@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social
Post #2530054
2026-04-18 23:14 UTC
"The rockets go up, you see
Are they acts? What if
if
they never came down?"
_Little, Big_, a great novel by John Crowley, has an in-world-of-the-book fashionable theory in which acts are compared to rockets; it was a book much discussed in this circle. One of the good things about the whole milieu of English-literature scholarship being blogged about at that time was that it offered a path from fannishness to literary critcism.
Of course this passage is also a passage about mortality.
Replies (1)
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@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social 2026-04-18 23:21
"Looking back (the cyborg runs, headless) the debris lies there, smells of gunpowder in the green-glow Looking back, tapping, For one last unfired" I no longer remember exactly how or why I wrote this. I originally intended it as a joke, or a jape, about Kaufman's work. Perhaps "the rockets go up" was also a reference Tom Lehrer's song _Wernher von Braun_? But after his death I cast around for something to write about him and found this and -- context determines interpretation.