A Single Layer

It was just after I finished my master's degree at the University of Edinburgh that I was introduced to  North and South , having raided the Rancho Mirage Public Library's impressive collection of BBC adaptations as thoroughly as possible. My flatmate Jess had burned me a copy of the DVD before I left Scotland, but there was something wrong with it, and it wouldn't play. Which was just as well, pirating being illegal and all. Elizabeth Gaskell's masterpiece, North and South , should never be read before Pride and Prejudice . I would like to get the comparison between these two novels out of the way as quickly as possible, because it's probably the first conversation anyone has about North and South . The premise of both is more or less the same - a man and a woman from two different walks of life meet; he finds himself unwillingly attracted to her and addresses a hasty proposal to her immediate and fiery rebuff; circumstances follow which make her regret her decisio...

"But indeed your children are not likely to trouble you about the meaning. They find what they are capable of finding, and more would be too much. For my part. I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five. "A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory. He must be an artist indeed who can, in any mode, produce a strict allegory that is not a weariness to the spirit . . ." "The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended. "I will go farther. The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscious, is - not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself." "One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is lay...

Still reading The Princess and the Goblin (some introductory reader questions to follow), but I came across a collection of welded sculptures from found objects by Brian Mock over at This Is Colossal . This one reminded me of the upcoming The Book of the Dun Cow , by Walter Wangerin, Jr. Wonder why...

I have been thinking lately that while cynicism comes very quickly to me, it's not very natural. That is, it's become natural, but I'm uncomfortable with it, and especially uncomfortable with its quickness. I don't like my cynical self. I don't remember it being with me always, and I'd like to return to what once was. I think that's what Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald were always pressing toward in their insistence that childlike innocence was something to prize. It always seemed to me such an odd concept - childlike innocence - as I've never met a child who had any less of the beast in them than I do now. But a lack of cynicism, a generosity of spirit is more akin to children than to adults. It certainly is in my own history, at least. I want to return to that. But I find that becoming like a child, which is actually a divine command, is painfully hard to do. One of the things I'm hoping for, I think, in the children's book group I'm rea...