Of Elsewhere
Very late update: the Diana Wynne Jones essay I wanted to share is long and abstruse and editing it to be even plausibly a blog post got very frustrating. Instead, I will give you a tldr: In the first three poems, Jones charts out something like Western history’s ways of thinking about truth (absolutist & […]
Farah Mendlesohn writes playfully in Diana Wynne Jones: Children’s Literature and the Fantastic Tradition that “it is just possible that for Jones’s complexity to be appreciated, first she had to grow her critics.” In these posts, I’ll jump off from the chapter of this book devoted to “The True State of Affairs.” My approach to […]
I miss this blog. I have, as you have seen, found it hard to keep up my momentum, because I’m usually working on so many projects at once: ever-shifting pieces of writing and art, of course, and also a newcomer pursuit: coding. Yes, I’ve taught myself to program using mostly free resources and I am […]
Today was a good day—beloved visitor in town, goal accomplished, meeting with friends in ten minutes—but I didn’t get a chance to write much of a blog post, so this will have to do. The accomplishment is the relevant part of all this: I finished my (theoretically eventually) publishable Diana Wynne Jones essay, minus some […]
Today I bring tidings of two minor projects I’m working on as a result of the Grad School Bug: reading Elizabeth Ammons’ Brave New Words, a call for optimistic, inclusive, and activist teaching in the humanities, and writing an essay exploring the concepts of truth Diana Wynne Jones develops in four pivotal poems in her […]
At some point I wrote that I preferred the literature of conviction to the literature of perception despite lacking all conviction myself. I speculated that this was because I took malicious pleasure in all the scenes where people prove how right they are and how absurd their opponents are (a pleasure that in me has […]
As you may know, Brandon Sanderson (author of the Mistborn series, among other great work)writes about hard magic, the kind with rules, and soft magic, the kind that’s unpredictable and mysterious. He prefers to write the former and argues that problems should only be solved by magic when the magic makes sense, so that the author […]
People love children’s and young adult fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones because her novels are funny, action-packed, full of twists and turns, clever, and skillful in their manipulation of and commentary on fantastic and mythological tropes. Some that I only care about only a little (I don’t require lots of action, and clever or “clever” reworkings […]
Of Elsewhere 