Despite being named Clives Staples Lewis, he apparently went by Jack. Must be an English thing.
Lewis is a writer who I have gone back to at various times in my life. As a child, naturally, I read the Narnia novels. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe being the first and best loved, of course (it has the most ‘magic,’ you might say – and the description of Lucy’s tea with Mr. Tumnus, with the sardines on buttered toast and a dozen other lush, tasty descriptions of the sorts of traditional English food that an American boy in a naval town had never heard of; still makes my mouth water). Though I gather it has a poor critical reputation, I always loved The Horse and His Boy. It’s a great book for a lonely boy who doesn’t feel quite at place in the world (am I Freudanizing myself? maybe, I don’t know – piss off). Also, the romance in that one is of a perfect level for a child who isn’t quite old enough or is only barely old enough to appreciate the opposite sex (or same sex, depending on orientation).
His science fiction books were never of great interest to me. The Christian apologetics never quite felt natural in Out of the Silent Planet, the only one I read (though as I think about it, I want to read it again, partly to trace its lineage back to A Princess of Mars).
My mother had a boxed set of some of his treatises and explicit apologetics: The Screwtape Letters (which I read several times in junior high), The Great Divorce (which I read once in junior high, but didn’t have the theological background to understand what he was driving at), Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and I think one other…
Later, as an adult, I read A Grief Observed, a naturally heartbreaking but comforting book (I was mourning a love affair, not a death, actually).
Basically, he’s got something for everybody.
You’ll recall that I indulged in reading a bound trade copy of the first seven issues of DC Comics ‘New 52 Batman.’
Well, it quickly became clear that if I wanted to continue the story, I’d either have to wait until next spring, when the next six or seven issues were bound, or catch up by reading the latest issues on my iPad, because comic book stores don’t have space to keep back issues like that.
In any case, the title of this darn thing should have given away what I eventually chose.
The physical technique for reading (scrolling?) through on an iPad took a few moments for me catch on to. But the effect is dwnright cinematic. My two complaints are that if you choose to pull back and view an entire page rather than a single panel, the resolution suffers greatly, particularly when reading the dialogue; and that sometimes, you just need to see a larger image because of how the panels are arranged (smaller panels placed over a larger panel, for example), but it doesn’t always make clear when you should pull back and it gets a little confusing. The latter, though, can be mended by practice on the reader’s part.
When I left off, Batman was looking more than a little battered and he remains that way when issue #8 opens. Which, artistically, is a good thing. One of my complaints was that square jawed men tend to look alike and that the only way I could differentiate Bruce Wayne from the character of a particular politician was by Bruce Wayne’s boyishly tousled hair (and I didn’t like him with boyishly tousled hair; too young and hip when I feel he should be formal and old money styled).
Now Bruce Wayne’s hair is tousled from having been been beat up and battered. He looks appropriately aged and appropriately unique. Not just another squared jawed hero, but a particular one. Of course, that also runs contrary to an earlier criticism, which I implied that I almost wanted the earlier Wayne to be more generically handsome and rich than uniquely something. So I hold two ideas at once? So what? Read Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, ’cause he totally says that’s cool, at least sometimes. Or, at least, he writes about it a lot.
As if taking advantage of the cinematic appearance on the iPad, several action sequences are broken up in that ‘Bourne’ style – with fragments of the body seen, rather than a complete whole. Frankly, that style works a whole lot better in a comic than in a movie. Assuming the comic pulls back to show the whole every so often. Christopher Nolan’s first two Batman movies suffered from incomprehensible action sequences on account of never pulling the camera back to give the viewer an idea of geography – of where characters were situated in relation to each other.
#8 comes dangerously close to the error of making what had been a dangerous, nearly unstoppable villain before (in this case, a sort of owl ninja – which is a lot more impressive than it sounds) into something a little more manageable. In the first seven issues, Batman struggles to fight even a single one of them. Now, he’s fighting a bunch of them and having too easy (though still a difficult) time of it (particularly as he’s still hurt).
So, I read this fun little piece about box sets by Steve Donoghue in Open Letters Monthly, but rather than reveling in the potential playfulness of box sets and the implied seriousness of box sets, I wondered ‘whither box sets?’
It’s no surprise that of the six boxed sets featured over there, four are of science fiction or fantasy series.
After all, the last boxed set I purchased was of books seven through nine of the the Wheel of Time series.
With the rise of e-books, do they make much sense?
Or perhaps they do.
Boxed sets of music are generally of higher quality musicians (a lot more Miles Davis and Led Zeppelin than Backstreet Boys and Justin Bieber), but what if that is because fans of (say) Sonny Rollins are more likely to feel attached to the physical object of the CD or LP and more likely to desire it.
Similarly, science fiction and fantasy readers tend to be obsessive and completist types. Might’n we be tending that way, too?
But, of course, all that goes back to the issue of books becoming less items of mass consumption than something for rarefied and (generally) older collectors. Like fans of jazz. Jazz hasn’t been truly popular since the sixties (I once read an article that blamed Dave Brubeck’s rarefied style for helping establish jazz as arty and intellectual and laying the seeds for it’s decline as part of the vocabulary of popular music).
I couldn’t help it. I donated $50 to the Pacifica Radio Archives.
They are trying to digitize all the old reel to reel and cassette tapes before the disintegrate.
They were playing clips of Ray Bradbury speeches and interviews. It was kind of a science fiction hour, and one of the hosts talked about the tape of an interview he did with A.E. Van Vogt (not so long ago, I tracked down a copy of his Weapon Shops of Isher, having read as a teenager a short story that was actually an excerpt from it).
So, I had to do my part to preserve those records.
I always get the urge to walk inside when I pass by a comic book store, but I’m frankly intimidated. I haven’t even remotely kept up in, quite literally, decades (not since I used to buy comics at the 7-11 style convenience store near our home in Norfolk, Virginia when I was a kid).
But I read about DC Comics relaunch, The New 52, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to start fresh and maybe keep up with a series.
There’s a comic store near my office, and I was in a frustrated kind of mood. It was actually about money troubles, which makes purchasing comic books sound counter-productive, but I needed the distraction and, oddly enough, doing this would, I felt, give me a certain feeling of accomplishment.
Because the various series have, nonetheless, been out for a while, I’m like 13 issues behind, so I went for one of the bound collections containing the first six to seven issues.
I told me story, in brief, to the owner and asked for his help and recommendation.
Firstly, he told me I’d be better off buying one of the bound collections, because he was unlikely to have the first thirteen issues of any of the series in stock.
He himself particularly enjoyed Batman, Batman & Robin (there are, something like three of four New 52 Batman series, including the original ‘DC’ of ‘DC Comics’ – Detective Comics), Wonder Woman, and Swamp Thing.
I’d rather had it in my head, as a sort of token nod to history, to get either Detective Comics or Action Comics (which is Superman), but I settled for the owner’s advice and got Batman.
Batman is still friends with Robin. And Actually, several former ‘Robins’ have advanced on (one becoming Darkwing and another becoming Red Robin; the current Robin in this series being uncomfortably young looking for a reader approaching early middle age who has concerns about child endangerment). This was a little worrying, not being a fan of the whole concept of the Robin, but it worked okay here, not in the least because none of the current or former Robins were major players (though the oldest former Robin and current Darkwing looks to maybe be a bigger player in future issues).
The artwork was generally very good, though Bruce Wayne and a mayoral candidate named Lincoln looked entirely too much alike (strong jawed, broad shouldered white men; the only way I could be sure is that Lincoln brill creams his locks while Bruce Wayne sports a disconcerting looking, mussy, curly, bedhead thing). The fight scenes were well done and walked carefully that fine line between the Batman who is just a really fit guy in a black and grey suit and Batman who something more, who is, well, a superhero. Good work on closeups of the face and using those to advance the emotional core of the story and to dramatize the inner life of the characters.
They build this new mythology about the ‘Council of Owls’ well (though the whole ‘owls eat bats’ thing is a bit of stretch for me) and I’m looking forward to reading further issues.
And I think I’m going to start reading one other – maybe Aquaman. Or Action Comics. I’ll see what happens when it happens.
the coffee philosopher 