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Victoria Nelson?
Oct. 9th, 2010 11:39 amSince LJ has become a place for queries to a community as much as a place to post essays, may I ask whether Victoria Nelson has been as active in conferences on the fantastic in literature, sci-fi and fantasy, etc., as have other friends of crowleycrow (who mostly are also non-LJ friends of John Crowley) whose LJs I sometimes follow? I note, all these years after, Harold Bloom as a potential link in the case of Nelson.
It took Jeffrey Kripal's reference in, I think, Authors of the Impossible to lead me to seek out The Secret Life of Puppets a decade or so late, and now I am wondering more than ever about the peculiar lack of overlap among different writers in what ought to be congruent interests. Nelson does make some useful distinctions about the Freudian roots of the worst of genre fiction versus the varied psychological groundings of the best of the genres as well as mainstream literature incorporating the fantastic, but then she skitters off into movies as indications of the return of the repressed neo-Platonic in mainstream culture and high art alike—Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves on one side, The Truman Show on another, and a smattering of cyberfantasy on the indispensable third side, but a peculiar lack of interest in some of the books I would have expected to see after all those discussions of puppets and automata as psychological precursors of robots and androids.
So I am wondering what she has been up to in the past decade and I don't have time to study the programs of all those conferences that I don't have time or money to go to but a few of my occasional readers do.
I keep thinking that Kripal's scholarship in history of religions, popular culture, psychology and sociology and anthropology and neurology (where he is trying hard to keep up with the latest research) ought to be meshed more seamlessly with the far from identical paths of cultural exploration of folks such as Nelson, who has apparently been linking Kripal up with others on this dubious path of interdisciplinary research...Kripal has already enlisted Erik Davis for the cause, so a good deal of pop culture that Kripal doesn't know has been taken care of.
But perhaps all these people have been on panels at sci-fi and fantasy conferences for years already. I was puzzled that Nelson didn't refer to Crowley's Ægypt Cycle of novels in her book until I noticed how oddly selective her choice of novels actually is. (I love her take on the origins of fantastic literature in the Greek romance, incidentally, and the excellent set of same-day coincidences that accompanied her attempt to research the topic.)
I am not sure I agree with Nelson's perspective on the meaning of all this recurrence of specific subgenres of the fantastic in popular culture, incidentally. But I would need to know what she has thought about all this since 2001 in order to say anything intelligent.
It took Jeffrey Kripal's reference in, I think, Authors of the Impossible to lead me to seek out The Secret Life of Puppets a decade or so late, and now I am wondering more than ever about the peculiar lack of overlap among different writers in what ought to be congruent interests. Nelson does make some useful distinctions about the Freudian roots of the worst of genre fiction versus the varied psychological groundings of the best of the genres as well as mainstream literature incorporating the fantastic, but then she skitters off into movies as indications of the return of the repressed neo-Platonic in mainstream culture and high art alike—Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves on one side, The Truman Show on another, and a smattering of cyberfantasy on the indispensable third side, but a peculiar lack of interest in some of the books I would have expected to see after all those discussions of puppets and automata as psychological precursors of robots and androids.
So I am wondering what she has been up to in the past decade and I don't have time to study the programs of all those conferences that I don't have time or money to go to but a few of my occasional readers do.
I keep thinking that Kripal's scholarship in history of religions, popular culture, psychology and sociology and anthropology and neurology (where he is trying hard to keep up with the latest research) ought to be meshed more seamlessly with the far from identical paths of cultural exploration of folks such as Nelson, who has apparently been linking Kripal up with others on this dubious path of interdisciplinary research...Kripal has already enlisted Erik Davis for the cause, so a good deal of pop culture that Kripal doesn't know has been taken care of.
But perhaps all these people have been on panels at sci-fi and fantasy conferences for years already. I was puzzled that Nelson didn't refer to Crowley's Ægypt Cycle of novels in her book until I noticed how oddly selective her choice of novels actually is. (I love her take on the origins of fantastic literature in the Greek romance, incidentally, and the excellent set of same-day coincidences that accompanied her attempt to research the topic.)
I am not sure I agree with Nelson's perspective on the meaning of all this recurrence of specific subgenres of the fantastic in popular culture, incidentally. But I would need to know what she has thought about all this since 2001 in order to say anything intelligent.
