Now I remember...

...why I called the column "Astral Weeks"!



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An archive of sorts is available at the L.A. Times site; there are numerous omissions, alas.

Some of my favorite columns concerned a Charles Fort biography; an 1881 New Zealand novel; a discursus on the Ouroboros; secret histories; structural vertigo in Catherynne M. Valente; Joe Haldeman; wow I wrote a lot of columns!; repetition (via Robert Silverberg and Osamu Tezuka); Christopher Miller's overlooked PKD takeoff, The Cardboard Universe; the forgotten pulp writer/physician Miles J. Breuer; Dash Shaw's Bodyworld; a DeLillo rarity; D&D stories; John Crowley (and again).

And then I wrote some things that could only loosely be called "columns": a cento; a J.G. Ballard abecedary; a two-part meditation on short stories; notes (and notes on notes). Editors David Ulin and Nick Owchar were always willing to go with these somewhat unorthodox formats—amazing!

"Tih Minh"

I. Here's me earlier this year:

Gorey also claimed to have exhausted the film archives at the Museum of Modern Art. There he immersed himself in the multipart crime epics of Louis Feuillade (not just the famous Fantômas and Les Vampires but the all-but-unseeable Tih Minh and Barrabas, “the greatest movie ever made”)... —Moving Image Source

Now John Crowley says that Tih Minh will be playing at Yale!

Thursday, December 3^rd

4:00 -11:00 pm Special Event

- Tih Minh (Louis Feuillade, 1919, 357 minutes plus two intermissions)

o Accompaniment by Philip Carli and Donald Sosin

o Introduction of silent film musicians by Richard Suchenski (History of Art and Film Studies, Yale), Introduction of film by Richard Maxwell (Comparative Literature and English, Yale)

Boop the Doop

John Crowley ponders invisible comics.

Parkiana for October 2009

I. My J.G. Ballard appreciation, in the form of an abecedary, is in this weekend's Los Angeles Times. Alas, we couldn't fit the entries for letters F, M, S, and W, so I include them here—that's right, this is a DISAMBIGUATION EXCLUSIVE™! (This whole setup reminds me of the end of Mark Leyner's Et Tu, Babe, where the abecedary is revealed to be incomplete because "On September 24, 1994, federal operatives, acting under the authority of the Punitive Confiscation Act, sized Chapter Five manuscript entries for the letters B, E, H, J, K, L, N, O, P, Q, R, U, and X.") Many thanks to my editors for letting me write the piece in this form in the first place!

Flight
Flight enabled and denied haunts these pages. In “The Air Disaster,” the “world’s largest airliner,” holding a thousand passengers, crashes near Acapulco, and though people think it landed in the sea, one intrepid journalist, acting on a hunch, heads to a remote mountain village instead. But his hunger for a scoop colors his judgment, and he finds himself in a hell of grotesque misunderstanding.

Man
Some story titles: “The Overloaded Man” (1961), “The Subliminal Man” (1963), “The Illuminated Man” (1964), “The Impossible Man” (1966).

Science fiction
Places where most of these stories appeared: Science Fantasy, New Worlds, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories, Worlds of If, Argosy, Anticipations, Dangerous Visions.

Wave IX
Poetry journal edited by Paul Ransom, narrator of “Studio 5, The Stars,” featuring products of the VT. (See Vermilion Sands.)

II. I wrote a brief appreciation of Renata Adler's Speedboat for a cool little book called City Secrets Books: The Essential Insider's Guide (Fang Duff Kahn), a gathering of similar appreciations of interesting (and mostly obscure) titles. How obscure? Thornton Wilder's...The Cabala. Patricia Highsmith's...Edith's Diary. Jonathan Franzen's..."Erika's Imports." E.B. White's...The Fox of Peapack and Other Poems. Plus stuff I have somewhere but have never read (Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept...no, not that Elizabeth Smart), stuff by writers whose other stuff I like (Robert Kelly's The Flowers of Unceasing Coincidence—"The shape of the whole thing...is that of a rhizome, i.e. a non-hierarchical space, a burrow where you, the can go to earth for as long as little as you like"), stuff that I've mentioned on this blog within the past couple of weeks (Chuck Wachtel's Joe the Engineer), stuff I truly have never heard of, authorwise and titlewise (Otto Lilienthal's 1889 book Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation, anyone? Giovanni Paolo Marana's 1683 Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy?), and enough of my all-time favorites (William Boyd's Any Human Heart, Powell's Dance of course, Todd McEwen's Who Sleeps With Katz [!!?!?!], Jonathan Coe's The Winshaw Legacy, Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban, Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity) to make me believe that this gathering has some basis in reality. And where else can you read writers like John Crowley on Paul Park (no relation!), Carole Maso on The Pillow Book, Gary Shetyngart on Mordecai Richler? Wait...Buck Henry on Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress?? Is this book for real?

Disambiguations™ for September 29, 2009

I. Richard Russo was on NPR's Morning Edition today, talking about some of his favorite office lit—including Personal Days! Listen here. (Full show here.)

II. "I don't buy it, and, more, I don't really even want it": Levi Stahl on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

III. The anatomy lesson: My favorite brainiac Meehan Crist gets to dissect, at Lapham's Quarterly:

The earliest lesson in dissection comes not from the West but from the East, in the pages of the Sushruta Samhita, an ancient Sanskrit text meant for students of the surgical arts who probably lived about six hundred years before Christ walked the streets of Galilee. It instructs its readers to find the body of a person—not too young and not too old—who has not died of poisoning or severe disease. Remove the intestines. Wrap the body in grass, hemp, or bast, the inner bark of trees. Place the wrapped figure in a cage, for protection from animals, and lower the cage into a river with a gentle current. Leave it there, bobbing in the rhythmic rush of water, “the body left to soften.” When you return a few days later, bring a brush made of grassroots, hair, and bamboo. Use the brush to remove one softened layer of the corpse at a time. “When this is done, the eye can observe every large or small, outer or inner part of the body, beginning with the skin, as each part is laid bare by the brushing.” In this way, you will travel beneath the skin and through the body to the very core, whisking away bits of bloated flesh until nothing is left, the body disappeared and your hands, empty.

IV. I also noticed, in the same issue of LQ, an essay by John Crowley:

Once last fall, world stock markets lost a trillion dollars in value in a single day, or maybe it was a week, and I found the evident impossibility of this somehow at once appalling and exhilarating. I wondered why—why it was exhilarating, that is. Was it the suggestion, the proof even, that this supposed value had not been actual at all, had been nothing, a projection, a magic trick? Why would that be exhilarating? Some of my own money was vanishing (as my wife reminded me, asking why I was laughing), and to most humans, the sense of a vast and necessary structure dissolving into thin air like Prospero’s cloud-capp’d towers might be gloom-inducing in the extreme.

Along about the same time, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland was being set up for its first test run, and there was speculation that the machine could so focus the random possibilities of particle collision as to swallow up the planet and all of us with it. A mini black hole might be created, doomsayers warned, a spot of “true vacuum” that could actually draw in the entire universe at the speed of light—all matter and energy and all time and space—and leave nothing at all behind. Nothing at all.

This possibility, like the vanishing trillions of cash value, was exhilarating too, only awe-inspiring rather than appalling—godlike laughter as against demonic glee.

V. And...Columbia folk: I'm reading tomorrow...where is "Mathematics Hall"?

Getting Personal with Ed Park

Wednesday, September 30, 8PM

203 Mathematics Hall

Columbia Professor and acclaimed novelist and critic Ed Park will give a reading from his novel Personal Days, followed by an open Q&A. Personal Days, one of the Time’s top ten fiction books of 2008, was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award and the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Park is a founding editor of The Believer magazine, former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement and a contributor to the New York Times and LA Times, among many other publications.

The Columbia Review and 114 Rue de Fleurus, the writers’ house of Columbia University, are co-sponsoring the event. Attendance is open and no RSVP is required.

Crowing

From Jane Dark's Sugarhigh!:

Born four years apart: two faces of one feeling...both in their own languages named after the crow...

Who is he talking about? (Click through to find out.)

A few recent Astral Weeks topics have featured this bewitching bird—Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow and Endless Things, the culmination of John Crowley's Aegypt sequence. (Crowley's Livejournal page is found at crowleycrow.livejournal.com.)

Now feast your gaze on the ominous crow symbol on the keyboard of the Personal Days cover (and done white-on-black on the spine)...What does the crow signify in my novel? You will have to read it to find out! Get your copy online today—or stroll over to the store and purchase it!

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Check out the crow at Crawford Doyle on Madison Avenue:



UPDATE: Rocketlass sends in a PD sighting from 57th Street Books in Chicago!

Big as the size of thoughts

Part two of my Astral Weeks column exploring Endless Things, the final book in John Crowley's Aegypt tetralogy, is now up at the L.A. Times. (Here is part one.)

Endless Things reminded me of the closing line in...either Nicholson Baker's The Size of Thoughts, or Maureen Howard's Big as Life (part of her ongoing tetralogy)—half my books are still in boxes so I can't look it up: "Books open, then they close."

Will the circle be unbroken?

Astral Weeks subject John Crowley reads Dizzyhead Rachel!

(Coming soon: Part 2 of my trip through Crowley's Aegypt.)

Mr. Crowley

Side note to my latest Astral Weeks column on John Crowley's Ægypt books: The epigraph comes from In Other Words, a collection of Crowley's published by Subterranean Press (and now, alas, sold out). Delightful cover, eh?

Aegyptian cream

My latest Astral Weeks is up—part one of a two-parter on John Crowley's Aegypt sequence. This month, I focus on his amazing novel The Solitudes (originally published in 1987 as Aegypt).

Tony Soprano-Powell

Powell loses his way in a sort of pallid drizzle of New Age babble, picke up at third hand along with his other impressions of 'the Sixties', and allows even his most robust characters to succumb to runes, horoscopes, and the sickly blandishments of Aleister Crowley. To invert, in fact, what has been so often and unfairly said against Powell, the verdict here must be that events are random and unstrung rather than intricately coincidental. The series does not end or conclude, still less achieve a resolution. It just stops.

That's Christopher Hitchens in 1998, on the last volume of Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. (The piece, "Powell's Way," is in his book Unacknowledged Legislation.) His parting shot is damning: "I first began to read Dance when it was incomplete and there was something to look forward to. The pleasure then afforded was rather greater than that which is offered by a long look back."

Oof!

I read Hitchens's assessment when I was not quite done with the Dance, but maybe this was good—my expectations for the ending were sufficiently depressed that I found it (and the last volume in general) very much to my liking.

I've been thinking about the way the Dance ends recently, thanks to all the pieces regarding the Sopranos conclusion—the multi-year series "just stops," apparently, on a (seemingly?) mundane note. (I saw a few of the early episodes years ago, but haven't kept up.) But maybe that's the best way? Better than, say, a shootout or explosion?

Dizzyhead Levi has some more in-depth musings on these lines (though alas, he isn't a Sopranos aficionado, either!)—and I see that he discusses another Crowley (who I'm currently reading, hopefully to write about)...very intriguing...

UPDATE: Levi's second Powell installment.

Hanging on the telephone

"Now it may be," he typed, "that every other recorded instant of gold made by fire—there are hundreds of them, almost all seeming to be variant on a few themes, like old comedy plots—maybe every one is false, the product of mendacity or wishful thinking or the accumulating errors of multiple transmission, history's game of Telephone that always pushes anecdotes to clarity, wonder, or exemplum. Maybe this is the one and only real one we know about, the one that slipped through the baffle of advancing Time that falsified all the others, to reach us like Job's servant out of the wreckage of the former world: I only am escaped alone to tell thee." —John Crowley, Daemonomania

Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not. —Cormac McCarthy, The Road

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From a recent game of Telephone:

When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse.


(First line of E.B. White's Stuart Little)

After 14 permutations:

When the steward sees this person arrive, they all get very quiet.