Scattered Musings

• New York, New York: I'm off to NYC tomorrow, where with any luck the books I need will actually be on the shelves. (With my usual good timing, I managed to schedule my trip to coincide with the library moving all its rare periodicals to new locations.) When not reading books in libraries, I'll be looking at books in the Strand and Labyrinth Books. And I'm also supposed to be "led by an invisible hand" to, if not "the necessaries of life," then at least lunch.

• Nature. Now it's in the kitchen. Couldn't it stay outside and leave the cat food alone?

• Perdido Street Station. It's been a while since I've read novel-length SF or fantasy, but I've started to accumulate steampunk fiction, and this seems to qualify--albeit in its own gloriously twisted way. It's only fitting that a novel obsessed with hybridity and rot should be so difficult to classify. PSS assembles a fascinating alternative world that sure looks suspiciously like late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century London ("Bentham Rudgutter"?), although the plot starts decaying, sort of like the city, after a few hundred pages. Like a lot of other people, I'm not altogether happy with the abrupt ending, which didn't deal adequately with the moral issues it raised. Still, the novel was an absorbing and sometimes provocative read. Should I go get a copy of The Scar?

• Jury-rigging. I somehow have to get both Man and Superman and Nickled and Dimed into the same honors course. ("Children, our unifying theme is...titles with conjunctions in them!" Uh-huh.)

• Getting longer. I'm desperately attempting to beat an introduction into submission, and appear to be failing. First it was 3 1/2 pages; now it's 5. Therefore, I was oddly consoled by Charles Webb Le Bas' life of Wycliffe (1832), seeing as how its introduction ends on page 89. (For more Le Bas, see this enthusiastic review by the still-Anglican Newman.)

Comments

[Brian]

Re. jury-rigging: clearly you must also include Of Mice and Men.

[oliviacw]

And War and Peace, and what the heck, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (Stephen Jay Gould). There's a nicely rounded syllabus for you!

[Amardeep]

I had never heard of steampunk! Neat idea.

[mjones]

Definitely get _The Scar_. I blogged about it fairly recently, if you're interested:
http://www.unbsj.ca/arts/english/jones/mt/archives/000827.html
http://www.unbsj.ca/arts/english/jones/mt/archives/000856.html

Also blogged not too long ago about steampunk:
http://www.unbsj.ca/arts/english/jones/mt/archives/000699.html

I'd particularly recommend Paul DiFilippo's _Steampunk Trilogy_.

[Peter Larsen]

Perhaps you could round the course out with the comic _Black and White_, the TV Show _Law and Order_, and the movie _Dazed and Confused_. You could call it "The 'Word and Word (where neither word is someone's name)'Titled Work: a cross-media perspective." The kids would go crazy for it. You could then go on to teach a film class comparing _The Madness of King George_, _The Killing of Sister George_, and _George of the Jungle_....

[Mr Ripley]

Mason & Dixon. Also Sondheim & Co. Dombey and Son. And Oryx & Crake. With selections from John and Belle Have a Blog.