A re-cap for all you late arrivistes (of course this being the web, the last are the first): finding my library in disarray one lugubrious night spent staring at spiderwebs in the corners, I found that the disarray of the books did indeed seem to have a shimmering order, if not aura, to them in the chance clinamen that had happenstanced them. Herewith selections from some of the juxtapositions — without, however, lingering on possible overtures which the collisions may generate. But first another fortuitous selection from a new Greg Bear novel, The City At the End of Time, I was reading last night. I trust you will see the resonance.
“His texts, hundreds of thousands of them, were acting as a kind of lens, focusing the improbable and retrieving from not so far away, perhaps, those things that would only become likely across a greater fullness of time. A fullness now deeriorating coming apart in sections — jamming and mixing histories in alarming ways. If nothing more were done, the future would drip-drop into their present like milk from a cracked bottle.”
Greg Bear
From Proust, Samuel Beckett:
“The point of departure of the Proustian exposition is not the crystalline agglomeration but its kernal — the crystallized. The most trivial experience — he says in effect is encrusted with elements that logically are not related to it and have consequently been rejected by our intelligence: it is imprisoned in a vase filled with a certain perfume and a certain coor and raised to a cerain temperature. These vases are suspended along the height of our years, and, not being accessible to our intelligent memory, are in a sense immune, the purity of their climatic content is guaranteed by forgetfulness, each one is kept at its distance at its date. So that when the inprisioned microcosm is besieged in the manner described, we are flooded by a new air and a new perfume (new precisely because already experienced), and we breath the true air of paradise, of the only paradise that is not the dream of a madman, the Paradise that has been lost.”
from Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, Dan Auiler:
Sequoia sempervivens is the classic redwood that gives this forest its beauty, and its ancient slendor would of course have attracted Hitchcock. The stand of trees through which Novak and Stewart wander is more than a thousand years old. The Latin name and definition is prominent in all the literature connected with the Big Basin; the film’s explicit reference suggest the same was true in 1957.
No on at the park has any recolletion of the Vertigo filming nor does ajy park record remain lof the two-day visit. The crew’s shooting days were shorter than usual — under five hours.
“On October fourteenth, most of the time was spent on the conversation just prior to the redwood cross-section scene. Judging from where the Jaguar is parked and where the redwood lcut is positioned, the scenes were filmed on a trail known today as the Redwood Trail. The two and a half page sequence was completed in a number of setups, the most difficult one requiring seven takes; in the final cut of the film, only a page of the material remains. Though Big Basin has (and still has today) a cross section like the one in the film, all of the dialogue surrounding the cross section itself was shot later on a soundstage and then integrated seamlessly with the location footage.”
from In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, Douglas Curran:
Madeleine Rodeffer became interested in flying saucers through reading a 1954 classic, Cederic Allingham’s Flying Saucers From Mars. The book mentioned George Adamski’s similar encounter with a blond Venusian named Orthon. A search of her local library turned up three titles by Adamski: Flying Saucers have Landed (1953), Inside the Space Ships (1955), and Flying Saucers Farewell (1961). Deeply moved by Adamski’s writings, Madeleine paced a call to his home near Mount Palomar, California. ‘I became so convinced that Mr. Adamski was telliing the truth that the first time I called him on the phone, I offered, ‘I would like to know what I can do to help you spread the word.’ Adamki’s reply was simple and direct: ‘Read and learn all you can. Be open-minded and do what you feel is right.'”