Crowley

Joshua A. Solomon · 31 Jul 2003, 14:32 · from urth-v0307.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Joshua A. Solomon" <J.A.Solomon at city.ac.uk>
Subject: (urth) Crowley
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 15:32:43 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0307-3835 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0307/3835.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

I recently talked with other Wolfe-fans who didn't enjoy Little, Big
(including Nigel, who is swamped with work at the moment; he'll be back
soon). I did. Thanks to Alga and Mantis etc. for turning me on. I started
with The Deep, read Beasts, Engine Summer, Little Big, Novelty, =3DC6gypt, =
Love
& Sleep and I'm now halfway through D=3DE6monomania. At one point, I noted =
that

>>Little, Big can be especially bewildering if
>>you are not familiar with the symbolic devices
>>he develops in his earlier novels.

Decoding (or at least, attempting to decode) this symbolic language is half
the fun for me.

Going back through our correspondence, the only other (possibly) relevant
thing I said was

>>Although Crowley is certainly intrigued,
>>if not obsessed, with occult matters
(you urthlings have convinced me that Gnostic
themes in particular are explored in his novels),
>>I find it hard to pinpoint
>>where his actual sympathies lie. Smoky, like
>>the protagonist of the =3DC6gypt series, frequently
>>encounters strange goings-on--even falls in love
>>with a semi-fantastic creature or two--but never
>>really buys into the whole supernatural mindset.
>>I suspect that one of the reasons Crowley mines
>>the occult so heavily is because it is such a
>>convenient metaphor for fiction in general. If
>>there is a single dominant theme in Crowley's
>>work it is the creation and perpetuation of
>>stories. Crowley may believe in certain things
>>that others consider fiction; he may not. I dunno.

bee

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net