Nture composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope. – Theodore Roszak
He thought: there is not only more than one history of the world one for each of us who studies it; there is more than one for each of us, there are as many as we want or need, as many as our heads and wanting hearts can make. – John Crowley
“You try to preserve possibilities. You try to have a life that continues to open out, even though you know it doesn’t” – John Crowley
investing
need to spend some time to make the heatmap better. the hotness radar?
20260811 Tuesday: today both Super Micro Computer and CoreWeave are reporting their earnings after hour. Follow CoreWeave. Its price keeps falling this Monday and Tuesday. With indices of S&P500 (-0.32%), Dow30 (-0.34%) and Nasdaq (-0.6%) all down slightly, worried if its earning missed. The bet is hard and the result turns out great.
notes
“It’s probably central to the nature of fiction altogether, to try to enter into lost worlds or enter into ‘the lost’ in some way.” – John Crowley
Ed Halter: Your novels exist somewhere between fantasy and science fiction and naturalistic fiction. Do you have any interest in the way the term slipstream has been circulating in the last few years to describe this kind of moving among genres?
john crowley: certainly the kind of fiction that always interested me is stuff that somehow manages to be convincingly actual – in the sense that you believe that truths are being told about the world you live in – and are also somehow connected to the imaginary in some way.
john crowley: There’s a moment in the last volume of Ægypt in which a little girl is singing the wedding. The text says, “In her singing and our listening was completed the renovation and atonement we all needed, whether or not we knew we had longed for it and sought for it, or would ever recognize we had it. It was the Great Instauration of everything that had all along been the case.” I wanted to restore the world to what it had been, to this world we know, not make a new one.
鲁迅：“此别成终古，从兹绝绪言。故人云散尽，我亦等轻尘。”
book: 托克维尔的《旧制度与大革命》: 不惜一切代价发财致富的欲望、对商业的嗜好、对物质利益和享受的追求，便成为最普遍的感情。这种感情轻而易举地散布在所有阶级之中，甚至深入到一向与此无缘的阶级中，如果不加以阻止，它很快便会使整个民族萎靡堕落。(利欲熏心) L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856) is a work by the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville translated in English as either The Old Regime and the Revolution or The Old Regime and the French Revolution.
Tom Disch: Misremembering John Crowley
Readercon #3 Programme Book, 1990: Many very good writers seem not to have been very nice people. Some, like Frost or Hemingway or Mencken, end up losing a large part of their posthumous cachet as their friends and biographers and even their own diaries make it clear that there was a Jekyll-and-Hyde-wide chasm between the man and the mask. As far as I can tell John Crowley is actually as nice as the people he writes about in Engine Summer and Little, Big and AEgypt, books that inspire readers to a special kind of readerly love precisely because their protagonists have a quality of ideal human sociability that is huggable without being sappy, charming without being coy, kind-hearted without being thick-headed. Perhaps there is another crueller, growly Crowley whom I’ve never met, but if so, he is an extremely adept and secretive fellow who’s been able to fool not only me but all John’s other friends of both sexes, since the only thing I’ve ever known any of them to say about John behind his back is how preternaturally nice he is. A good many people (writers) envy him, and in extreme cases may profess to dislike his work, but only in the way that Scrooge dislikes Christmas, out of misanthropy, or the way Salieri is said to have disliked Mozart. For Crowley’s work is at that level of greatness that sets the parameters by which other work must be measured. It is absolutely good
I understand that the traditional form of these convention-booklet appreciations is to reveal choice intimate details about the appreciated author’s private life. It is not a tradition I can easily observe, for though I have no compunction about gossiping, I don’t remember the details of my life (or my friends’ lives) only the generalities. I have been chez Crowley on a few occasions, most memorably a book party for Little, Big at John’s then home in the Berkshires, a party that had some of the flavor of the big riverside do in AEgypt. I can tell you that John’s manner of home decoration was rather spare than cluttered, with a Japanese (or Shaker or French provincial) knack for making seemingly humble objects yield their numinous potential, a knack one