Word: magics
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...Games in the stadium at Olympia by U.S. silver medallist Adam Nelson on Wednesday. The fact that he'd just suffered a heartbreaking loss of the gold medal to Ukrainian Yuriy Bilonog in the finals seconds did nothing to dim his enthusiasm for an event whose venue captured the magic of the Athens Olympiad. And it was shared by competitors, coaches and spectators...
...during a year she spent teaching English in Bilbao, Spain. "I had a kind of waking dream," Clarke remembers, "about a man in 18th century clothes in a place rather like Venice, talking to some English tourists. And I felt strongly that he had some sort of magical background--he'd been dabbling in magic, and something had gone badly wrong." The man would eventually become Jonathan Strange, but her sorcerer's apprenticeship was a long one: it took Clarke more than 10 years to finish the book...
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is set in an alternative version of early 19th century England, one in which magic is real but on the wane, to the point that there are only two practicing sorcerers left in England. The pair are a pleasing study in contrasts: Mr. Norrell is exceptionally learned but shy and fussy. "He is," a character remarks, "at one and the same time, the most remarkable man of the age and the most tedious." Strange is charming, young, fashionable and romantic. Clarke could have called the book Sense and Sensibility if the title weren't already taken...
Clarke is an extremely funny writer, which is rare in fantasy--Rowling is sometimes goofy, but Clarke is genuinely witty. But what really sets Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell apart is its treatment of magic. Clarke's magic is a melancholy, macabre thing, confabulated out of snow and rain and mirrors and described with absolute realism; it's even documented with faux-scholarly footnotes. When spells are cast (and they frequently are--Clarke isn't one of those stingy fantasists who doles out, say, one spell every hundred pages), they come with consequences of both the intended and the unintended varieties...
...football and about Africa," says the cartoon's creator, Pierre Sauvalie. "Africa needs to show its stories and one of the best ways is through cartoons. Their appeal is universal." When you think about the $75 billion global animation industry, what comes to mind is the stunning computer-graphic magic of Pixar or the irony-laced wit of The Simpsons, not an obscure little outfit in sub-Saharan Africa. But Pictoon - a cartoon company formed in 1998 by Sauvalie, a French-Cameroonian graduate of the renowned Les Gobelins animation school in Paris, and Senegalese businesswoman Aida Ndiaye, once the local...