- The magic circle jenny davidson full#
- The magic circle jenny davidson tv#
- The magic circle jenny davidson windows#
The magic circle jenny davidson tv#
Today, to a generation of readers who barely watch TV on ‘channels’ and don’t really know what a ‘dead’ one would look like, the metaphor will be nearly inscrutable. The passage of time has raised questions, however. Another opening line from near-future speculative fiction is that of William Gibson’s debut novel Neuromancer: ‘The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.’ The startling metaphor seemed to speak with remarkable directness to a world in which new forms of media and mediation had come to define human consciousness. One example: the opening sentence of Orwell’s 1984: ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ The sentence is initially unassuming, simply descriptive, but in the startling final detail Orwell achieves estrangement, establishing the alternate nature of the novel’s historical reality with economy and force. Sometimes that invitation is so powerful that the sentence itself takes on a life of its own. The first sentence of any novel works as an invitation into a new world. Also from Gibbon’s memoirs: ‘It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.’ The precision of the place and time setting, the startling contrast effected by the juxtaposition of barefooted friars and the pagan temple, the fact that there is an exterior soundscape as well as an internal thoughtscape, the way the sentence builds to the magnitude of the project to come – all work to make the sentence great. The aphoristic parallelism in that lovely sentence does some work of emotional self-protection. ‘I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son,’ Gibbon wrote. But his spendthrift father had depleted the family’s resources so much that he told Gibbon not to.
As a young man, Gibbon fell in love and asked permission of his father to marry. The sentences of Gibbon that I love most come from his memoirs, which exist in a host of drafts braided together for publication after his death. The first sentence of any novel works as an invitation into a new world.Edward Gibbon is one of 18 th century Britain’s other great prose stylists. It is propelled forward by the momentum of clauses piling on top of one another. The sentence is elevated in its diction, but it is also motivated by an ironic sense of the vanity of human wishes. When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation. We have to train ourselves to read complex sentences like this one, but if it’s read properly out loud by an actor or someone else who understands the way the subordination of clauses works, it may well be taken in more easily through the ear: Here’s an elaborate, Latinate favourite, from Samuel Johnson’s preface to his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). A sentence must have a certain distinction of style – the words come in an order that couldn’t have been assembled by any other writer.
A great sentence compels you to rehearse it again in your mind’s ear, and then again later on.
It is a novel for the world of Google Glass, and should be read whether or not the world of Google Glass turns out to be our world.A great sentence makes you want to chew it over slowly in your mouth the first time you read it. The book gestures at being one of those in which real life gives way to the fantastic, but ends up insisting (correctly, I think!) that when the fantastic intrudes into ordinary life, it does not replace ordinary life but rather overlays it - so that one can have the most heightened and extrawordly experience possible, and then go home, with the smell of it still on you, and check your e-mail and brush your teeth. It reads strangely at first but makes sense once you get used to it.
A lot of the dialogue is in an interestingly distant Delmore Schwartz register.
The magic circle jenny davidson windows#
“Text” here means books, as you’d expect, but also text-as-in-texting and chat windows and games.
The magic circle jenny davidson full#
Strange and kind of great new novel by Jenny Davidson (who, for full information’s sake, is someone I’ve known on and off since college) about young intellectuals who believe in the power of text more than is perhaps good for them.
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