John Crowley’s early novel Engine Summer (most easily available, with two other short novels, in the collection Otherwise) is a beautiful book whose seeming simplicity contains (conceals? or better, enables) great depth and affective power. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel, set in a future when humanity’s great technologies have crashed and burned, and various semi-utopian communities and isolated individuals or small groups survive and make their lives in the ruins, in a world that has been mostly reclaimed by nature, but also amidst the detritus of all that lost technology – and sometimes with bits and pieces of that technology that still seem to work, more or less. In the setting, the novel is basically a young man’s coming of age narrative; except that it’s also many other things at the same time: an exploration of different modes of life, different cultures, different values, different ways of relating to time and memory; and a reflection on the ways of negotiating these differences; and a meta-narrative about the ways that stories get told, and narratives organized, and about how the telling of stories relates to the lived experience those stories are about and which they claim to recount; and a bit of experimentation with psychedelic dislocation; and a meditation on love, pain, and loss, and irreparability; and a kind of lyric in prose, whose language and rhythms are always shimmering at the limits of the speakable and thinkable, even as they seem so clear and direct, only you can never quite pin them down. This book isn’t like anything else I’ve ever read (except for the only other Crowley novel I have read, the immense and stupendous Little, Big); its mode of thought, and very way of being are quite alien to me, or to anything I usually like; but the radical otherness of Crowley’s writing haunts me, in ways that I cannot account for, aside from on the basis of the beauty of his prose, and his books’ undertows of emotion, somehow mixing melancholy and a sense of having to live with impossibility and failure, with a kind of understated exultation.
John Crowley’s early novel Engine Summer (most easily available, with two other short novels, in the collection Otherwise) is a beautiful book whose seeming simplicity contains (conceals? or better, enables) great depth and affective power. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel, set in a future when humanity’s great technologies have crashed and burned, and various semi-utopian communities and isolated individuals or small groups survive and make their lives in the ruins, in a world that has been mostly reclaimed by nature, but also amidst the detritus of all that lost technology – and sometimes with bits and pieces of that technology that still seem to work, more or less. In the setting, the novel is basically a young man’s coming of age narrative; except that it’s also many other things at the same time: an exploration of different modes of life, different cultures, different values, different ways of relating to time and memory; and a reflection on the ways of negotiating these differences; and a meta-narrative about the ways that stories get told, and narratives organized, and about how the telling of stories relates to the lived experience those stories are about and which they claim to recount; and a bit of experimentation with psychedelic dislocation; and a meditation on love, pain, and loss, and irreparability; and a kind of lyric in prose, whose language and rhythms are always shimmering at the limits of the speakable and thinkable, even as they seem so clear and direct, only you can never quite pin them down. This book isn’t like anything else I’ve ever read (except for the only other Crowley novel I have read, the immense and stupendous Little, Big); its mode of thought, and very way of being are quite alien to me, or to anything I usually like; but the radical otherness of Crowley’s writing haunts me, in ways that I cannot account for, aside from on the basis of the beauty of his prose, and his books’ undertows of emotion, somehow mixing melancholy and a sense of having to live with impossibility and failure, with a kind of understated exultation.
Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus was pretty much a box office flop last year, but it’s a really good film. It’s a biopic about the life and death of Bob Crane, the actor whose one famous role was as Colonel Hogan, on the Nazi-POW-camp sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. (I used to love the show when I was a kid, both when it was originally on the air, 1965-1971, and later in reruns). Crane did dinner theater after Hogan’ Heroes ended its run, and in those early, pre-VCR days he was really into videotaping himself having sex with loads of women. He was murdered in 1978; the only suspect was his friend and associate, John Carpenter, who provided him with his video equipment and went out with him to pick up babes. But Carpenter was not tried until 1992, and then he was acquitted. The film extrapolates from these uncertain facts…
Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus was pretty much a box office flop last year, but it’s a really good film. It’s a biopic about the life and death of Bob Crane, the actor whose one famous role was as Colonel Hogan, on the Nazi-POW-camp sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. (I used to love the show when I was a kid, both when it was originally on the air, 1965-1971, and later in reruns). Crane did dinner theater after Hogan’ Heroes ended its run, and in those early, pre-VCR days he was really into videotaping himself having sex with loads of women. He was murdered in 1978; the only suspect was his friend and associate, John Carpenter, who provided him with his video equipment and went out with him to pick up babes. But Carpenter was not tried until 1992, and then he was acquitted. The film extrapolates from these uncertain facts…
Continue reading “Auto Focus”
Seafair is a Seattle summer festival; it goes on through much of July and culminates the first weekend of August. I’ve never quite understood it, even though I have lived here for 19 years. There are some cool parades for kids, miscellaneous events like “landings” by the Seafair Pirates (a bunch of businessmen in pirate costume who swagger about; in recent years they have toned down their act), and – on the final weekend, which is now – the hydroplane races in Lake Washington. Traffic is going to be a nightmare this weekend, since we live right near the main viewing area for the races.
But the part of Seafair that I really hate is the Blue Angels: Navy precision fliers who put on an air show every year for Seafair final weekend. The planes may look pretty up in the air, but it is HELL living in the neighborhood above which they perform their maneuvers. The noise of their repeated fly-bys is incredibly loud; the animals are terrified, the baby can’t sleep, and the overall effect is nerve-wracking. I know we should thank whatever forces or powers there be that this is only a simulation of war, and we are not actually getting bombed; but our not-so-well-to-do, racially diverse neighborhood really does feel under assault. And it’s all the more galling that this is for the benefit of jokers from the suburbs who are better off than we are, and who can enjoy it as a show because they don’t actually live here. I don’t understand how they can allow air shows and such in (above?) heavily populated areas like ours.
Seafair is a Seattle summer festival; it goes on through much of July and culminates the first weekend of August. I’ve never quite understood it, even though I have lived here for 19 years. There are some cool parades for kids, miscellaneous events like “landings” by the Seafair Pirates (a bunch of businessmen in pirate costume who swagger about; in recent years they have toned down their act), and – on the final weekend, which is now – the hydroplane races in Lake Washington. Traffic is going to be a nightmare this weekend, since we live right near the main viewing area for the races.
But the part of Seafair that I really hate is the Blue Angels: Navy precision fliers who put on an air show every year for Seafair final weekend. The planes may look pretty up in the air, but it is HELL living in the neighborhood above which they perform their maneuvers. The noise of their repeated fly-bys is incredibly loud; the animals are terrified, the baby can’t sleep, and the overall effect is nerve-wracking. I know we should thank whatever forces or powers there be that this is only a simulation of war, and we are not actually getting bombed; but our not-so-well-to-do, racially diverse neighborhood really does feel under assault. And it’s all the more galling that this is for the benefit of jokers from the suburbs who are better off than we are, and who can enjoy it as a show because they don’t actually live here. I don’t understand how they can allow air shows and such in (above?) heavily populated areas like ours.