John Crowley is an acclaimed fantasy novelist whose reputation has far surpassed that genre; Yale polymath Harold Bloom, for example, ranks his novels Little, Big, Ægypt, and Love & Sleep in the pantheon of the Western Canon of great literature, alongside novels by William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among other giants. Crowley just discovered Second Life, and on his blog, recounts his first visit with a passage approaching a prose poem:
So I went and looked for it, and found it, and went into it, creating an Avatar of my own; and was plunged into a realm, not particularly rich as far as I could get, feeling much like Alice in Wonderland as I tried to navigate -- you can fly, and I dropped myself in the ocean by accident, and found a shrimp boat to perch on, but couldn't find land; when I did I was constantly getting lost in trees, and coming up to signboards that said nothing. Other people appeared, and made cryptic remarks to me, and I to them. And last night I kept dreaming or half-dreaming of this place, or a place like it, and following my Avatar around, the realm expanding or diminishing.
Read it all here. And so another esteemed fabulist joins Warren Ellis, Robyn Miller, and doubtless others in exploring the digitized global dreamscape of ours first hand with their unique talents.
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