Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague is a 2001 international bestselling historical fiction novel by Geraldine Brooks. It was chosen as both a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book. The novel is based on the history of the small Derbyshire village of Eyam that, when beset upon by the plague in 1666, quarantines itself in order to prevent the disease from spreading further. The Plague that hit Eyam is historically similar to the Black Plague in Europe.
The law is a symbolic construction and therefore rests on a variety of undertakings. What gives law its meaning is, for some, ideology, and for others, the welfare of the majority. However, what is manifest is a conception of the law as a material structure that carries symbols of everyday life. The analyses that are made in the law and semiotics movements show that the law's symbolism cannot be understood by reference only to itself, a strictly 'legal' meaning. It is a symbol that conveys life, a symbol that in itself is contaminated with life, politics, morality and so on.
. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change.
"Homeless Flea" by Steve Talmy is a story about a hapless flea that gets shaken off by its host and has to find a new dog to carry it around. In the process, it finds itself on the wrong animals and has to guess where it is.
Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making
Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) was one of jazz's greatest and most enigmatic figures. As a composer, pianist, and bandleader, Monk both extended the piano tradition known as Harlem stride and was at the center of modern jazz's creation during the 1940s, setting the stage for the experimentalism of the 1960s and '70s. This pathbreaking study combines cultural theory, biography, and musical analysis to shed new light on Monk's music and on the jazz canon itself. Gabriel Solis shows how the work of this stubbornly nonconformist composer emerged from the jazz world's fringes to find a central place in its canon.
