{"id":15256,"date":"2016-04-22T10:13:10","date_gmt":"2016-04-22T17:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2016\/04\/22\/15256.html"},"modified":"2016-04-22T10:13:10","modified_gmt":"2016-04-22T17:13:10","slug":"on-first-looking-into-crowleys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2016\/04\/22\/on-first-looking-into-crowleys\/","title":{"rendered":"On first looking into Crowley’s Crowley"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The latest book chosen at random from my unread-books shelves is The Confessions of Aleister Crowley<\/cite>. I'm curious about the man, but not curious enough to read all of this thousand-page “autohagiography”; but I did read the first 30+ pages before starting to skim.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, he writes more engagingly, even entertainingly, than I had expected. For example, I was charmed and amused by a footnote on his first page, in regard to the county where he was born: “It has been remarked a strange coincidence that one small county should have given England her two greatest poets—for one must not forget Shakespeare (1550-1616).” A great deal of the book so far maintains that tone, a sort of self-aggrandizement that (I suspect intentionally) avoids making entirely clear the degree to which it's tongue-in-cheek.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the detailed recitation of small incidents from his childhood and youth, given enormous import and weight, are already starting to wear a little thin. The general pattern seems to be that he's persecuted by a wicked and\/or foolish person in a position of authority; although he sees his own skill at some endeavor (such as chess or mountain-climbing) to be nothing out of the ordinary, he happens to turn out to be the Best Ever at whatever he turns his hand to; foolish people think he's not actually the Best Ever; in the end, he proves them wrong, and scathingly criticizes and\/or mocks them (and, often, their religious beliefs; he was raised in an extremely strict religious family). And there are other occasional unpleasantnesses mixed in, including a dash of misogyny.<\/p>\n

So I'm skimming now. But I'm enjoying the prose more than I expected to; if I didn't have such a huge backlog of unread books awaiting my attention, I might be more interested in lingering a bit more on this one. Not a lot more (it would take a lot to get me to read any thousand-page book in full), but a little.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest book chosen at random from my unread-books shelves is The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. I’m curious about the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-writers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}