I have good news. And I have bad news.

The good news is that after the indefatigable fact-and-theory searcher Robert Cheatham posted an excerpt on our local Artnews listserv, I betook myself to the URL he cites. Thus Robert Cheatham:

"yes, I can hear the rejoicing of those out there (well, one of you I know) who loved the previous three books of John Crowley's fabulous series called AEGYPT. Oddly enough with the completion of the book, Crowley seems to go against the grain of what I was saying in the previous post about change (and counter histories). or maybe not...

the whole review is in the new Book Forum.
http://www.bookforum.com/beha_may.html "

And thus Christopher Beha on the four books of Aegypt (The Solitudes being referred to as a 1987 book with no mention of its ever having been itself mistitled Aegypt:

"Endless Things sat unpublished for several years before Small Beer Press took it on, and all three previous volumes—The Solitudes (1987), Love & Sleep (1994), and Daemonomania (2000)—are out of print. This is unfortunate not only because the four novels ought to be read together but because, combined, they constitute an effort as valuable as (however different from) Updike's Rabbit novels and Ford's Frank Bascombe trilogy."

Did no one tell this man about Overlook Press? which thus far has lived up to its name, being as overlooked as one could possibly imagine.

Whose website, I have just realized, is called The Wingéd Elephant. I had been planning a post regarding yesterday's coincidence...oh, heck, I will summarize it separately anyway, so as not to take anything away from our collective gloating about John Crowley's early review in an arbiter of hipness in the book and visual art world.

on the difference between chance and coincidence

In this extract from Kafka on the Shore, Nakata has been wandering around with no clear idea of just what he is looking for, when his driver pulls up for no particular reason in front of an interesting-looking building.

"“Mr. Hoshino?'

“'Yup?'

“'That’s it.'

“'What do you mean --- that?'

“'The place Nakata’s been searching for.'

"Hoshino looked up from his map again and gazed into Nakata’s eyes. He frowned, looked at the sign, and slowly read it again. He patted a Marlboro out of the box, put it between his lips, and lit it with his plastic lighter. He slowly inhaled, then blew smoke out the open window. 'Are you sure?'

"'Yes, this is it.'

"'Chance is a scary thing, isn’t it?'

"'It certainly is,' Nakata agreed."


Even so, by sheer chance we find what we are looking for, not having known where to find it or even what it was.

Whereas coincidence is co-incidence, two events that don't necessarily have a meaning. Less than five minutes after I posted my comic fantasy about the falling elephant, a co-worker exclaimed, "Oh my God, they put the elephant in there again!" She was referring to a photograph of an elephant in the Grant Park zoo; my editor in chief Sylvie Fortin had mentioned, in the interview published in that morning's issue of Creative Loafing, an observation on her pleasure at having the elephants as a highlight of her morning run round Grant Park. A long conversation about elephants ensued, while I sat bemused as usual, having been able to see perfectly well that nobody else in the office had yet looked at my LiveJournal post.

Later I remembered Rumi's story of the elephant in the dark (not the blind men and the elephant as in the folk story, since Rumi's point is that the would-be wise men have the option of coming into the light and seeing where their partial interpretations of the phenomenon have taken them).