September 10, 2012
The best part of finishing a Dickens’ novel – courtesy, perhaps, of the good people at librivox.org - is that one can find out what Chesterton had to say about it.
A shame they never met; it would have been quite possible, if Dickens had lived to a good old age rather than dying in 1870 at 58.
August 11, 2012
The names of the 4 children were surely not chosen at random. Peter is a natural choice for the chief vicegerent of Aslan/Christ, as is Lucy for the youngest child who yet enlightens the others about the existence of Narnia (before the 16th century reform of the calendar, St Lucy’s day was the shortest, while her name, of course, means light).
Why is Susan chosen for the one who is eventually excluded? Because Susannah was excluded from the Protestant canon? I wouldn’t put it past him!
That leaves Edmund. I have no clear idea why this was chosen. To English ears the name has a chivalric sound. Possibly it was intended to suggest the insufficiency of natural virtue.
August 2, 2012
In my quest for intellectually unchallenging reading matter, suitable for flushing one’s brain after a whole day’s thinking, I recently came upon Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels. For a science fiction novel (or probably for any modern novel), there was pleasingly little of sex and violence to mar my enjoyment of the plots, even though, ideologically, the books are of cause utterly unsound. I was quite amused by the author’s early 1940s enthusiasm about nuclear energy and faith in sociology. In the story, a central role is played by the science of psychohistory, defined by Wikipedia (is there any pop culture item without a Wikipedia entry?) as “a fictional science i[...] which combines history, sociology, etc., and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people”. The founder of this science uses it to predict with statistical probabilities the course of history and the incidence of crucial crises for a foundation established at the fringe of the galaxy over a course of 1000 years.
A helpful plot device, but somewhat risible, I thought. Something that people are actually trying to develop, according to Nature.
February 10, 2011
Remember the confession survey fabrication?
Here’s another confession-related fabrication in the news.
Really, the only point of reading the papers is to set you off googling and flicking through the blogs to find out what actually happened.
And when you’ve wasted lots of time doing that, you need the Carolina Chocolate Drops to get you back to revising your months-overdue translation. Only you then spend fifteen minutes digging out ms paper to transcribe the tune …
I’ve put Ches Bond back up on the blogroll – he’s been back for ages, I don’t know what took me so long. He writes the kind of stuff I always intended to write, but am, erm, too extremely busy doing really important things to get round to :/
July 7, 2010
April 24, 2010
Berenike-as-she-happens-to-be
Berenike-as-she-could-be-if-she-realised-her-essential-nature
After Virtue (2nd ed, 1985), p52; David Copperfield (many eds), passim
What’s *not* supposed to happen when you mention to a friend that you have come to the sad conclusion that you resemble Dora Spenlow in all her negative aspects, is the friend saying “Yes, it had occurred to me before”. 
Edited: Cut that. Correction.
Berenike-as-she-could-be-if-she-realised-her-essential-nature
January 27, 2010
The Seraphic Scribe’s latest serial novel. Comic genius, imho.
“Jeepers,” said Sister Henrietta a third time. “Are you here?”
“Goodness gracious, no,” I said. “I don’t count. But there are plans afoot to paint my brother James once he and his wife finish their M.Divs. We wanted Freud, but when Freud saw Jamie, he said he’d already painted that face and was bored of it. He did Papa, as you see.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“Papa? Flourishing, I assure you. He was the grey-haired version of Grandpapa at breakfast.”
“Not Edward, Sigmund Freud.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“I must have misheard,” said the powder blue nun in a kindly voice, as if to a frightened child. “This portrait makes Edward look like his face is melting.”
“Well, Freud, you know,” I began, but Sister Henrietta turned on me the resolute look of a squirrel about to attack an acorn.
“Now, M.C., I want to talk to you about your future.”
“Do you, goodness. I thought your lot had given that sort of thing up, ha ha ha.”
“I don’t get you,” said the nun.
“Oh, er, eschatological joke. Sorry.”
“I’m not one for bathroom jokes,” said Sister Henrietta severely. “Especially not when one is considering one’s vocation.”
“Oh, er,” I said. “Vocation. Well, you see. I’ve got one.”
“Oh my child,” shouted Sister Henrietta, throwing up her hands. “I know it. I could sense it in you. As soon as you walked into the breakfast room, I said to myself, There’s our next novice.”
“No, no, no,” I said, alarmed. “No, dash it. I say, No. I mean, I have a vocation to the married life. Got a piece of paper to prove it. Also a wedding ring, as you see. And a husband, somewhere or other. London, probably. Or in the Shires, shooting things.”
All of it is here. (unfortunately the episodes are in reverse order, the first at the bottom).
Ready-to-read books are here (part one features your favourite ex-bloggers Aelianus and Boeciana): suitable for all audiences (ask Cath) but even funnier if you’re a Catholic.
This season’s new book is here. No news yet as to UK distributor
[updated to add:] here’s what Novalis had to say about their trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair:
And our 2010 prospects, notably Dorothy Cummings’ Seraphic Singles: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Single Life (which you’ll be hearing more about in the coming months, so stay tuned) was the talk of numerous publishers we met with.
January 18, 2010
Everything in this post is pasted directly from http://www.alphonsecomic.com/. I’m putting all this up because I want to read this comic, because I think at least two of the people who have been known to read this blog will find it interesting, and because I think it deserves a plug!
Alphonse is the story of eight lives that intersect because of an attempted abortion. Why “attempted?” Because while there are no angels or demons on either side, there is definitely a monster in the middle: Alphonse. Rendered “grotesquely abnormal” by his unwitting mother’s use of controlled substances, he is both sentient and freakishly coordinated. He is also deeply wounded, twisted by fear and rage after the attempt on his life, and bent on revenge.
But violence begets violence. Alphonse is pursued even as he is pursuing, and haunted by his only friend’s insistence that there is another way…
Buy it at indyplanet. Sign up to sponsor part three here.
October 30, 2007
Something Seraphic Single said about Canadian war dead reminded me that my awareness of Canadian soldiers in the First World War can be summarised as: Walter Blythe. And for you chaps out there, that means: Anne of Green Gables’s youngest son.
A Canadian relative of mine sent me the first three Anne books when I was in Primary 5, I think (eight years old? I was young for my year). After tearing through these, Wick Public Library – a fine little Carnegie library with a stuffed crocodile in the hall – provided most of the rest of the series. At some point someone gave me the Emily books. But it was only upon moving to the terrifying metropolis of Dundee at the age of nine that its much bigger (but ugly and crocodile-less) public library offered access to the last Anne book, Rilla of Ingleside. Although I’ve reread the books in my possession many times, I realised upon rereading Rilla last week (Edinburgh Central Library doing service this time – a rather larger Carnegie library, but no crocodiles) that it was probably the first time I’d read it since I was nine.
This may explain why I’d forgotton how thoroughly a World War I novel it is. Lots of bits and bobs from Anne stick in the mind, and I think they’re very good books to read at a formative age. I’ve never forgotten the line when Anne remembers what was said ‘by a very old, very true, very beautiful Book: weeping endureth a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’ Similarly Anne’s attitude to her family: when someone says to her rather sneeringly, ‘I believe you have six children?’, she replies, ‘Seven. Six living.’ But I suspect I’ve forgotten the structures containing such things. Was the weeping over Gilbert’s illness? Who was turning up their nose at large families? I forget.
As a result of such forgetfulness, then, I was surprised that Rilla began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and ended with the return of her sweetheart at the end of the war. Rilla is a unique Anne book – apart from Anne’s being a background character, it is entirely about a small Canadian community’s response to the war. The response is that all the brave young men volunteer to fight for their country (yes, their country; and we may also note that LMM has an entry in the new DNB, so the favour is returned). All the women wish they weren’t going, but would rather die than show anything less than a smiling face to their menfolk. And the local pacifist (who is not a personable example of the genre) ends up being shouted down at a prayer meeting. In case this sounds too paint-by-numbers, it is not: the characters are painted with their usual charm, and the story is of growth in virtue through adversity. The take on the War is very clear, however; there is a good deal of talk about how this is a battle for civilisation, and/or a period of judgement, which must be followed by a better world.
Here the comparison with Mrs Miniver comes in. I know practically nothing about WWI (I wrote a number of essays about its origins; none about the course of the war), but was vaguely surprised to see it presented in these very large-scale moral terms (rather than more simply repelling unjust invasions, etc). Quotations to follow when I update this. In any case, here again we seem to see largely (I think) false hopes that such catastrophe could surely only be followed by improvement. Rilla was published in 1920 (according to the LMM Institute – my ’50s copy said first published 1928, which would have been more interesting, really). I wonder what LMM was thinking? Did she think the world in 1920 showed signs of the right response to its situation? Was it becoming evident that the culture of the 1920s did not meet the moral standards set by the Blythe family? (The Emily books, come to think of it, seem generally untroubled by the passage of time into the ’20s – at least in terms of fashion. Hmm.)
Rilla is also monumentally unfashionable in the episode where Rilla rescues the baby of a recently-dead woman with a feckless absentee husband. Upon taking it home, Gilbert her father insists that if they are going to look after the baby, Rilla (aged 14) must do it herself, as her mother does not have the strengh. And Rilla does; and it is the making of her. It is hard to imagine anyone these days recommending becoming ‘primary carer’ for an infant in one’s teens, even in the context of a large and very supportive family. I’m not sure what I think about this, to be honest. It didn’t trouble me first time round, but I suppose I thought fourteen was impossibly grown-up by then, anyway.
The Anne series is particularly fine because it depicts life after the happy ending. Rilla is a very good end to the series because it opens up the next generation of happy endings; but, as various folk in the book remark, in Anne’s youth (Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908) no-one imagined that their children would be looking for happy endings in the midst of the Great War, or that the ending many would endure would be death in the trenches.
October 26, 2007
I know I said today (well, yesterday), but, er, I trundled home from a post choir practice evening in the pub and, lectores dilecti, you’ll regret it if I try to write about Rilla now. Or at any rate, Seraphic will, who may well be the only one interested!
I was trying to find a picture of the hideous 1950s cover of the edition that I just read (much as I usually like 1950s design, Rilla as Miss 1950s is just WRONG), but Google images has failed me.
In the meantime, look! the whole text is online, courtesy of the same people who put up Mrs Miniver. And so’s millions of stuff by L.M. Montgomery (scroll down through the list)!
EDITED TO ADD: Oh bother, found out that UK copyright is life plus 70 years and LMM died in 1942, which I think means one shouldn’t read freebie reproductions of her work online (at least, so that website seems to think). Go and support your public library!
