Question: is it too late to dress up as a dufflepud for Halloween?
Sometimes it seems that all around me are dufflepuds–those one-footed, herd-mentality little creatures in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. They’re ruled by a wise magician who was once a star, but they see him as an enemy and throw themselves giddily behind [...]
Archive for October, 2007
A confederacy of dufflepuds
Posted in Fiction, Lewis books on October 31, 2007 | 4 Comments »
Learning from the masters
Posted in Biographies, Lewis books on October 30, 2007 | No Comments »
I’m learning some interesting odds and ends about Lewis and Tolkein. For example, Tolkein didn’t publish that much in his field (philology). Instead of academic writing, he invested in his students. Both Lewis and Tolkein were soldiers. Both men lost their mothers at a young age. Both men were clinical book geeks: for amusement, Tolkein would translate fairy [...]
After becoming
Posted in Biographies on October 23, 2007 | 2 Comments »
I finished Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder. It leaves me feeling sad. Yes, she lived a life admirable in many ways. (I wrote about that here.) She and her husband were a team. She knew how to carve out a life from uncooperative earth, how to sew and can and garden and care for stock. She and [...]
Lord Peter Wimsey
Posted in Fiction on October 15, 2007 | 2 Comments »
I finished Have His Carcase. It’s my first Dorothy Sayers novel, and my first foray into detective fiction since I used to read Mrs. Pollifax in my mother’s Reader’s Digest condensed books. I can say I’ve met Lord Peter Wimsey now. I can also say I’d like to find out more about Sayers.
I enjoyed it. It [...]
Little nuisances
Posted in Life on October 14, 2007 | 1 Comment »
It strikes me today that simple bodily aches and pains are a goad of the Spirit.
I don’t have glorious martyrdom staring me in the face. I have little nuisances. One of them is aches and pains from a lifetime of stupid exercise. (It’s not stupid to exercise. But it can be stupidly pursued–excessively and obsessively.) My [...]
Socialization? Or sufficiency?
Posted in Fiction, Homeschooling, Parenting on October 12, 2007 | No Comments »
This is Katie:
She’s a border collie. She’s bred for intelligence and stamina, made to herd sheep all day long. Instead, she spends most of her days sleeping or chasing frisbees or going for walks on a leash. She’s a good sport. But her life with us is not the purpose she was made for.
What are people made for?
This is [...]
Here’s one more
Posted in Fiction, Lewis books on October 7, 2007 | No Comments »
Here’s one last photo of the Wood between the Worlds. (See yesterday’s post.) Here is what the photographer, Harold Davis, has to say about Lewis’s Wood:
“I was inspired by the Wood between the Worlds from C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew in the Narnia series. This forest is a sort of sleepy no-place that exists outside of [...]
Wood between the worlds
Posted in Fiction, Lewis books on October 7, 2007 | 2 Comments »
Why has the Wood between the Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew always appealed to me? It’s a place I return to often in my own mind. I like it so much I tried to find the perfect picture to capture it, and use it as the header for my blog. But all the photos were [...]
Modern compassion
Posted in Fiction on October 4, 2007 | 3 Comments »
I finished Falling Man. It leaves me with the sense that I have inadequate categories for judging the story. My visceral reaction is that I didn’t enjoy it, but that’s hardly a judgment of the book’s literary qualities. There is a sensibility I can’t relate to there–a skepticism, a sophistication in the narrative voice as [...]
Man fallen
Posted in Fiction, Writing/Blogging on October 2, 2007 | 1 Comment »
2/3 of the way through Falling Man, and pressing on… The book is a long study of man falling–from the sky, from a sense of safety in the world, from best to worst possibilities in our nature, from the top floors of the towers to a dusty grave. There’s a marriage in the story that [...]
