![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
...but too late, of course. Unless I quickly delete the whole thing, as I occasionally do.
I've just spent a pleasant half hour following the respective Tales of a few more John Crowley fans, only one of whom is not already a Mutual Friend of crowleycrow. The one who isn't (perhaps only because his blog is on blogspot, not livejournal) is The Hanged Man, a.k.a. John Hanlon of Brooklyn. NY, whose post regarding the publication of Endless Things is one of the most interesting I've read thus far in this regard.
Mr. Hanlon, in surveying his own history of reading John Crowley, offers this reflection on the Aegypt quartet (I omit a long aside regarding a parallel experience in a book he's now reading): "One of the jokes of these novels concerns the main character, Pierce Moffet [he means Moffett -- jwc], who has esoteric theories about The Way Things Really Work, but can't quite put them into words. He's living off of a publisher's advance, having promised to write a book outlining his thoughts, but he's at a point where he feels his ideas more than he thinks them. Then, surprise, circumstances lead him to an old unpublished journal that spells out exactly what poor Pierce has been trying to say. This experience may be familiar for many who read ..., and it also echoes what it's like to read AEgypt. You've found a book that expresses a sense of life you've felt but never expressed, and then the main character finds a book that expresses a sense of life he's felt but never expressed."
Juding from the extremely personal responses, The Hanged Man is usually read only by his closest friends and immediate relatives, which is too bad because he has some perceptive things to say about Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and what it feels like to wake twice in one week in the small hours of the night and unaccountably spend hours composing sentences that do not contain the letter e. (Cf., as he remarks, the relevant novel by Perec.)
Hanlon is also good on finding Boschian visions in Victorian postcards, Baroque paintings of the Virgin Mary squirting milk into the mouths of saints, and numerous other images and topics that remind me that if the fans of John Crowley took to reading one another's blogs, they would soon have no time left in which to earn a living.
His meditations for each of the forty days of Lent includes celebrations of "atheist day," an account of a visit to the Campo dei Fiori to commemorate his favorite heretic Giordano Bruno, and remarks on Marvel Comics on the life of John Paul II versus the classic autobiographical comic that influenced Art Spiegleman, "Binky Brown Meets the Virgin Mary." The nephew to whom he is godfather describes his uncle John as the man who is "the really real Devil."
Which reminds me that the gentleman in the devil costume at the masquerade where the rock band plays the song with the Catullus lyrics (you know, the "vivamus" one with "nox est perpetua et una dormienda") is one of the few threads I don't recall being tied up in the amazing performance of Endless Things, which pulls together so many loose ends so prettily that the door marked MM is the only one that comes to mind as a trail that simply disappears.
I'm sure there are more, but I'm astounded as how well Crowley pulls together an enterprise that was originally thought of as following all the many choices at leisure, until it became evident that life does not allow us the option of following all the choices. Crowley slips a few new references into the text so slyly that I had overlooked one until a reviewer, who was making another point entirely, included it in a quoted passage.
I picked up my signed copy of Endless Things at the post office today (Thomas Pynchon's 70th birthday, and the anniversary of the end of the Prague Uprising of 1945, a national holiday in the Czech Republic). I had already read the book in bound galleys (for which, inadequate thanks and immense gratitude to the dear folks at Small Beer Press who let go of a copy at AWP Atlanta) and thus was flabbergasted to find that myself echoing Ron Drummond's reaction that the book is "drop-dead gorgeous." The proportions and its heft when held in the hand are everything; the text is exquisite beyond imagining, and Rosamund Purcell's cover image also, but the pleasure of the volume's overall physicality is more than I had ever imagined. So often (though I won't name names) the bound softcover galleys of a book turn out to feel better in the hand than the clunkily heavy hardcover. That is decidedly not the case here. Y'all click through to Small Beer Press and order your copy right now, unless you've already given amazon.com its cut of the proceeds.
What pleases me is that the other folks writing this sort of thing are specifying the friends who ought to have bought their copies already (which is how I started tracing the Tales I mentioned at the beginning of this interminable post).
And now I shall post the damn thing, and try not to go back in and delete it immediately.
I've just spent a pleasant half hour following the respective Tales of a few more John Crowley fans, only one of whom is not already a Mutual Friend of crowleycrow. The one who isn't (perhaps only because his blog is on blogspot, not livejournal) is The Hanged Man, a.k.a. John Hanlon of Brooklyn. NY, whose post regarding the publication of Endless Things is one of the most interesting I've read thus far in this regard.
Mr. Hanlon, in surveying his own history of reading John Crowley, offers this reflection on the Aegypt quartet (I omit a long aside regarding a parallel experience in a book he's now reading): "One of the jokes of these novels concerns the main character, Pierce Moffet [he means Moffett -- jwc], who has esoteric theories about The Way Things Really Work, but can't quite put them into words. He's living off of a publisher's advance, having promised to write a book outlining his thoughts, but he's at a point where he feels his ideas more than he thinks them. Then, surprise, circumstances lead him to an old unpublished journal that spells out exactly what poor Pierce has been trying to say. This experience may be familiar for many who read ..., and it also echoes what it's like to read AEgypt. You've found a book that expresses a sense of life you've felt but never expressed, and then the main character finds a book that expresses a sense of life he's felt but never expressed."
Juding from the extremely personal responses, The Hanged Man is usually read only by his closest friends and immediate relatives, which is too bad because he has some perceptive things to say about Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and what it feels like to wake twice in one week in the small hours of the night and unaccountably spend hours composing sentences that do not contain the letter e. (Cf., as he remarks, the relevant novel by Perec.)
Hanlon is also good on finding Boschian visions in Victorian postcards, Baroque paintings of the Virgin Mary squirting milk into the mouths of saints, and numerous other images and topics that remind me that if the fans of John Crowley took to reading one another's blogs, they would soon have no time left in which to earn a living.
His meditations for each of the forty days of Lent includes celebrations of "atheist day," an account of a visit to the Campo dei Fiori to commemorate his favorite heretic Giordano Bruno, and remarks on Marvel Comics on the life of John Paul II versus the classic autobiographical comic that influenced Art Spiegleman, "Binky Brown Meets the Virgin Mary." The nephew to whom he is godfather describes his uncle John as the man who is "the really real Devil."
Which reminds me that the gentleman in the devil costume at the masquerade where the rock band plays the song with the Catullus lyrics (you know, the "vivamus" one with "nox est perpetua et una dormienda") is one of the few threads I don't recall being tied up in the amazing performance of Endless Things, which pulls together so many loose ends so prettily that the door marked MM is the only one that comes to mind as a trail that simply disappears.
I'm sure there are more, but I'm astounded as how well Crowley pulls together an enterprise that was originally thought of as following all the many choices at leisure, until it became evident that life does not allow us the option of following all the choices. Crowley slips a few new references into the text so slyly that I had overlooked one until a reviewer, who was making another point entirely, included it in a quoted passage.
I picked up my signed copy of Endless Things at the post office today (Thomas Pynchon's 70th birthday, and the anniversary of the end of the Prague Uprising of 1945, a national holiday in the Czech Republic). I had already read the book in bound galleys (for which, inadequate thanks and immense gratitude to the dear folks at Small Beer Press who let go of a copy at AWP Atlanta) and thus was flabbergasted to find that myself echoing Ron Drummond's reaction that the book is "drop-dead gorgeous." The proportions and its heft when held in the hand are everything; the text is exquisite beyond imagining, and Rosamund Purcell's cover image also, but the pleasure of the volume's overall physicality is more than I had ever imagined. So often (though I won't name names) the bound softcover galleys of a book turn out to feel better in the hand than the clunkily heavy hardcover. That is decidedly not the case here. Y'all click through to Small Beer Press and order your copy right now, unless you've already given amazon.com its cut of the proceeds.
What pleases me is that the other folks writing this sort of thing are specifying the friends who ought to have bought their copies already (which is how I started tracing the Tales I mentioned at the beginning of this interminable post).
And now I shall post the damn thing, and try not to go back in and delete it immediately.
