18th Century letters

There's been a long delay in posting... I do apologize. I'm at the end of the semester and have been working on a number of projects: motivation in learning as a complex adaptive system, a machinima version of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, and a look at the use of letters in Restoration and Enlightenment British drama. Right now I'm looking at the letter-writing scene in William Wycherly's The Country Wife and the letter-ripping scene in Nicholas Rowe's The Fair Penitent as scenes of establishing authority through authorship. If anyone out there can think of any other scenes that might potentially fit into this theme, please post!

Iconography

I wanted to point out that Heavenly Windows has posted a new icon to this blog. Face Made Without Hands is my favorite. Scroll through all of the beautiful artwork here and enjoy!

On-line books

I always love hearing about a new way of looking at books. This website was recommended to me by another bluestocking, and I hope you enjoy it too! Abe Books specializes in new and used books and seems to offer a lot of good reviews.

Grammar Girl

Have I mentioned how much I enjoy this podcast? I believe I've posted links to Grammar Girl's show before, but it's always gratifying to listen to someone clarify misconceptions for those people you would never correct personally. I suppose she's preaching to the choir, and I imagine her listeners are all fans of Lynne Truss and Strunk & White. Sometimes it's just nice to know there are other persnickety, grammar-obsessed people out there.

Freddy and Fredericka

Spring Break is over, but I'm still enjoying the newest book by Mark Helprin: Freddy and Fredericka. described as an allegory, a picaresque saga, and fable-cum-romance, I've been laughing out loud over his portrayal of how Brits see the States. It's a great look at class and culture, silly and funny, but not stupid. It's very transparently based on Prince Charles and Princess Di's marriage. I remember getting up in the middle of the night to watch their wedding, and many scenes from Helprin's novel will be recognizable; others, not so much, but still entertaining.

Top Ten Book Stores

Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver is definitely one of my favorite bookstores in the country, but I'd be hard pressed to say what bookstore is my favorite. I suppose it's whichever one I'm in at the moment. Here is my top ten list, in wildly varying order depending on the day:

1. Tattered Cover, Denver
2. Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle
3. Epilogue Book Company, Steamboat Springs
4. Book People, Austin
5. Taschen, New York
6. Micawber, Princeton (unfortunately closed in 2006)
7. Octavia, New Orleans
8. Powell's, Portland
9. Well's Books, Victoria
10. Reader's Cove, Fort Collins
    

Neil Gaiman

I had read Neil Gaiman's American Gods not too long ago and enjoyed his modern-adaptation of myth, which is soon to be made available on-line. I've just learned about the wide variety of genres he's engaged in and am doubly impressed now by his versatility. In addition to novels, he's written children's literature, graphic novels, and screenplays... I may see about adding some of his other works to my stack of books. Not sure when I'll get around to reading them, but I like to store up treasure. Gaiman's website includes a number of essays about writing and literature, and I was particularly interested in his idea that all books are gendered. Some interesting comments in this essay related to the craft of writing.

Teaching, bluestockings, and blogs

I thought I'd quickly clarify how this blog, these posts, and how my shared items below right relate to teaching. The National Council for Teachers of English have established Standards for the Language Arts which detail all the reasons why teaching English is important and how this teaching should be accomplished. In my opinion, underlying all of it though, is a joy in written and spoken communication. A love of books. A love of language. A love of art in whatever form it takes. Sometimes this love takes the form of being prickly about "improper" use of language (is there really such a thing?), as the Grammar Girl feeds indicate. Other times it will take the guise of sharing a book review or a previously unknown author, as my previous post did. Sometimes it shares news about new forms of communication such as wikis and blogs. More than anything, this blog and the feeds are meant to convey the avid and widespread interests a bluestocking or a lover of language should possess.

Colley Cibber

I've had more fun in the last week learning about a Glorious Revolution playwright I knew nothing about. Colley Cibber was an actor, manager of the Drury Lane theatre, and playwright, writing plays of his own and adapting others. His version of Shakespeare's Richard III was the definitive version of the play and the most performed Shakespeare play throughout the 1800s, so much so that people objected to the original version... preferring Cibber's "acting version" instead. Lawrence Olivier even included some of Cibber's lines in the classic movie version of Richard III. Cibber is especially known for his autobiography, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian, which set off many of the satirists of the time because of his braggadocio. It's a fascinating book, filled with stories and gossip about all the actors of the time. Alexander Pope was driven mad by Cibber's vanity and was furious that Cibber was named Poet Laureate in 1730, making him King of the Dunces in his Dunciad. Right now we've been reading Love's Last Shift, his first play which was immensely popular, being performed over 80 times. Vanbrugh wrote a sequel to it which we're also reading, The Relapse. A couple of years ago someone combined the two plays in a performance in San Francisco... called Restoration Comedy. Colley Cibber's real strength was not so much in his acting or his writing, but in his great sensitivity to the audience. He was aware of how theatre was an exchange between actor and audience and was able to recognize moods and trends and adjust for it. Increasingly during this time the theatre included music and dance as a nod to the growing popularity of opera; the more elaborate costumes, props, and sets of the time reflected the influence of French spectacle on English theatre as well.

Vitus

I wanted to mention a terrific movie I saw the other day. Vitus is a subtitled Austrian (I think) film about a child prodigy, and is a great glimpse of childhood talent, parents who confuse the boundaries between child and self, and normal adolescence. I wouldn't mind owning a copy of this movie.
Last night we watched The Valet, another subtitled film (original in French). Very entertaining, and it was remarkable how the same types of cuckolding schemes that I'm reading about in my English Restoration Drama class are still being used as entertainment now. I'd recommend seeing this one also, although I don't anticipate adding it to our library.
We've also just received a copy of Transformers in the mail from Blockbuster; I don't anticipate either giving a review or recommending it, but our guildmates have recommended it highly... there's no accounting for taste, is there?

What's Bred in the Bone

I've just finished reading a terrific book by Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone. He's a Canadian author who has written three different trilogies, and this particular novel is the middle piece of the trilogies. It's framed by characters from the other 2 books discussing whether or not to continue publication of the autobiography of a mysterious artist/restorer of Renaissance art. The bulk of the novel, though, is the recounting of all the unknown details of this man's life by the Lesser Zadkiel, the gnostic angel of biography, and the daimon who developed his greatness. Lots of references to art, literature, religion, and history, with a focus on the creative process. To the right I've posted a painting by Bronzino that figures largely in the plot. We've been reading this work to see how theories of chaos and complexity might apply to the construction of the novel, but it's a terrific book no matter how you read it. I'm running out to get the other pieces of the trilogy this weekend.

Catching up

To follow up on last semester, my research on macaronic verse and different depictions of Nausicaa ended up evolving into a machinima project that adapts classic literature into short films using video-capture software and MMORPGs (massively-multiplayer-online-role-playing-games). I think I realized that what interested me about the first two topics was how old stuff is used in new ways, and how using old stuff in new ways is subversive to ideas of canon, and how much I really love doing something that tweaks people who can't stand having the canon messed with. So far, it's just the one short film--The Best of All Possible Worlds from Bernstein's version of Voltaire's Candide, using video from World of Warcraft. I'm just learning about copyright protection, and I think I need to write for permission from CBS recordings to be able to post the video on-line. With what I've done so far, for academic purposes and using a CD I had purchased, there's no problem; however, I need to double-check on the recording I used before I make the film even somewhat public. I also am bothered by those two little glitches in the middle and need to find out what is causing them.
In any case, I've submitted my proposal for a master's project that will allow me to create a half-dozen more of these little films. I'm thinking about using excerpts from typical required reading lists for junior and senior high schools--maybe something from Poe or Hawthorne, a poem by Blake or a sonnet by Shakespeare. Some works that are hard for a teenager to relate to. My Mr. Darcy's already aspiring to use his druid's raven form to recreate Poe's Raven; I have my doubts since an animated Simpsons' version already exists.
Here's a link to one of my favorite machinima films, mostly because of the original madrigal music, but also because there are some interesting video effects. Just imagine using some of these talents using great texts.

Back to writing...

Here's a new confession... this lovely blog has been part of a school assignment, which explains the long delay between first and second semester postings. As I understand it, the most effective blogs (read, with the widest and most enthusiastic audience) focus on a narrow range of interest and post regularly. I'm going to try to post more regularly... not, God forbid, to get a wider audience... but in order to become a little more adept at blogs and to see if I can learn to love it.

In the long hiatus between semesters, I read a terrific book about a blogging experience: The Julie/Julia Project. It describes one woman's experience working her way through all 500-odd recipes of Julia Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking over a one-year period, blogging her successes and failures.

Another interesting blogging tidbit you might enjoy: review of an anthology of blogs.

I'll be updating our bedside reading stacks soon, and in the next posting or two I'll let everyone know about my courses this semester.