BLOG BACKLOG: UPDATES

Afraid my productivity has slipped a bit of late. Not sure if it's work-related or just getting old. Current status of projects:

Still working through Schulenberg's The Keyboard Music of J.S. Bach a few pieces at a time. Today I listened to a little trio of minuets (BWV 841-843) Bach seems to have used pedagogically. About half-way through. The sheer exhaustiveness of it is impressive, and it complements listening quite well, particularly as Schulenberg doesn't address the listening experience as much as editorial, manuscript and musicological issues behind the song.

Also about halfway through the complete Kinder- und Hausmärchen of the Grimm Bros, which is about as peculiar as you might expect. Unfortunately that's about the only language work I've got at the moment, although I watched a French film pretty much every night in January.

 

THE COLOR OF MAGIC

Took a short break from Marjorie Garber's splendiferous Shakespeare After All to read Terry Pratchett's The Color of Magic. Essentially a spoof of the fantasy genre, The Color of Magic details the escapades of wizard-college-dropout Rincewind and his four-eyed companion Twoflower (the first tourist on Discworld), along with the man-eating Luggage and an ensemble of other equally bizarre characters.

Pratchett's writing drips with personality and periodically manages a genuine joke, but far and away the best part of the book is not the writing itself but the subject. The Discworld, it's zany cosmology, intricate but inconsistent, irrational but highly logical, is incredibly imaginative and yet uncannily familiar. Pratchett revels in the act of world-building with the same gleeful animation of a child constructing a universe out of building blocks, and it shows. Imagine a more spectacular, if less profound, Bill Watterson working exclusively in the domain of fantasy/sci-fi parody. Various mythological tropes and satires of our own world mingle and cause a chain reaction.

Prachett does slip into rather unoriginal parody on occasion, and the writing has (more than) the occasional hiccup. But in Discworld, that hardly seems to matter.