📚 Over the summer, I had a strange epiphany that my new book was by an author my son had also read. I asked him if he had read anything by Katherine Rundell, and sure enough, he came back with his copy of Imaginary Creatures. I was reading her nonfiction book Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.
On Monday, we both had the opportunity to hear Katherine Rundell speak at the St. Louis County Library, and it was the best kind of author event there is. I think its safe to say that we both left as bigger fans than we were when we went in.
Rundell also told a remarkable story about the beginning of her time at All Souls College, Oxford:
When I was 21, I was elected a fellow at All Souls College in Oxford. I was about to begin a doctoral thesis on John Donne and so I was assigned, as an academic mentor, the renowned scholar of the Renaissance, Colin Burrow. He asked me what I planned to do with my years in college. I said that I wanted to write for children, in a dream world. I wanted to write books that offered children vivid realms, and large ideas, and new jokes – something like Philip Pullman or Diana Wynne Jones. And he said: “Diana Wynne Jones is my mother.” I had never been so joyfully startled in my life. (”‘A true original’: Katherine Rundell on the genius of Diana Wynne Jones,”The Guardian)
🎹 Speaking of patient trust: After an 11-year wait, it’s finally time to trot out English composer Herbert Howells’s “Sarabande for the 12th day of any October” from his Partita (1971). Yes, October 12 falls on a Sunday this year. That won't happen again until 2031.
I first noticed this piece in 2008, and I think it's safe to say that you can trust me to track when these Sundays come up.
Though there are moments that sound autumnally elegiac, the piece commemorates the birthday of Howells's idol Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the work's composition would have been in time for the 100th anniversary of Vaughan Williams's birth.
Until next week, -David
p.s. Shout out to Mario who recommended Super-Infinite to me in the Duke University Bookstore this summer.
About David Sinden
I’m David Sinden, and my whole professional life has involved playing mechanical action organs in Episcopal Churches in states that border Kentucky.
