Tell Me About John Crowley

Was that the geeks guide to the galaxy podcast? I'd bookmarked that from somewhere on ilx a while back and saved it for after reading the book - in fact I listened to it a couple of days ago. It was pretty interesting although a bit sad that it sounds like his books haven't been selling so well.

That's the one.

Thanks for posting it!

Have read Beasts and The Deep. Loved Beasts, the conceit and the characters. Was not taken by the politics but that was kept largely in the background. By contrast The Deep is all politics, with a confusing bunch of similarly named characters vying for power - Old Redhand, Redhand, Young Redhand, Red Senlin, Sennred... the writing was gorgeous, I never felt like abandoning it but I just didn't give a shit. And it's marketed as SF but it's a feudal society set on a discworld?

Anyone read his non sf/f stuff, e.g. The Four Freedoms?

I'm listening to the audiobook of Aegypt. Semi-hard to follow sometimes as it's read by the author and from what I understand there are passages written in different scripts, or indicating that they're quoting from a text or past era, which he doesn't really demarcate particularly well.

iirc even with the print/ebook I did occasionally get confused with what part of the narrative I was in, what fictional world; however the extracts from other texts are cleary demarcated, can see how that would be extra confusing in an audiobook.

Crowley's accent is also somewhat off-putting to my Britisher ears and took me a while to adjust, although it makes sense that he should read his own book as the rhythm of his writing is known to be idiosyncratic. He was born in Maine but grew up in various places, but he pronounces the word 'car' with an Southern Irish-style long-'A' like "kaar".

Aegypt is all time top ten material for me

have you read the other three yet?

Way back when, I didn’t know Love & Sleep was the second book of a series and bought it and started it. Got about fifty pages in before setting it aside and going to get aegypt. L&S as far in as I got was wonderful, but after finishing Aegypt and being so very blown away by it, I ended up saving L&S ‘for the right moment’ which is a silly thing I do sometimes with books, sometimes for many years.

I’ve heard demonomania is not on the same level.

The start of Love & Sleep is an incredible piece of writing, a totally vivid creation of Pierce's childhood and stunningly evocative of childhood in general. As I said above the third was a bit of a struggle at times but the fourth is a very satisfying resolution.

have you read the other three yet?

― neith moon (ledge), Tuesday, September 29, 2020 1:44 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm listening to the quadrilogy

Finished Ka. It was.. .quite good. Very inventive, wonderfully written, I just didn't find it as captivating as Little, Big or Aegypt. Not as labyrinthine as the former or as full of surprising wisdom as the latter.

I still haven't started the novels, but did enjoy all the stories (incl. novella) that I've read in Novelties & Souvenirs:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71DMvbbR6KL.jpg

Last year's And Go Like This brings us up to date on the shorter fiction, I think.

From Summer 2020 What Are You Reading?
Listening: Just started John Crowley's AEgypt. I struggle with Crowley. I've started both Little, Big and Engine Summer. The first was impenetrable, the second maybe a little easier on the brain. He has a strange rhythm to his writing which I find exhausting; and listening to AEgypt on Audible is no less of a task to follow. His paragraphs are rooms with many doors and no matter how much I rewind, I still have trouble following the free associative subject matter - one minute he's describing angels in a scrying glass, the next a clergy-boy, then a bus journey through a mythical America, an internal monologue about wish-fulfilment, a meeting with a shepherd - and that's just the first hour of this massive great book. I admire Crowley's imagination, but he certainly isn't spoon-feeding me here.

― doorstep jetski (dog latin), Tuesday, September 1, 2020 10:33 AM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've only read shorter things, in collections now out of print, but Novelties and Souvenirs is all the shorties (and some not so short), as of 2004, anyway. Amazon's Look Inside for print edition will even let you access some whole stories via titles in table of contents, and the Kindle version provides a bunch of previews. I don't remember ever having much problem with the ones I read, but could be we're in similar strata of spacey density.
I recently came across "The Reason For The Visit" for the first time, in Interfaces, a 1980 anthology edited by Virginia Kidd and Ursula K. Le Guin: somehow he indicates right off that his guest is Virginia Woolf, although he never drops the name (eventually says, "I can't remember if I ever got to the lighthouse," which isn't a euphemism: he's just strung out on her letters, diaries, essays, and I've been there). Her English manners just get more lovely, and he feels her disappointment in him. Oh, this has happened before, in attempted demonstrations of social changes to time travelers Dr. Johnson and "to Max Beerbohm I'd insisted that I would be considered well-dressed---even something of a dandy---wearing an old, yellowing tropical suit and a vulgarian's Hawaiian shirt. But those visitors were figments, really. This visit was hers, and she asked the questions, and I was shy."

― dow, Tuesday, September 1, 2020 1:39 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh yeah, there's also a 2019 round-up of stories, And Go Like This, and Reading Backwards: Essays and Reviews, 2008-2018, which might or might not provide illuminating gateways to his brain, hmmm.

― dow, Tuesday, September 1, 2020 5:46 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

(Title might be a warning.)

― dow, Tuesday, September 1, 2020

novelties & souvenirs is really good, shows off his breadth of subject matter and diversity of approaches. "the great work of time" is the undisputed classic but i also really liked "why the nightingale sings at night", a creation myth more thoughtful than genesis, and "the war between the subjects and the objects", a short and sweet philosophical joke.

Does that collec tion have The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, because I fucking love that novella.

Sadly it does not. One for my 'to read' list.

The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines is all-time, I need to reread it. It's available in a collection he put out a couple of years ago:

https://smallbeerpress.com/books/2019/11/05/and-go-like-this/

Haven't listened but it's new
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f49ZeDU7F4

I remember first encountering him in adolescence. I read Beasts, Engine Summer and The Deep, all of which made a huge impression on me. Little, Big came out when I was in high school and was, I thought, a major leap forward (although the older books still hold up on re-reading). I've kind of lost touch with him since Aegypt, although I did re-read Little, Big after reading Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane (which struck me as a pale shadow of Crowley's book). Sounds like I have a lot of catching up to do.

Got this, for re-reading the then-newly collected contents, soon after it came out, in early 00s---still need to re-read!
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71DMvbbR6KL.jpg

Then in 2019, another collection, which I don't have:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71I8rcC8hQL.jpg

https://aaronparksmusic.bandcamp.com/album/little-big

Little Big also marks the recorded debut of the intuitive working group that gives the album its title (and which takes its name from a fantastical novel by John Crowley—a favorite book of Parks and, the pianist notes, Wayne Shorter).

Crowley is on Gil Roth’s podcast this week and a link led me to this (I didn’t know):

https://harpers.org/archive/2022/01/the-old-imperium-learning-to-live-with-my-aging-mind/

Very goodl thanks! Will try the meditation, now that he's described his experience with it (incl. habitual mental chatter, clatter, chowder, explainer)

You might not be able to tell from my posts, but it has definitely helped me.

Douglas A. Anderson, editor of the very fine Tales Before Tolkien, reporting:

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2023
Today the Book I Ordered Seventeen Years Ago Actually Arrived
I kid you not. The book was to be published in 2006, as the 25th Anniversary Edition of its original publication in 1981. Now it has appeared in 2023, the year of the book's 42nd Anniversary. I won't go into the long (looong...) history of the delays, but will merely thank those involved for their perseverance to finally see this book published.

The book is Little, Big, by John Crowley. This version contains the author's preferred text, illustrations by Peter Milton, and an essay by the late Harold Bloom, one of a number of people who have died in the interim since the book was announced.

The book itself is oversized (about 8 inches by 10 1/4). It weighs over five pounds. It is not an easy book to handle, or to read from. But it is out. And I will not repeat the idiotic phrase (which I have always hated, and thought inaccurate) that it was worth the wait, because it isn't.

the author's preferred text

Maybe I’ll reread it some day but aegypt kicks its ass IMO

I was reading the extremely intermittent updates for that edition a couple of years ago, it honestly read like a scam. I'm planning on rereading it sometime soon (not that edition), aegypt... maybe later.