(urth) Crowley and mystery

[Son of Witz]

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.


>-----Original Message-----
>From: David Stockhoff [mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net]

>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.
>


>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.
>
>
>
>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>       
>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: Dave Lebling [mailto:dlebling at hyraxes.com]
>>>>> Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2008 04:08 PM
>>>>> To: 'The Urth Mailing List'
>>>>> Subject: Re: (urth) Crowley and mystery
>>>>>
>>>>> 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
>>>>>
>>>>> Son of Witz wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>         
>>>>>> 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
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>           
>>
>
>
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