Austen powers

I recently gobbled up Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede’s Sorcery and Cecelia, a delightful little trifle that’s what might have resulted if Jane Austen had learned to write at Hogwart’s School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. The novel’s subtitle is "or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country," and that kinda gives you a sense of the playful tone of the book, which takes the form of a series of letters between two cousins over the course of the London "season" in 1817. Kate has been swept off to the city for all the society doings -- the balls and dances and comings-out of respectable young ladies -- while Cecelia is stuck back home in Essex, but even though their only contact is via postal mail, which keeps each of them days behind the other’s news, they still manage to jointly fly headlong into social catastrophe, maneuver their aristocratic betters in a tea-party of a chess game to resolve the disaster, pick up some rudiments of proper magic (such as how to use charm bags to ward off evil spells), and of course fall in love with dashing and fascinating young gentlemen along the way. The whole thing is wonderfully clever, sophisticated fun (even if it is rather mysteriously labeled "young adult fiction"), and I’m looking forward to reading the sequel, The Grand Tour: Being a Revelation of Matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, Including Extracts from the Intimate Diary of a Noblewoman and the Sworn Testimony of a Lady of Quality. The sublime wit and supremely understated snark implied by the subtitle alone tickles me something awful.

Sorcery and Cecelia is emblematic of a certain impishness in geek culture: a willingness to combine things we love in unexpected ways. And it’s not just books I’m talking about: it’s everything from self-described "brick artist" Nathan Sawaya’s life-size sculpture of Han Solo in carbonite made out of Legos to all the many dioramas mounted in Peeps -- those disgusting blobs of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup some people consider confections -- commemorating such things as The Lord of the Rings. It indicates a certain instinctive urge on the part of creative geeks to not only create but to comment on the pop-culture universe out of which the new material springs. Fine art and high culture have always engaged in that kind of commentary about the fine art and high culture that has preceded it, but what geeks are doing suggests that "low" art -- or at least some "low" art -- is worth exploring and re-exploring, too.