Ntuple Indemnity

This week’s selection: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) by Susanna Clarke.

In brief: In the height of the Napoleonic Wars, two magicians appear in England and strive to restore its long-lost tradition of wonders, but disagree on whether fairies have any role to play. On one thing we can all agree: this epic love letter to England herself is fantastic, and shouldn’t be missed.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, keep reading below.)

Continued »

This week’s selection: Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (2007) by Ben Ratliff.

In brief: Ratliff’s carefully organized history of John Coltrane’s diverse musical stylings and its legacy in post-1960s jazz is a concise work of criticism that wisely puts the musical evidence front and centre. Its great success is its insistence on establishing Coltrane’s monumental importance instead of merely asserting it as the truth.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Coltrane, keep reading below.)

Continued »

This week’s selection: On Beauty (2005) by Zadie Smith.

In brief: Smith’s comedy of intellectual warfare in a New England college town dazzles with its ventriloquial feats of dialogue. Yet the novel is more insightful as a study of personal aesthetics, and how artistic principles motivate individual actions, than of American politics, which here seem oddly transplanted from a British sensibility.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on On Beauty, keep reading below.)

Continued »

Book blogging will resume this Wednesday. This is a promise, and without such a visibly dangling promise I would likely put it off for another week, then another. This does suggest that I should resume reading—not that I ever stopped, although my recent attentions have been disproportionately fixed on the screen rather than the printed page—and that, given how it is currently Monday, calling on the 600-page gorilla that’s been rehearsing its Ruthian slugging in the on-deck circle of my to-be-read stack for weeks now is simply asking for trouble.

In the meantime, I feel a certain duty to direct everyone’s attention to a blog that I am certain nobody follows, but which has resurfaced in a burst of desperate collaborative inspiration, and lived to tell my RSS hotline the tale. (Speaking of which, I highly recommend that you bookmark my RSS feed in your favourite aggregator if you haven’t already. My online presence is known to disappear from time to time, and I don’t expect anyone to like this place enough to reload it in their web browser day after day, wondering if I yet liveth.)

For a number of years now, Steve Smith has coordinated a displaced edition of National Novel Writing Month for those of us who have far too many excuses to be neglectful of the whole shebang in November, when the event typically occurs. Our summer edition has hitherto occurred in May. I have participated three times. I have failed three times.

This year, it is in June. I am not sure this changes anything. And while a pace of 50,000 words a month is probably advisable if I want to have any hope of finishing the project of my current fancy before I depart for my new commitment in the fall, I will not be participating in this edition of the contest.

That shouldn’t stop anyone else, of course—which brings me at long last to the point of my highlighting the U of A NaNoWriMo blog at all: the successful participants of previous years are recounting their experiences and dispensing their advice. I make especial note of Chris Samuel’s story, which never did receive adequate exposure outside the extremities of its Facebook impact zone, and almost—almost—makes up for the ten dollars he didn’t pay me for not fulfilling his fifty-kiloword quota. For fulfil it he did, oh yes. It was written, as the Saracens say.

I highly recommend trying this at least once in your life; if not in June, then in November. I look back now at my prior misfires, all aborted at around the 7,000-word mark because I didn’t feel sufficiently mature or well researched to finish them, and I see them as training wheels rather than wastes of my time. The kind of training wheels that unscrew themselves in a jumble of bolts and hang your knees up for the pavement to flay—but that’s called Building Character.

This week’s selection: Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (1976) by Northrop Frye.

In brief: This collection of a dozen variegated essays—some broadly accessible, others strictly for the interest of literary scholars—is a grab bag of erudite criticism that serves as thorough sampling of Frye’s one-man theory show. The academic pieces, which attempt to deduce overarching mythic cosmologies from the poetic output of writers such as Milton and Blake, are an ample demonstration of Frye’s method. Far more compelling, however, are the pieces that argue for the continued relevance of the imagination following its dislodgment from the objective world of science and history.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Spiritus Mundi, keep reading below.)

Continued »