-will-benefit-from-carcass-data/

http://www.bostonglobe.com/<wbr>news/science/2015/05/14/<wbr>fighting-extreme-poverty-with-<wbr>science/<wbr>caFFpj90kZln3h8imQBoEP/story.<wbr>html

"The work will also add to a raging discussion in the policy world about how to best reduce poverty. This type of discrete intervention can't deter many of the major contributors to poverty, such as corruption or government instability, according to John Crowley, a chief within the social and human sciences sector at UNESCO." [thanks to pgdf]
 urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:255185 In the land of dreamy dreams 2015-04-20T15:46:48Z 2015-04-20T15:46:48Z Correspondents who remember or who paricipated in the brave though failed effort here to build a taxonomy of dreams -- back in 2009 -- may be interested to know that the effort forms a part of my new essay in Harper's magazine. It was great fun setting it forth, tough of course it had to be fairlly restricted.

http://harpers.org/archive/2015/05/an-artist-of-the-sleeping-world/

I'm sorry to say that Harper's has a pretty high paywall -- but of course there's always the library.

JC urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:254924 Unicorns 2015-04-16T12:54:06Z 2015-04-16T12:54:06Z How clever of me to know about unicorns in the newsroom altering the story process. I think I learned it from John Clute or possibly Tom Disch. It seems important to know this in my apparent job.

https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/how-unicorns-in-the-newsroom-change-the-storytelling-process/s2/a564795/ urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:254540 Return of the Grammar Whiz 2015-04-13T10:57:00Z 2015-04-13T10:57:00Z American justice clear time

Rules as always: add words at the beginnind and/or end to make a grammatical English sentence. No adding punctuation to the phrase. No meta-syntax using words as objects of discussion, e.g. "The phrase American justice clear time makes no sense" or similar. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:254416 Dismaying, a little 2015-04-08T01:19:33Z 2015-04-08T01:20:29Z I learn in the new New York Review of Books that Ezra Pound was influential in getting sections of Jouce's Ulysses published in the American literary journal the Little Review. One of the pieces (for which the issue was suppressed) included one "proposed title" -- which I was amazed to see -- and research showed me was not far in the finished book, which i read with care long ago -- including this passage no doubt -- which i thereupon forgot that I had read, except i perhaps had NOT forgot:

EVERYMAN HIS OWN WIFE

 OR

 A HONEYMOON IN THE HAND

 (A NATIONAL IMMORALITY IN THREE ORGASMS)

 BY

 BALLOCKY MULLIGAN

 It's even described as a sort of play, as was my own:

Ars Auto-Amatoria, or
Every Man his Own WIfe

A Very Heroic Epyllion, in Four Fits

...with a Dramatis personae which included "the brothers,Ballaock, a pair of hangers-on" (see Daemonomania, pp.147-152 of the Bantam edition). OBVIOUSLY readers have assumed I just lifted it. And maybe I did.
 urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:254144 crowleycrow @ 2015-04-06T07:33:00 2015-04-06T11:32:57Z 2015-04-06T11:32:57Z I think the phrase "at long last" is strange -- strangely moving, odd in construction, impenetrable in meaning to a non-English speaker, beautiful on the mind's tongue so to speak. I retain it as the title of a book I very likely won't write. I looked on Amazon and it is the title of a small number of books -- a gay romance, a get-rich guide, etc., but no book I saw carried the touching affect of the words, or that the words could have in the right context. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:253918 A time to update 2015-03-16T00:26:03Z 2015-03-16T00:26:03Z It seems to me that it's time (!) to update Ecclesiastes. "A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together"? "A time to embrace, a time to refrain from embracing"? Surely we can improve this list. "A time to tweet, a time to refrain from tweeting" would be one, but surely the list could be as long as the original and more, you know. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:253511 crowleycrow @ 2015-03-05T07:42:00 2015-03-05T12:41:52Z 2015-03-05T12:41:52Z What the "News of the Weird" classifies as "Unclear on the Concept." From the NYTimes report on the release of the Ferguson report:

"With the conclusion of our investigations into these matters," Mr. Holder said, "I again commit to the people of Ferguson that we will continue to stand with you and to work with you to ensure that the necessary reforms are implemented."

On Wednesday night, there were two dozen protesters outside the police department, and officers made a handful of arrests of those standing in the streets.
 urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:253213 Collapse 2015-02-28T14:04:03Z 2015-02-28T14:04:03Z The Asutralian auto dealership I owned with my brother Brendan (where'd he come from?) has collapsed, apparently quite literally if you believe the photo:

http://www.couriermail.com.au/business/anz-launches-lawsuit-against-bryan-byrt-directors-john-and-brendon-crowley-after-auto-dealers-collapse/story-fnihsps3-1227241888701 urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:253071 More me 2015-02-11T13:10:16Z 2015-02-11T13:10:16Z My climate change research, which I can't think how I found time to do, has turned up some surprising results, suggesting that it may be due to a sort of natural gastric upset on Mother Nature's part. I'm sure I have my reasons.

http://guardianlv.com/2015/02/climate-change-is-linked-to-underwater-volcanoes/ urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:252787 Thanks 2015-02-10T12:29:48Z 2015-02-10T12:29:48Z I'm somewhat overwhelmed by the good will, patience, generosity and affection my post about the fine-press edition of Little, Big drew. Abashed, somewhat. But thanks to all of you (and to all those still waiting who didn't respond, at least SOME of whom are surely a bit grumpy). urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:crowleycrow:252312 Unredeemed 2015-01-16T16:54:04Z 2015-01-16T16:54:04Z WHat is the term -- I believe descending from Calvinist theology -- that means unsaved or depraved or not among the elect, but that came to mean simply bad, immoral, resistant to correction?