Nick Milne is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Ottawa. In his spare time he writes gory musicals and walks around cities.
His old blog may be found here, his Facebook profile here, and e-mails may be directed to this address.
Samuel Johnson on Blogging
"To fix the thoughts by writing, and subject them to frequent examinations and reviews, is the best method of enabling the mind to detect its own sophisms, and keep it on guard against the fallacies which it practises on others: in conversation we naturally diffuse our thoughts, and in writing we contract them; method is the excellence of writing, and unconstraint the grace of conversation."
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has sold over 50,000 copies in the UK and 600,000 in the US since publication in April, sparking a new trend for what Quirk has dubbed the “literary monster mash-up”. Other publishers have rushed to jump onto the bandwagon, and this autumn will see publication of both Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter – subtitled She Loved Her Country; She Hated Demons – and I am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas. “Marley was dead. Again,” says its publisher Orion. “Will the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future be able to stop the world from drowning under a top-hatted and crinolined zombie horde?”
Seth Grahame-Smith, meanwhile, the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, signed a deal worth a rumoured $500,000 (£300,000) in April with Grand Central to write the life of Abraham Lincoln, vampire hunter.
Intriguing. I also note with a certain amount of interest that they’re purposefully releasing Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters on the same day as Dan Brown’s latest novel is set to come out. Apparently the people at Quirk Books are all about choosing their battles.
UPDATE: Thanks to the invaluable Craig Burrell, here’s a look at the official trailer for the book – an apparent novelty in its own right:
I had intended to do a somewhat lengthier introductory post about the notorious theological fuss-causer William Law (1686 – 1761) before getting into his material, but I’m too tired to do such a post at the present moment but not so tired that I can’t happily post a most excellent paragraph.
Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729), a difficult and convicting masterpiece, places a great deal of emphasis on how many of the things condemned both in the Gospels and in the Serious Call – things like luxury, or leisure, or public displays of piety – are not necessarily sinful in themselves, but are rather the consequences of things that are. There are implications to everything, he argues, and one may infer much about the cause from what is seen and known of the effect.
It is just so, for him, on the subject of foppery.
All the world agree in condemning remarkable fops. Now what is the reason of it? Is it because there is anything sinful in their particular dress, or affected manners? No: but it is because all people know, that it shows the state of a man’s mind, and that it is impossible for so ridiculous an outside to have any thing wise or reasonable, or good within. And indeed to suppose a fop of great piety, is as much nonsense, as to suppose a coward of great courage.
The old warning about books and covers carries no weight whatever with William Law. Well, that’s a glib assessment; it’s actually an interesting question. The alternative to his take on the matter is that the person is only pretending. That is, he’s not really a foppish dandy, but only affects to be one to disguise his true nature, whatever that is. It would thus be unfair to say that the foppishness of his character was a reliable indicator of the moral trouble wihtin. Maybe so, but even that has implications: “He’s lying about who he is, but he’s a model of Christian piety and truth after all.”
More later, if I remember to. Law is a subject well worth deeper insight.
For the cover of their Spring & Summer FUN Guide (a “Toronto Parks, Forestry and Recreation booklet filled with programs and services for people of all ages” distributed to “community centres, civic centres, libraries and City Hall after February 22, 2009″), the City of Toronto digitally altered a stock photo of a family to replace the tan-skinned father with a darker-skinned one, according to the National Post.
The original photograph, showing four people of radically different genders and ages, was apparently not diverse enough. They were also unacceptably comfortable in each other’s presence, so a degree of painful and obvious awkwardness was added by making the image manipulation stick out like the blazing of the sun at noonday.
Reading some of the comments on this recent magazine-based malfeasance, as reported initially at the National Post’s newsblog, is a frustrating and weird experience. User “myuill” is unimpressed:
And so why is this a story? The city Photoshopped someone into a marketing piece … cool. When the National Post stops using electronic tools to increase saturation, improve contrast, sharpen, denoise, bring out hilights and lighten dark tones in NEWS stories let us know.
Otherwise this is hardly newsworthy.
The writer’s committment to the ideals being upheld by the shoddily-manufactured propaganda of the magazine cover is breathtaking and worthy of applause. Only a race ideologue could refuse to see the absurdity of the decision that was made and the manner in which it was carried out.
How? The question might reasonably be asked. Strange as it sounds, though, I have no doubt whatever that they’ll be able to pull it off to their own satisfaction, and that it will likely prove to be a highly entertaining work. It’s a form plainly choking with possibilities, after all. Vernunft looks for the day in which Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is “recast as a buddy comedy,” but what else may be done?
- Foucault’s Discipline & Punish as a sarcastic webcomic?
- Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France as a mime performance?
- Giambattista Vico’s New Science as a series of t-shirts?
I had intended to write about mash-ups a lot more on this blog, back in the day, but I eventually gave up on it because I lack the vocabulary to discuss music of this sort in the technical terms it deserves. I still love the form, though, even if I can’t really describe it as well as I had hoped.
What follows stands very near the top of the field when it comes to such things. If the recordings had simply preserved the mixed and rearranged sounds for the listener the achievement would have been notable enough, but the retention of the original video sources for what has been mixed together serves only to underscore the amount of delicate work involved in producing something like this.
Simply amazing:
And this one eventually achieves a sort of haunting urban beauty (it’s worth sticking it out to the end, to be sure):
Both are by the same artist (or, I guess, the same collator of the work of other artists), and there are several more such productions from him, all found easily enough. The general principle is plain: various clips with congenial rhythms and sounds, though not directly related, can be mixed together to create something new and cohesive.
All of this is very promising from a cultural standpoint. Though we live in an age in denial of its roots and at war with all that has gone before it, we nevertheless get moments wherein a striving for order reveals a higher and perhaps unexpected unity. There may be a lot of shapelessness about, but people still want shapes and are willing to do the work it takes to uncover them. Indeed, the long nightmare reign of deconstruction may have finally run its course and fulfilled its purpose: the established forms having been pulled down and destroyed, the way is now clear for them to be rediscovered.
Whether it’s “good music,” properly considered, is more than I can say with certainty. I certainly believe that it is, however much it may differ from the highest productions of the human intellect. Music can be said to originate from the low and common instincts of the average person, manifesting itself in simple rhythms and folk songs and ryhmes. A lot of that sort of music is excellent, but we don’t have to do just that. If we can convene an orchestra and write a symphony and call down the thunder of heaven, even if only for a few minutes, surely it is worth doing – a moral good.
How music of the sort in the videos above compares to such holy works is a matter of some contention. I tend to agree that meticulous orchestral work is simply better, in whatever way, than the productions of even the best bands. It’s a matter of essential hierarchy rather than just differing quality on the same level. It’s possible to take this too far, of course, and allow it to fester into a disdain for anything that isn’t orchestral and symphonic. I was once horrified to read comments from an author and cleric whom I respect and admire to the effect that he had no regard whatever for the genre he called “rock music,” that he had never in his entire life listened to a rock song in full, and that he felt it likely that he would suffer some health-related disaster if ever he made the attempt – the music would poison him in some way or give him a heart attack, I guess. This was written last year by a man of quite profound intellect. I simply can’t understand it.
Alright, so I kind of fell down on the job over the last couple of days. I had lots of stuff I had intended to post, and the usual, but then I got busy and lazy in equal measure – never a good combination.
So I’ll post some stuff on the weekend to make up for it.
For example, an enterprising artist has produced redesigns for the covers of the Harry Potter series to render them as though they were old school paperbacks. Apparently such redesigns are common across all sorts of media (I’ve even seen it done for classic videogames, if you can imagine such a thing), but it’s rare to see them coupled with such effective original art as well. It turned out pretty well (click to enlarge):
Will Clark is set to direct “Pride and Predator,” which veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about.
…has just become apparent. Why am I not reading this right now? What am I doing with my life? There’s no more time for anything but this:
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.
