now my charms are all overthrown

or, Mr Pond in Print and other stories

My esteemed compatriots in the blogalectic, Jenna St Hilaire and Masha, have each written a striking and eloquent engagement with the other’s view on art and beauty and entertainment. I urge you to read both ‘By Any Other Name’ and ‘Words, words, words’. Shakespeare quotations seem to be in season this week, so I’ve adjusted my title accordingly.

And since their posts compliment each other so well, I’m taking the advantage to give you all a respite from my ideas concerning art and nonbeing, and to fill you in on several happenings.

If you ever wondered what fairy tale scholars do all day—well, I guess this won’t help you that much, but I’ve just had an article published at Enchanted Conversation. It’s called, fittingly enough, ‘Enchanted Conversations: The Reverse Adaptation of Fairy Tales in Online Culture’, and you can read it here. I originally presented it at the Never-Ending Stories children’s literature conference at Ghent University, and a heavily revised and expanded version of it is forthcoming next year in an academic anthology of the same name.

Not only that, but I’m delighted to tell you that Harry Potter for Nerds (Unlocking, 2011) is now available for purchase on Amazon.com (and Amazon.co.uk, for my British readers). It looks like Travis Prinzi has pulled off yet another winner of an anthology. I’ve got a chapter in, called ‘“Just Behind the Veil”: Death in Harry Potter and the Fairy Tales of George MacDonald’. Do pop round to let me know what you think once you’ve read it.

And then, this:

Wolf had heard scary tales about this hill. Stories of blue elf-fires, burning at the mouths of long-abandoned mineshafts and tunnels. Stories of bogeymen and ghosts.

Up on the very top, he had heard there was a road. A road leading nowhere, a road no one used. For if anyone was so bold as to walk along it, especially at night, he’d hear the clamour of hounds and the blowing of horns, the cracking of whips and the rumbling of a cart. And out of the dark would burst the Devil’s own dog pack, dashing beside a black wagon drawn by goats with fiery eyes, crammed full of screaming souls bound for the pits of Hell…

That chilling passage comes from the critically-acclaimed Dark Angels [The Shadow Hunt] (HarperCollins, 2010) by Paradoxes friend and regular Katherine Langrish. She’s just released the book trailer, and rather than embed it here for your viewing pleasure, I’m going to send you all to go watch it at Katherine’s blog, Seven Miles of Steel Thistles. Because if you watch it over there, you might wind up winning three signed copies of the book.

Katherine writes breathtaking and eldritch stories might be impossible to describe without using Lovecraft, Wynne Jones, and Dahl as adjectives. Her deep knowledge of folkloric tradition and oral storytelling combines with historical accuracy to create a rich and enchanting read. Add to that characters that are deeply and sensitively drawn, and—why don’t we just plan a group outing to Waterstone’s or Borders right now and have done? If—as might be the case, airfare proves too expensive at short notice, then we can be comforted that these books are available on Amazon, too.

And now it’s a sunny day in Scotland, so I tarry here no longer. Whatever you read this weekend, read well.

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.