Literature: June 2003 Archive Page

"We need to take a minute to consider how anomalous a genre weepies really are. Most movies—especially American movies—are essentially dramatic, as opposed to lyrical (concerned with mood or the inner self) or conceptual (concerned with ideas). The weepie's the exception. It creates an interesting aesthetic problem for the people making it: How do you explore characters, in an essentially visual medium, who are not constantly externalizing their conflicts in action? Babette's Feast takes that problem and turns it right around, making it work for the movie." Jim Shepard --Babette's Feast and the Reclamation of Melodrama (Believer Magazine)

"Rowling's ability to stop the Potter pretenders is largely a function of the new regime of international copyright. Until recently, countries varied considerably in how they protected literary works, especially works from abroad. The United States, for instance, has a long history of providing less protection than the Europeans. Benjamin Franklin was a kind of pirate: He did good business as a printer of unlicensed English writing. In the 19th century, the United States generally refused to recognize foreign copyrights, allowing American readers to get the latest Dickens and Doyle cheaply. And the borrowing of characters itself has a longer tradition." Tim Wu --Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright: Should Tanya Grotter and the Magic Double Bass be banned? (Slate)

"Emerson was himself a sort of group blogger in The Dial, a magazine he founded with Margaret Fuller in 1840. He designed it as a compendium of the 'good fanatics,' like Thoreau, Alcott and Channing in his Concord circle. 'I would not have it too purely literary,' he wrote to Fuller, venting a blogger's ambition. 'I wish we might make a Journal so broad and great in its survey that it should lead the opinion of this generation on every interest and read the law on property, government, education, as well as on art, letters, and religion.'" Christopher Lydon explains why American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) is "a man for bloggers to embrace". --A God for Bloggers (Lydon)

"When I was studying at York, reading the plays was part of the curriculum, and then, in the summer, there were a selection of the plays performed in the street (perhaps 15?), conveniently available to watch. Now that I am at Toronto, there are still medieval play recreations regularly available to watch, since the PLS is alive and well. The scholarly study of medieval drama has improved substantially since those early days, as Prof. Klausner made particularly clear in the Vagantes talk." S. Worthen --York Mystery Plays: Update (Owlfish)

Owlfish's blog post is a good overview of what's happening in medieval drama re-creation these days. I haven't exactly been following the field since I left Toronto, though I do tend to my PSim website, and occasionally field e-mails from students and researchers.

Margaret Atwood recalls encountering Animal Farm" as a girl: "I mistook it for a book about talking animals, sort of like Wind in the Willows. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book - the child's version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was bad but dead.... The whole experience was deeply disturbing to me, but I am forever grateful to Orwell for alerting me early to the danger flags I've tried to watch out for since. " Margaret Atwood --Orwell and Me (Guardian)

The Corpus Christi Play was an annual outdoor event, involving hundreds of actors; it was already a long-established tradition by the end of the 14th century, and continued until suppressed by the Protestant Reformation in the late 16th century." --Medieval 'Body of Christ' PlayLiteracy Weblog)

Today is the day the medieval church would have celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi ("Body of Christ). This website is one of my oldest online resources. I created the first version in C++, and it ran only on Windows. When I demonstrated it as a poster paper at my very first academic conference (almost 10 years ago), I learned just how many medievalists are also mac users. That led me to learn Java.

"While I'm an admirer of Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin, I don't see either of them shooting for literary effects -- rather, they excel by exploring and extending the possibilities of IF. I think my list of 'favorite IF authors' would probably not contain any surprises, but I think Graham Nelson's Jigsaw probably deserves a mention for the clever treatment of the romance, and the way the game manages to bring so many nations and eras to life." Dennis G. Jerz --Dennis Jerz Interview (Interactive Fiction) (Avventure Testuali)

A few months ago, I fired off answers to a few e-mail questions submitted to me by Francesco Cordella, editor of a delightful bilingual interactive fiction fan site. He's now posted the exchange on his site.