Reviews and Comments

I opened up the French edition of this in the library today and was completely awestruck by the images on the last pages (proving I am also a vampire from Clan Toreador).

This is the English edition, which I own but have never read.

Osamu Tezuka is my favorite manga writer, hands down, far ahead of any other. I think I will close out my “read 100 books in 2024” with him.

I am deep into the other essays (ie: where she is For and not Against Interpretation).

It is a little exhausting and I don't recommend it was a way to pass time while you are waiting in the cold for the bus. But there are things I am really taking notes on. For example, when she is talking about different Robert Bresson films on their own terms but before she diverges into the big themes of his work in general. Taken side-by-side, the former is the type of thing I am looking to learn from, the latter is what I want to avoid.

I am a few essays in and it is hitting the spot.

It was a strategic decision to read this book right now because I am on the cusp of starting a film watching blog. I had a pretty good idea of what this book was going to say but I wanted to hear the thesis in full.

I am reading it because I want to be able to write some prose for my blog but I don't really want to engage in criticism. It is more of a record to myself of what I appreciated about a given film watching experience. (And the same goes for wyrmsign and the books I read.)

At the end of the first essay, Susan Sontag says that we need "less hermeneutics and more erotics" in our approach to enjoying art. That's the sort of bold statement I am looking for from this book.

This comic presents the idea that the Book of Matthew is a subversive text because it includes the genealogies of different women who may or may not have been sex workers. It includes all of the necessary footnotes, citations, and discussion to follow his train of thought. In these footnotes, the author describes himself as a religious guy and lays down his positions on faith. What he actually believes is even more subversive than the premise of this book, and I can appreciate it even as a very non-religious guy.

It reminded me of King Jesus by Robert Graves. One of the plot points in that book is that the marriage between the elderly Joseph and the young Mary was to protect her honor after some sexual impropriety (consensual or not).

Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus was a perfect antidote to the polemics of CS Lewis that made me stop reading the Space Trilogy. I read this stuff for both pleasure and research purposes. The two books of the Space Trilogy were a frustrating blind alley for me. But Brown's comic has re-oriented me in a fruitful direction.

I don't really like C.S. Lewis in general. I am reading this series because a friend recommended it to me -- I am particularly interested in the depiction of angels (in relation to a project I am working on).

I think this first novel works pretty well as "science fantasy" but it still is unsubtle and didactic like other stuff I have read by him.

I think stories about space exploration that were written before the space age can be pleasantly whimsical in how they depict it without any of the knowledge that we take for granted about space now. Would it even be possible to write about it in the same way now?

The second novel (Perelandra) sounds really good based on the synopsis -- and this first one laid out enough of a foundation for me to continue with the trilogy.