Mr Pond in Print

an anti-wednesday post*

Today, I present you with two announcements worthy of anti-wednesday. First, I’m thrilled to give you a trackback to Paradoxes regular catrionmcara’s blog:

Anti-Tales Published!

That’s referring to the book, not the phenomenon. Yes, the book. It is in bookstores and on shelves, including my shelf, and it’s beautiful. Here’s a section from the blurb to entice you:

Although anti-tales abound in contemporary art and popular culture, the term has been used sporadically in scholarship without being developed or defined. While it is clear that the aesthetics of postmodernism have provided fertile creative grounds for this tradition, the anti-tale is not just a postmodern phenomenon; rather, the “postmodern fairy tale” is only part of the picture. Broadly interdisciplinary in scope, this collection of twenty-two essays and artwork explores various manifestations of the anti-tale, from the ancient to the modern including romanticism, realism and surrealism along the way.

One of the twenty-two, I add (smiling modestly and scuffing the toe of my shoe in the dust), was penned by a overly loquacious and needlessly pedantic wee blogger with the nom de plume of Mr Pond.

Secondly, I’m just as delighted to tell you all that an article which found part of its origins on this very blog has just been published in a peer-reviewed, cross-disciplinary journal. In collaboration with my esteemed and eloquent colleague Mike McDuffee, I’m pleased to present:

‘As if, if: Being the sayings of Mr. Pond and Mr. Puddle, a drowning pair without a care.’

[The Atrium, 2:1 (2011).] It’s available at this link. And here’s a quote from an abstract if the title wasn’t enough:

Wonder assails us in a vision of our shattered inheritance and the endless promise of the empty expanse from which words are born, the silence that gestates speech. Suffering wrenches us through its grotesquery, the clamor that silencing words cannot silence, the frenetic waiting on becalmed waters for regenerated winds of change. There is a horror in these words, a haunting sense that a man lost at sea will die of thirst, that the long-awaited daylight is only the prelude to another nightfall.

But there are still the words themselves. And that is reason to hope.

Read and enjoy. And let me know what you think.

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*No, I’m not forgetting our dear Brothers Grimm. But this week, ‘unsettling wonder’ got bank-holidayed. If you’re that upset, you can tide yourself over and read some nice fairy tales here.