Crowley and mystery

I don't find either of those books particularly confusing. Wonderful, brilliant, and exquisite, yes; but they're not New Sun-like. I suspect a discussion of it for me would devolve into quoting favorite lines and swooning. However, Crowley's long and complex four novel series Aegypt (The Solitudes, Love & Sleep, Daemonomania, Endless Things) is something that I would love to hash over with interested parties. As many of its characters and situations are drawn from history (John Dee, Giordano Bruno, and so forth), I would just like some particularly erudite person to lecture at me about the source material -- I suspect I would learn a lot that way. --Zvi

I agree that their surface is less confusing than Wolfe's, but I get something new every time I read them; and I would love to see the fine spelunkers of this list unleashed on them (or, as you say, Aegypt) to dig up the many things I'm sure I missed.

anyone read Edward Whittemore's Sinai Tapestry. that's a strange sort of puzzle. Odd book. One of those ones where I didn't like it until about a month later, when, not having thought about it since closing the pages, the symbols jumped out and started making sense. very curious work. I'm not sure if it's scifi or not. The cover would lead you to believe it, and many elements. I suppose New Sun fans might find a lot worth pondering. Jerusalem, repeating Anchors in history, time paradoxes. I just found out it's the first of the Jerusalem Quartet. I suppose I should read the others. very strange. the blurb on the cover compared it to LOTR, which left me scratching my head big time. ~witz

Witz....you gotta slug your way through long and short sun.... Myspace me willya...you around? S ------Original Message------ From: Son of Witz Sender: urth-bounces at lists.urth.net To: The Urth Mailing List ReplyTo: The Urth Mailing List Sent: Dec 17, 2008 3:19 PM Subject: Re: (urth) Crowley and mystery anyone read Edward Whittemore's Sinai Tapestry. that's a strange sort of puzzle. Odd book. One of those ones where I didn't like it until about a month later, when, not having thought about it since closing the pages, the symbols jumped out and started making sense. very curious work. I'm not sure if it's scifi or not. The cover would lead you to believe it, and many elements. I suppose New Sun fans might find a lot worth pondering. Jerusalem, repeating Anchors in history, time paradoxes. I just found out it's the first of the Jerusalem Quartet. I suppose I should read the others. very strange. the blurb on the cover compared it to LOTR, which left me scratching my head big time. ~witz

I've read all of the Jerusalem Quartet books, and Quinn's Shanghai Circus, which has a similar style but is more-or-less unrelated. They actually remind me more of Pynchon than Wolfe or Vance or Crowley, though it's hard to articulate why. Probably because the whole quartet has an overarching theme and some consistent macguffins but is mostly episodic. I like them, but then I like Pynchon, and Flann O'Brian, and other strange more-or-less modernist types. Wolfe tells stories with plots, but tells them obscurely. Pynchon's books, and Whittemore's, have plots but they are at least in my opinion secondary to the desire to produce effects. Wolfe is in many ways a very traditional writer on the surface. Whittemore was out-of-print for a long time, but recently (the last couple years) his books were all republished in rather nice trade paperback editions. -- Dave Lebling, aka vizcacha

that makes sense. I've started Gravities Rainbow twice, gotten 200 pages in and thought, why the hell am I reading all these psychedelic lists of details. At least with Burroughs, the psychedelic listing is entertaining. Everyone tells me I have to get past 300 pages with Rainbow. I guess I didn't like LoTR untill about page 300, so one day I'll probably try again. ~witz

I, er, might be able to help. I did my Master's minor concentration in something my advisor and I agreed not to call "Renaissance Weird Shit." It's all a bit fuzzy now, of course, but the main point is: read Frances Yates. She did look rather like the White Queen. I don't know if her sister looked like the Red Queen. Anyway, most of what you need to know about Dee and Bruno (at least for the purposes of reading Crowley) you can get out of Yates. Adam

yeah, I'll probably start em in a couple of days. Would have started them today, but I wanted to let Urth sink in a bit more. Last read of it, I started the whole shebang over again, and promptly forgot a bunch of Urth details, which led to some embarrassingly off the mark posts. I'm itchy for them though. anyone know if the Short Sun stuff is out of print? Borders never has them on the shelf.

ok. Haven't been around myspace. I can barely stomache it in there, but I try to pimp my shit to bands, you know, so one does what one must. ~witz

Witz...just have a wee bit of holiday cheer to pass your way...address? Hook up??? S Sent from my BlackBerry? smartphone with SprintSpeed -----Original Message-----

yeah, I'll probably start em in a couple of days. Would have started them today, but I wanted to let Urth sink in a bit more. Last read of it, I started the whole shebang over again, and promptly forgot a bunch of Urth details, which led to some embarrassingly off the mark posts. I'm itchy for them though. anyone know if the Short Sun stuff is out of print? Borders never has them on the shelf.

ok. Haven't been around myspace. I can barely stomache it in there, but I try to pimp my shit to bands, you know, so one does what one must. ~witz

Indeed. I don't believe Crowley has read Dee or Bruno except as excerpted in Yates. .

J. Crowley sounds great! thanks for another book recommendation, folks. I also had a couple of false starts with Gravity's Rainbow, but like so many folks, when I finally got into it, it got its hooks deep in me and I enjoyed it immensely. Just another person nudging you to read it at some point. Of course, I've also still got the Long and Short Suns waiting for me...

It took me a few times to finish 'GR'. I can't say that I enjoyed it immensely. .

You might know that a number of former list members put together Snake's Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley Recently read Lord Byron's Novel, which was enjoyable too. Perhaps not quite as dab a pastiche as the voice that Susanna Clarke uses David Duffy.

I have and like the book, but I didn't know that it was connected to this list (or did you mean the Crowley list)?

They're in print, but that's the way it is with Wolfe. You can get them off of Amazon or Abebooks. The Science Fiction Book Club put out a compiled edition of "Short Sun".

No, here. Michael Andre-Driussi also authored Lexicon Urthus, you know ;) Alice Turner was Alga, and in the Digest I see is the second message ever. David Duffy

Someone asked before about discussions of Aegypt etc. There is a fair bit in the archives eg http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0696.shtml is about the middle of them. It also answers which books JC read about Dee. Apropos of nothing, I have finally started AEG -- yay. David Duffy.

Speaking of the Jerusalem Quartet---I'm not very familiar with it though I have read reviews. A quick google came up with the following description: Sinai Tapestry, originally published in 1977, is the first book of Edward Whittemore's Jerusalem Quartet: four novels that make the long, complex history of the Middle East comprehensible as no other books do, and that do so by creating an alternate version of history - part real and part imagined (and what pleasure, while reading, to speculate on what, in the novels, is real and what imagined!) - that begins, in this first book, by telling the story of how early in the nineteenth century, Skanderbeg Wallenstein, a fanatical Trappist monk from Albania, comes upon what is "with out question the oldest Bible in the world" and discovers that "It denied every religious truth ever held by anyone" What would happen, then, he wonders - in ways not so different from the actual speculations of twentieth century Biblical scholars - "if the world suddenly suspected that Mohammed might well have lived six centuries before Christ" or that Christ had been a minor prophet in the age of Elijah" or "that the virtues of Mary and Fatima and Ruth had been confused in the minds of later chroniclers and freely interchanged among them?" "Melchizedek must have his City of Peace," Wallenstein. concludes, just as men must have their Jerusalem" Believing that faith must be sustained in the world, Wallenstein also believes that if the cause for faith is absent, then it is his duty to provide it. "The decision he had made in his cell," Whittemore tells us, "was to forge the original Bible." But this forgery - what has led to it, and what issues from it-becomes, in Sinai Tapestry, an imaginative conceit that informs the entire Quartet: It is Whittemore's way of asking us to consider the many ways in which illusions can give birth to realities, by which realities can be transformed by dreams, and - above all - through which the real and the imagined can conspire to create those events and legends that determine how we live, love, and die. At a high level of abstraction, this sounds not very different from TBotNS. Wolfe also forges an alternate history but on a vaster scale, a history in which the miraculous truth and mundane deceit are conflated. Note the line about Mary and Fatima and Ruth; after chiliads, the same has occurred on Urth. And the last paragraph especially.

Exactly what I was thinking. the trappings are not at all similar, nor is the plot, but some of the meta concepts about time, recurrent anchors in history, fraud and veracity in religion are probably closer to BotNS than any other work I've read. I'll have to read the first again, then the others. Like I said, I had a strong "WTF did I just read?" reaction to the book, then it dawned on my, unbidden, months later in a real Aha moment. There were several complaints I had about it, but once I began to understand it more, everything I thought was sort of stupid became symbolically perfect and apt.

Yeah, other than what I quoted, it does sound fairly silly. I have a low tolerance for silly unless it's funny (see Snow Crash: very silly, not funny). Wolfe always disguises his silly.

yeah, it wasn't overtly silly. It was there, but fairly straight faced and highbrow, as in Wolfe. "He mispronounced quite common words: urticate, salpinx, bordereau." LoL. ~witz