Friday, March 30, 2007

100 Great Pages: Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, page 39

Fifth of a series of posts about 100 great comics pages.
Links to: an introduction to the series; an index of posts by creator; an index of posts by title.


When I began this series, I made a list of the first few entries I wanted to do and a large number of other works that I wanted to get around to eventually. But I always knew that happenstance would play a major part. In the case of the Codex Seraphinianus, created by Italian artist Luigi Serafini, the chance was my discovering (via Eddie Campbell) that it had been posted online, in its entirety, as a Flickr set.

I described the Codex in my earlier post, but to recap briefly: the Codex Seraphinianus is a fictional encyclopedia, presented as if it was an alien artifact: written entirely in an undecipherable alien script, with strange and hallucinogenic illustrations throughout the text giving glimpses of pregnant, elusive meaning. Whether it is supposed to be from an entirely alien world (in which case the obvious people sometimes included are puzzling), from an alien looking at our world (in which case the obviously fantastical lifeforms, places, etc, are puzzling), or something else, is unclear. It's a masterpiece of suggestive mystery, of meaningful nonsense. Like many people, I first heard of it from an off-hand comment in Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas; but until its recent posting I had only seen the various sample pages available here and there on the web, and had never read it in its entirety (as it is rare and quite expensive). Having actually read it, I knew I had to include a page in this series.

But have I in fact even read it now? In my earlier blog post about the Codex, I wondered whether the word "read" was the proper word to use in discussing it. I have looked at every page -- some for longer, some for less time: the text-only pages -- at a very rough guess, perhaps a fifth of the total -- are, obviously, particularly unrewarding; many of the heavily illustrated pages are so beautiful that they took my breath away. I have never used hallucinogens, but looking at the Codex makes me feel as if I know what LSD must be like. But have I read it? Is "read" the right word?

I have come to the conclusion that it is not. This is true even though I would without hesitation say I had "read" a silent comic like Peter Kuper's Sticks & Stones or Evan Drooker's Flood. The reason is that in the context of a work like the Codex, "read" implies something untrue -- that one has actually read the existent text and not simply looked at the images. Given that the text is, so far as anyone knows, nonsense (but see here), this is impossible; but to say, "I've read the Codex Seraphinianus" implies a mastery which is unwarranted. Further, while the pages are definitely better seen in sequence -- you get a lot more out of it approaching it as a whole work, with a given order,* than simply looking at any given sample pages (said the man writing a series of blog posts about pages taken out of context) -- you don't quite read the images the way that one "reads" (by which I mean something like "performs closure on", to use McCloud's term) silent comics. Say, therefore, that I have "looked through" the Codex: it will be more accurate.

In fact, since I have announced this as a series of great comics pages, including the Codex begs the question of whether it is comics or not. Now Eddie Campbell would argue vehemently that these categories are reductive: that one shouldn't care whether or not the Codex is comics -- one should simply care that it's good. And on many levels I agree with him. But since I disagree with him on equally many levels -- and since I don't want to try to weigh in on The Great Campbell/McCloud Debate™ now (though I may at some point in the future) -- I'll simply note that the page I'm discussing happens to be a page of comics, at least by the Eisner/McCloud definition of comics as "sequential art".** A few of the pages have sequences of art that are clearly meant to be read as temporal sequence -- i.e. are comics by the Eisner/McCloud definition -- but this page is rare in being dominated by a lengthy, comics-like sequence. I think the only other one laid out in quite so traditional a comics fashion is page 41 -- two pages later. (What that means I don't know, although the pages are thematically quite similar in a lot of ways.) So even if you won't call the Codex comics in its entirety -- and I pretty much wouldn't -- I think most people would agree that this page is comics.

Anyway, it's wonderful, and from a wonderful book, so bollocks to the definitions.***

So here is page 39:

(Click for a larger version.)

I've rotated the image 90 degrees so that its (apparent, to us) proper orientation is up -- as one would, presumably, rotate the book if one shelled out the money to have a dead-tree copy in one's hands -- but if you want to see what it looks like in the book, click here.

In many ways, the "story" here is readily comprehensible -- although the story one gets out of it is distinctly surreal. In the first panel, we are shown a map (its status as a map made clear by the labeling, in the now-familiar alien script, which is on it); in the second through fifth panels we are shown rains, followed by the growth of some sort of crop; in the sixth panel, we see the crop harvested; in the seventh, we are shown in close-up what the crop is: ball-point pens, which grow in the manner of tubers; and in the final panel we are shown the use that these are put to: they are used as the components of necklaces.

(Page forty-one, which as I said is very similar in structure, shows the growth of chairs -- not as parts then manufactured, but as full chairs -- which are then sat on by (for some reason) someone wearing ice-skates.)

It's worth noting that this is hardly the strangest page in the book -- indeed, its very nature as comics makes it among the most straightforwardly comprehensible. Nevertheless, its combination of real and imaginary features, its reordering of the familiar world in a strange way, makes it (in many ways) quite typical of the Codex.

But what are we to make of this presentation? Is the Codex describing a world in which this actually takes place? Or is this the misinterpretation that an alien culture has of our world? Or is it supposed to be metaphorical -- about creation having its roots in the earth, and hanging like a chain about our necks? -- Further, is this an answerable question -- that is, if one studies the Codex for long enough, can one figure out where and when it is supposed to document? Or is it just an exercise in defamiliarization, a playful romp in the gardens of the strange? (If ever there's been an artistic object which aims for, and achieves, defamiliarization, it's the Codex Seraphinianus.) I don't know the answer to any of these questions: I enjoy the page as an exercise in dream-like strangeness, but I don't know what to make of it.

In discussion at Eddie Campbell's blog I said that the Codex as a whole reminded me of Jim Woodring's Frank, in its eerie, often-unsettling, dream-like (or hallucinogenic) tales which mix the familiar and the strange. A commentator, "John C" (who I think is the same John C who wrote perceptively about the Codex here) replied that he thought "it most closely resembles European fantasy works like those one sees from Roland Topor and various bande desinée artists rather than people like Jim Woodring." I'll stand by my Woodring thought, though I admit that it may well have as much to do with my limited frame of reference than anything else. (Jacek Yerka also strikes me as similar in spirit.) Overall, obviously, the dominant mode is surrealism; beyond that, I don't know.

Let me take one small topic: the alien script. What is it doing in this page? Well, it changes the viewpoint: it makes what we see a representative example rather than a specific incident. It implies a whole society -- that this is a tradition, a habit -- rather than, say, some strange specific incident in which pens happened to grow like tubers in the ground, and we had so many of them that we made necklaces. The script (along with the greater context) even helps establish a narrative voice -- one of detached description -- that we then read as the intent behind the pictures. We might be wrong about that voice: it's how encyclopedias that we know are written, and might not really apply to the Codex at all, given that its supposed to be alien. But I think we tend to impute that tone to the Codex, fairly or not. And, of course, once one thinks of the Codex as a product of an alien society, we realize that we are imputing to it all sorts of things that might be wrong: even the idea that the squiggles in question are a script (with an implied language and meaning behind them, even if we can't know them) -- and not, say, simply decoration, or their portraits of the strings of which matter is made -- is simply an assumption that may be wrong. The alienness of the Codex necessarily destabilizes all our attempts to bring meaning to it (although, at the same time, we can hardly help doing so.****) There's no question that the script is absolutely essential to the feel and nature and meaning (whatever that is) of the Codex -- even if we do skip by the all-text pages quickly (for what can one make of them?), their presence is important in helping shape the meaning of more heavily image-based pages such as page thirty-nine.

Surely it's important that this page (and its cousin, page forty-one) are in the "flora" section (again, see my first footnote below), which consists of drawings and sketches and diagrams and so forth of plants. It shapes how we feel about the page; but I don't think it makes it mean any one thing.

Is asking about its meaning just silly? Is it all just supposed to be beautiful and strange? Or, on the other hand, are we missing something big if we just groove on its strangeness rather than seek more specific meaning (it certainly seems set up to encourage us to do the latter).

Did I mention that the art is beautiful?

And what are we to make of the watch in the penultimate panel, the one where we see the man holding the tuber-pen out? That's a very modern-looking wrist-watch.

Is it comics? Have I read it? What does it mean? I don't know. But I know that it's wonderful. (Can I know that without knowing what it is or what it means? I think so, but it's a funny situation to be in.) Go take a look and see what you think.

Update: Nothing to do with the Codex, but Eddie Campbell (whose name I took in vain above) and I are hashing out issues of definition in the comments. Worth a look.

___________________________________
* The Codex is quite distinctly divided into eleven sections, each with a title page, introduction and table of some sort (a summary? a table of contents?) before the main matter. Further, the rough subject of each section is fairly clear (various different attempts to label the sections come out quite similarly). And each section gains in coherence if looked through all together in order -- although admittedly not by much.

** I think that there are three major definitions of comics/graphic novels in play right at the moment. The first, which I think of as the Eisner/McCloud definition, is that comics are "sequential art"; the second, which I think of as the Pekar/Harvey definition, is that comics are "words and pictures"; the third, which I think of as the Horrocks/Campbell definition, is that comics can only be defined by what they historically have been, with a strong dose of "to hell with all this definition crap" mixed in in the bargain. As far as I'm concerned, all three have their merits; and one can most fruitfully engage with the field of comics by using, in various ways, all three.

The Codex is "new lit" by Eddie Campbell's definition -- a graphic novel but not comics (good enough for my purposes); this page, at least, is clearly comics in the Eisner/McCloud sense, even if the whole is not. But is this page comics under the Pekar/Harvey definition? Does an undecipherable alien script count as "words"? I shall argue in a moment (or have argued above, if you're reading the footnotes all together at the end) that the script is essential to the meaning (the feel, the effect, the nature...) of the Codex. But is it words? It's certainly supposed to make us think of words.)

*** Which is Eddie Campbell's basic point about the definitions, if I understand him properly.

**** An interesting test: can we think of this page -- page thirty-nine -- as not comics in the Eisner/McCloud sense? By this I mean: can we try not to process the images as a temporal (causal) sequence, showing us a location, a sequence of events, a use? Scott McCloud says that his iconic picture:

is comics if we read it as a man raising a hat -- but isn't if we read it as a picture of two men, one raising a hat. (Well, he says it of two squares. But you get my point.) But at any length, it becomes well-nigh impossible not to see most comics as sequential art -- not to do closure. Can we imagine an alien race alien enough to make a page like this and not intend sequence? (It's hard.)

16 comments:

Eddie Campbell said...

If every sequence of images in the history of humanity is to you 'comics' then the truest line you wrote is the one about having a 'limited a sphere of reference.'
it would be like saying that all dance music in 4/4 time all the way back to the middle ages 'is rock'n'roll'.

Eddie Campbell

Eddie Campbell said...

:)
and since somebody might think I meant 'new lit' to be a definition of sorts, i've removed it from my labels which means you get a blank page on that link.

things we have to do :)


eddie

Stephen said...

EC: Honored to have you reading!

As I said, I'm not ready to weigh in on The Great Campbell/McCloud Debate™ right this moment. But I will say that your line about rock & roll only works if that's the sort of classification system of which "comics" is a part. It might be more like arguing that cave painters from 40,000 years ago are in some sense doing the same thing as Picasso was, namely painting... which I think is a more reasonable argument. It's all about whether we're talking about a medium or a historically bounded phenomena that's closer to a genre. Both views have a measure of truth, I'd say.

Anyway, as I said, bollocks to the definitions.

Still, I think that this:
and since somebody might think I meant 'new lit' to be a definition of sorts, i've removed it from my labels which means you get a blank page on that link.
was a bit of an overreaction. Dang it, I liked that label! Serves me right for linking.

SF

Eddie Campbell said...

okay
if you do get into that old argument just remember that what i'm against is not McCloud per se (percy) .

I'm against DEFINING. The whole procedure. The word even. In fact all thinking along these lines is wasted time.

Eddie

Eddie Campbell said...

including the bit about the cave painters

Stephen said...

I'm against DEFINING. The whole procedure. The word even. In fact all thinking along these lines is wasted time.

I get that. And, as I said, in some ways I agree with you. But in many ways I don't... I think definitions can be incredibly liberating & inspiring.

(Incidentally, I once agreed with you... said that definition was simply a silly thing to do. When a couple of my physicists friends -- who are (contrary to stereotype) very literate, and philosophically inclined -- stopped laughing at me, and explained why you couldn't do math or physics without definitions, I began to change my mind. Not directly applicable to artistic categories, I grant... definitions function very differently in physics/math than they do in philosophy/criticism, and it makes perfect sense to be against the latter but not the former... but it was a consciousness-raising moment for me.)

If I have time, I'll try to write this up. Won't be this week, though, nor the next.

Eddie Campbell said...

when i said i was against defining, i meant that i'm against trying to construct scientific-type definitions in an art environment. (See my long quote from RG Collingwood in my How to be an Artist for the imagined dismay the sientific mind must feel when confronted with the story of Art)

okay we're agreed on that.

as for being against the word, what i mean by that is that I see it being misused a lot.
Strictly if a thing is 'defined' it is completely wrapped up and limited from that point on. a while back somebody in my blog comments was talking about 'shifting definitions' which seemed to me a contradiction of terms. Surely we're juggling with 'descriptions' until the terminus at which point the whole matter is seen to be 'finite' and can then be 'defined'. (ie we can define human biology because it man is no longer eveolving. it's fixed.)

anyway, I'll write more about this further along. I've been delberately avoiding 'naming' media as i'm trying to construct a new model for looking at media, by which we become unconcerned about the dividing lines between one medium and the next. (thus if 'new lit' is once recognised a s a 'name' then it is to be immediately rejected) this is the opposite from McCloud's way of looking at the world. But i feel that his is limiting in the extreme. Which is why I find myself lined up opposite him in summaries of the matter. I'm not on the other side of a dividing line. I'm saying the line does (should) not exist.

i'm working on a draft.
more later
eddie

Stephen said...

Eddie,

I certainly look forward to your thoughts on this!

But two responses.

First, as is evident from your commentator's talk of "shifting definitions", I think that a lot of people use the word "definition" differently. For a lot of people, definition is (at times) a personal thing, and (at times) a thing adopted for the sake of a discussion or a thought experiment. That's sort of how I think of it. (I'd say it's all a question of how you choose to define "define", but I fear we might both drown in irony.) For what it's worth, my impression is that in mathematics definitions definitely are discussion dependent; I know frightfully little math, but I can testify that Euclid's definitions are quite different from David Hilbert's.

Anyway, the point is that I don't think that these definitions are finding The Utmost Essence of Comics -- hence my saying that it's fruitful to use, simultaneously and shiftingly, McCloud's definition, what I'm calling the Pekar/(R.C.) Harvey definition, and the one I'll call (to avoid giving offense) the Horrocks/Delany definition.

It's all about what one finds (intellectually, aesthetically, personally) fruitful. And I think that what you miss (or just disagree with, perhaps?) is how unbelievably liberating I -- and a lot of other people, based on what I've read and heard -- found, and find, McCloud's definitions. We don't see it as limiting; it was experienced as an incredible broadening of vistas, the opening up of an incredible number of possibilities. I think that the reason I personally so strongly resist your (and Dylan Horrocks', and Samuel R. Delany's) resisting of the whole idea of definitions in discussing McCloud is that I feel, emotionally, like I am fighting to keep that sense of freedom and expansion and possibility.

Thus when I read in an interview that you did your suggesting that (I'm paraphrasing, forgive me if inaccurately) yeah, we should simply admit that comics are superheroes, and graphic novels are an attempt to do something else, I experienced it as an attempt to stuff me -- us -- a whole field of human endeavor -- back in a jail from which we'd escaped. I understand intellectually why you might find the idea of definitions limiting (and certainly as employed by, for example, R. C. Harvey, they tend to be), but I think that they can be, in contrast, quite liberating -- and that in the case of McCloud's "sequential art", they are. By (with a playfully anachronistic spirit, if you like) roping medieval stained-glass windows and the Bayeux tapestry into the same category as Mad, Martian Manhunter and Maus, it created an explosion of possibility and excitement that I feel emotionally motivated to intellectually defend.

This has gotten very long for a comment, so I'll stop here. I hope this has clarified somewhat.

SF

Eddie Campbell said...

it is a starnge, narrow, mcCloudian sort of mind that must declare a thing to be contained within its own circumscribed 'category' before it can give itself permission to be interested in it.

Stephen said...

I strongly suspect that we're just not going to agree. But trying one more time, here are two (possibly contradictory) responses:

(1) Until we hypostatize a category, there is no "it" to be interested in.

(2) Don't think of it as confinement, think of it as collage: wow, look, if you think about these things all together, isn't it neat?!

... Having taken some time to say why, emotionally, I felt motivated to reiterate my position (although -- to repeat -- I think that multiple perspectives are valuable, indeed necessary, here), I must admit I'm curious: what's motivating your opposition here? If people want to play with definitions, what's the harm? Why not see it as playful rather than constricting?

SF

Eddie Campbell said...

Hypostatize..

ha, i had to look that one up. But it will be useful to remember. that is exactly what i accused Mccloud of. Having constructed an amusing hypothesis he then proceeded to treat it as though it were an object in space and time. Things were either of it or decidedly not of it, and there could be no coexisting alternate hypothesis.

And a lot of his theory was based on deliberate misreading of the sources. For instance, he looked at the Sunday papers. the comics section is made up of cartoons, half of which are in multi panel format and half of which are not. (Those fractions are variable... i keep an LA Times on file in case this argument comes up. I can retrieve it and give exact fractions if necessary). So comics are not confined to 'sequential art'. That would be the result of a scientific statistical analysis of the materials. yes or no?

If a person wants to take an interest in pictures made into sequences, and make surveys through human history. Well, that is a valid project. why not?

If he wants to say it's all exactly the same medium, that the holy Stations of the Cross is the same art as mutt and jeff... you asked what's the harm... i would say that a certain trivialization would be the harm. to treat mankind's sacred productions in the same way as the mundane? no, you and I are atheists, but I would allow that studies of art created for widely different purposes ought to be approached in quite different ways. Of the artefacts of ancient Athens, the colossal staue of Athena in the Parthenon, which bore the gold of the city's wealth literally on her mantel, and the little terracotta figure of the barber giving a guy a haircut are both 'sculptures', but it would be simpler altogether to treat them as being of different media.

One of beefs against McCloud's method was that he had no real respect for or interest in the discipline of history. he was always just 'playing', to use your word. And I thought it was very childlike and charming for all that. Like a child playing with the mechanism of a musical box, holding it to his ear, lost in his musings.

He was like the Millais painting of 'Bubbles'.

but it was not something to be taken seriously.

Eddie Campbell said...

(I'm hoping to get a copy of my new book within the hour... it's on the fedex truck according to online tracking... and i can't concentrate on doing something constructive... My own blog post later today will probably be half the dimensions of what i just wrote above)

ec

Eddie Campbell said...

still walking around in circles and looking out the window....

and then the crowning foolishness. Having declared that all examples of pictures used in sequence are the same art form , which we have just invented, we will call it ... 'comics' (even though the sources prove that not all comics are sequential art), a word which etymologically means exactly the same as 'funnies'. My favorite English Usage, Fowler's only just relents and allows that the adjective 'comic' is nowadays accepted also as a noun to indicate an example of those cheap throway illustrated entertainments, as well as a stand-up comedian, now it must be made to mean something else entirely. (insert McCloud's definition.) I'm sorry , but i consider myself too educated to ever go along with such a proposition.

( I realize I've said all this a million times, but you got me started... and my book aint here yet...)


also, why do you see yourself as somehow contained within the idea of comics????

"experienced it as an attempt to stuff me -- us -- a whole field of human endeavor -- back in a jail from which we'd escaped. "

all of human learning is open to you.. (as i know you know.).. so why would you identify with a cheap shoddy kind of literature as though it was the nation of your birth??? If I say comics are crap, you will take it as a personal insult even though you are not, so far as I know, a producer of same?

It's like Mccloud offered you a ladder out of the ghetto, and I kicked it out from under you?

Why not just like the Seriphinianus for all that it is? why do you also have to make it 'comics', and why in doing so does that make it any better than you already thought it was?

The last guy in whom i encountered this attitude definitely had a working class (in the British sense of the phrase) chip on his shoulder. That's not what im seeing here is it?

Stephen said...

First, I presume the new book has arrived: so congratulations on it! I very much look forward to reading it.

As for the word "comics"... I guess I'd just say that words aren't bound by etymology; that words take on new -- often radically new -- meanings all the time; and that this has happened here. (Fowlers I find stuffy and old-fashioned; this may be a matter of taste or upbringing or something.) So I am happy -- perfectly happy -- to say that yes, "comics" now means something having no direct etymological connection to the "comic"; that "graphic novels" can be nonfiction, even though "novels" can't be; that these are simply new terms being used in new ways.

Historical context... well, I teach & study history for a living (such as it is). But partly that makes me all the more understanding of the value of taking things out of historical context sometimes. It's important to know what you're doing, i.e. to be conscious of what you're tossing away -- but I guess I'd say that history has (as Nietzsche put it) advantages and disadvantages for life, and I think it's important not to be overwhelmed by history too.

I think -- I hope -- I do take the Codex seriously on its own terms. I brought up the whole definition thing to excuse shoving it where it (mostly) doesn't belong, and to talk, a little, about how pages 39/41 felt different to me than most of the rest of it.

My emotional connection is not based on being working class. But you're right, I do have an emotional connection to comics. Part of it is that I am, in fact, working on what I would call a graphic novel (I'm writing the script, planning on illustrating it myself); and I certainly don't consider it a "cheap throway illustrated entertainment" in any sense. But I was inspired to do it (after working for some number of years on prose fiction) by a lot of things... in part by Scott McCloud. (And in part by a lot of great new work that I've seen while hunting for comics over the past decade -- including, if I may say so, your work.)

But I think it's more than that. I have long identified with non-privileged artistic forms and genres -- one of my main interests in prose fiction is SF, where I think some incredibly literary work has been done, but ignored, because of the genre label. And so yeah, I identify with comics... and SF... just as I do with history or people who love libraries or the Democratic party, and I tend to get emotional about them.

And I think a lot of my hesitation is in what I hear as the disrespect in your talk about comics -- what sounds like, to me, a basic sense of 'you can't talk about good stuff with all that junk' that I hear in some of what you write, such as the comments about the holy stations of the cross & Mutt & Jeff. This is an old fight, for the respectability of popular entertainment; and it seems to me you seem to be on the opposite side of the fight that Gilbert Seldes was fighting back in The Seven Lively Arts in favor of taking Herriman (and, yes, I just checked: he mentions Mutt and Jeff!) seriously. This is why it feels to me like you, not McCloud, are the one trying to exclude things: keep that nasty cheap disposable literature out of my High Art!

But I don't believe that you really mean that. When I first started reading, you'll forgive the word, comics again, eight or nine years ago, I did so because I thought there was a lot of good work I'd never heard of. And the single most reliable list I found -- the single list that I spent the most time tracking down (almost not quite) everything on it to read -- was your list in How to Be an Artist, which was for me the working cannon of graphic novels worth reading. So I suspect our tastes aren't that different.

I guess I'd want to ask, again, why you seem to have such a chip on your shoulder about this whole notion of definitions. So we define comics: ultimately, so what? In the case of R. C. Harvey I think it seriously distorts his aesthetic judgments; but I don't think it does for McCloud (you may know more than I do).

I suspect this all comes out of very different life experiences... you've worked in the comics field (again you will excuse the word (he said in his best Yiddish accent)) for years; I've never come within a thousand leagues of it. I've just read some wonderful books that I call comics -- some by you -- and like thinking about them together.

... This has been less coherent than I hoped. Perhaps some of what I meant leaked through. I hope so!

Again, congratulations on the new book. When's it actually for sale again?

SF

Eddie Campbell said...

re the etymology argument.
of course words take on new meanings. these meanings accumulate. But mcCloud would have it that a word can take on a new meaning that excludes previous meanings. I.e. a single panel cannot be a comic. I personally use the word that way and can show it has a long history of at least 120 years. Originally it meant a humorous drawing. (AB Frost, see my article in the comics journal.. #. can't remember). You can't choose to obliterate previous meanings, and there is a principle involved in that sort of thing, even though this instance is inoccuous, so i won't allow it to happen.

re the chip on my own shoulder... okay you caught me.
As a practitioner of art and a philosopher of aesthetics, some things are important to me and worth arguing about. One is when I see ideas that are foolish being taken up wholesale. I will stand my ground.
Gore Vidal said:
"Trust a nitwit society like this one to think that there are only two categories - fag and straight. "
(I've seen it quoted slightly differently but the meaning is always the same)
McCloud has decided that in our field there are only two categories:
'comic's and 'not comics'.
and the reason that is not good can be shown by Vidal's follow-up:
"Sex is a continuum. You go through different phases along life’s way … and if you don’t, you’ve been sort of cheated."
Gore Vidal

McCloud's judgements are sound enough, and as a teacher of practical matters he is excellent, however, with regard to creating an overarching philosophy of what it is that we are about, i have serious issues. (Harvey's judgements are faulty and i cannot read a paragraph of his nonsense without forming a fist.)

right... i have my book, i have looked at it over lunch, I have photgraphed it and my post for today will be that and a hndful of words. The rest of me words all got spilled here

onan

Stephen said...

The Mrs is telling me I should let you have the last word; and it's Pesach tonight which, atheist or no, means Business for us Red Sea Pedestrians.

So I will congratulate you on your new book; and say that while I know the feeling of spilling words, perhaps a different biblical metaphor will come into play, and that casting your bread upon such varied waters will cause it to return a thousandfold.

We can only hope.