there is also a virtual panorama of him receiving an award in Prague....

It is far too late to be of much use to John Crowley, even if I wait till I actually know what I am talking about, but I am trying to remember whether anyone mentioned Haruki Murakami when thinking about books with which to compare the Aegypt tetralogy for potential readers. I started (belatedly) reading Kafka on the Shore with that advertising-related errand in mind, and a hundred pages or so into the novel it seems to me that many fans of Murakami would love Aegypt…the same sense of contemporary events blending with folk tales, but not too much; the graceful side meditations on aspects of immense issues, enfolded naturally into the plot; and of course a riveting tale to keep the reader from getting overly bogged down in those big questions of global culture.

It is especially odd that this particular novel went unmentioned since it won the World Fantasy Award the same year John Crowley received the Lifetime Achievement distinction.

I gather from essays about him that Murakami has his own distinct quirks that make the comparison not one to be stretched too far (Crowley certainly doesn’t have “mysticism get to be a bit too much,” though the notion of “idiosyncratic humor and poignant nostalgia” sounds familiar).

But we are not looking for exact parallels, just hooks to draw in already-existing reader bases. And though it has been established that I live in a very strange piece of turf where iBooks outnumber Dell laptops, I know far more Murakami fans hereabouts than fans of John Crowley and Neil Gaiman put together, making this prime territory for colonization by the Aegypt quartet.

Fans of my habitual coincidences should note that I was surprised to find so much of Kafka on the Shore set in Takamatsu, a town that played a large role in my personal 1970s because certain women artists I knew did yearlong residencies there, sending back strange letters from a strangely prosaic but mysterious territory.

Some respondents to that marketing query on the crowleycrow Livejournal brought up books that reminded them of Aegypt for purely structural reasons. Looking at another novel that has been sitting by my bedside (one which I bought sometime after the 1992 publication date and never read), I suddenly find myself wondering just where John Updike got the idea of writing a book about an academician who is asked to write his recollections of the years of the Ford Administration and ends up adding in the chapters of his unfinished book on the presidency of James Buchanan, so that we have a back and forth dialogue between a narrative regarding one century and a narrative by the same author regarding another, and the two…well, the structure isn’t all that unique, but the 1987 publication date of a certain other novel, and the near-exact coincidence of time frame, makes me wonder if the appearance of that novel gave Updike an idea.

Obviously I was reminded of Memories of the Ford Administration for another reason, which also illustrates how far behind I stay in my reading.

the lineaments of gratified desire sometimes require too much airplane travel

Randall Jarrell wrote once that publishing a book of poetry in America is like throwing a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the echo.

I have learned that earnest pleas for information on this blog are the equivalent. I seem to ask only questions to which none of my readers have the answer.

But I woke up this morning wondering what had become of the web designers in London who ran House of Blake and whether they are still trying to make the Institute of Imagination function. IOI never seemed entirely realistic to me, a vastly improbable joke disguised as an Institute, with hefty annual fees for membership but no clear idea of the benefits.

In fact, the IOI website, last time I checked it, seemed itself more like the stub of the original excellent exercise in Blakean aesthetics, a wittily serious 21st century version of William Blake’s original visions.

And when I visited them, years ago, they had retreated to the attic rooms even less desirable than the rooms Blake and his wife had occupied on South Molton Street, since the original site in the House of William Blake had proven too expensive.

If they are still there (and the IOI website certainly is) I wonder what they are up to.

I might have occasion to find out myself in six or seven weeks or so, but even if so, I am unlikely to have time to drop by South Molton Street and look for them.

I shall send them an e-mail inquiry and see what happens, but I am putting this post out anyway.