Tag Archives: C.S. Lewis

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Goofing, Poetry

When ‘Brunch’ Was New, the Limits of Science, and Worthless Commercials

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Something inspired me to look up a distinct definition for the word brunch the other day, and I happened upon this piece from Punch magazine in 1896. Merriam-Webster says the earliest brunch is believed to have appeared in print in 1894, and this aligns with that claim.

“According to the Lady, to be fashionable nowadays, we must “brunch.” Truly an excellent portmanteau word, introduced, by the way, by Mr. Guy Beringer, in the now defunct Hunter’s Weekly, and, indicating a combined breakfast and lunch. At Oxford, however, two years ago, an important distinction was drawn. The combination-meal, when nearer the usual breakfast hour, is “brunch,” and, when nearer luncheon, is “blunch.” Please don’t forget this. 

Tis the voice of the bruncher., I heard him complain,  
“You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again!  
When the clock says it’s 12, then perhaps I’ll revive,  
Meanwhile, into bed, yet once more let me dive! 

“The last meal I had was 3:00 AM.;  
I’m a writer, so please don’t such habits condemn!  
This cross between supper and breakfast I’ll name,  
If you’ll let me, a ‘suckfast’ –and ‘brupper’ ‘s the same!”

It goes on to lesser effect. What else do we have?

Lewis on Science: C.S. Lewis understood the limitations of science better than many scientists. Michael Ward writes:

What is frost to someone who has never encountered it? What is a degree of frost? Ordinary language would be more helpful in explaining the situation: “Your ears will ache … you’ll lose the feeling in your fingers” etc. The word numb will convey more than any number.

However, what Keats tries to convey in his poem can’t be rendered as a thermometer reading. It is not univocal or universal; we can’t translate his poem into, say, Japanese without loss or at least alteration. And yet if we want to know just what it feels like to go outside and breathe the bitterly chill January night air, Keats paints for us a very vivid and sensible picture. He communicates knowledge to us that the ordinary and scientific ways of speaking leave out.

In other words, poetry is a kind of knowledge, and since knowledge is a synonym for science we could quite legitimately say – if we wanted to – that poetry is a branch of science. 

“Numb and Numb-er,” by Michael Ward, Plough.com

Lewis on Science-Fiction: Lewis wrote about science-fiction a good bit and broke it down into several genre categories.

Poetry: How Fame Fed on Edna St. Vincent Millay

And this video by Rachel Oates, “Atticus Is Everything Wrong With Modern Poetry,” is an amusing criticism of a published writer who appears to have turned his Instagram posts into a paper-published thing.

Commercials: “If I were endowed with wealth, I should start a great advertising campaign in all the principal newspapers. The advertisements would consist of one short sentence, printed in huge block letters — a sentence that I once heard spoken by a husband to a wife: ‘My dear, nothing in this world is worth buying.’ But of course I should alter ‘my dear’ to ‘my dears.’”

Photo: The Big Shoe, Bakersfield, California. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion

What of Our Deeds Will Matter for Long, Statesmen, and Blogroll

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“Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,
                           Nothing but bones,
      The sad effect of sadder groans:
Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.”
from “Death” by George Herbert

A handful of life paths — intellectual and artistic work in particular — are about trying to create, as Horace wrote, “a monument more lasting than bronze.” They are a calculated gamble that a life dedicated to the difficult and narrow path will continue after our death, however unrewarding it might have been to experience.

But that we even have Horace’s poetry to read is as much a caprice of fate as a function of his poetic virtue. Some manuscripts survive the collapse of civilization, others do not; it seems unlikely that these survivals and disappearances precisely track merit. We have Horace and we are missing most of Sappho.

It’s Very Unlikely Anyone Will Read This in 200 Years (via Prufrock)

Statesmen: A review of The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation by Daniel J. Mahoney. “The best politician employs the intellectual and moral virtues and ‘all the powers of the soul,’ with proper humility and deference to divine and moral law, to better the community.” Has anyone in this generation or last done this? Have we lost this type of man for a while?

Racism: Albert Camus has something to teach us about anti-racism in his book The Fall. “The Fall operates as a reverse confessional with the priest as the penitent who, rather than seeking absolution, wants only to implicate us in his guilt. With this inverted symbol Camus recognizes that power often wears a priestly frock.”

Abolition of Man: Do you think you understand Lewis’s Abolition of Man? Here’s some help. “Through Ward’s page-by-page, sometimes line-by-line, and occasionally word-by-word exegesis of Abolition, we discover the wide plethora of sources upon which Lewis drew to critique his opponents as well as to appeal to Western and non-Western thinkers who have maintained confidence in reason’s capacity to know moral truth.”

Evil: A review of Sarah Weinman’s Scoundrel: “The moral of this tragic story is that people are often too trusting of criminals professing their innocence, and ignore the reality of human nature: Evil exists. Heinous crimes don’t commit themselves.”

Christian Living: What do believers need today? We need power.

Photo: Brooklyn Hotel, closed. Brooklyn, Iowa. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Religion

Easy to Make Counterfeits of Christ

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I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength with friends over the last few weeks. We came to an appropriately seasonal chapter this week. The plans of both heroes and enemies are being revealed, and the theologically minded villain says, “The Head has sent for you. Do you understand–the Head? You will look upon one who was killed and is still alive. The resurrection of Jesus in the Bible was a symbol: to-night you shall see what it symbolised. This is real Man at last.”

The kingdom of God is of this earth, the man says in another place, and we will bring it about in this generation by pursuing this counterfeit Christ called the Head, the first artificial man.

I won’t reveal the particulars of this grotesque evil, in case you haven’t read this one yet, and it doesn’t matter for my point. This is a creative effort of anti-humanist planners who carry on the tradition of the best eugenicists. They wish to remake man in their own image and call him God Almighty.

The creation of divine counterfeits occurs in every generation. Some of them run like a bad sequel; some make even Christ’s followers comfortable.

In a sermon on the importance of gospel ministers in following Christ’s example, Calvin says, “We need not to have our hearts overcharged and time filled up with worldly affections, cares, and pursuits.”

Of very great importance, in order to do the work that Christ did, is that we take heed that the religion we promote be that same religion that Christ taught and promoted, and not any of its counterfeits and delusive appearances, or anything substituted by the subtle devices of Satan, or vain imaginations of men, in lieu of it. If we are zealous and very diligent to promote religion, but do not take good care to distinguish true from false religion, we shall be in danger of doing much more hurt than good with all our zeal and activity.

edited from “Christ the Example of Ministers,” John 13: 15-16

Calvin apparently thought it easy to raise up ourselves even though we intend to raise up Christ, easy to be conformed to the world and call it conforming to Christ.

And didn’t Christ Jesus say, “See that you are not led astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is at hand!’ Do not go after them” (Lk 21:8 ESV).

Authors

A Review of Lewis’s Medieval Mind

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Understanding C.S. Lewis’s worldview, not as merely Christian with a British spin but as devoutly medieval, will help new readers grasp and enjoy his work. Lewis would hate social media and maybe every Internet. He disliked the mechanistic world and preferred organic nature. (I’m seeing this unfold in That Hideous Strength, which I’m reading with friends over several weeks.)

As an educator, Lewis the scholar sought to restore to students a medieval mindset capable of what Baxter calls “the right sentiments of praise and admiration for creation.” As we have lost our appreciation for that “slow, contemplative, symphonic world” that was the medieval cosmos, so we have lost our delight in the kinds of books medieval people loved, books that held up other criteria besides mere originality.

C.S. Lewis Was a Modern Man Who Breathed Medieval Air… | Christianity Today
Authors, Bookselling

Jack Lewis’s ‘Heimskringla’

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Photo from auctions.tennants.co.uk

Via the Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society, Sept.-Oct., 2021:

News from finebooksmagazine.com website dated June 9, 2021:

Leyburn, North Yorkshire, England — A highly important collection of C.S. Lewis titles from the library of the author’s lifelong friend Cecil Harwood (1898-1975) is to be offered in Tennants Auctioneers’ Books, Maps & Manuscripts sale on 28 July 2021. […]

Leading the collection is C. S. Lewis’s personal annotated copy of Snorri Sturlason’s Heimskringla (Cambridge, 1932), a hugely evocative literary artefact shedding light on his mature engagement with the Norse sagas which had first stimulated his ‘imaginative Renaissance’ as a young schoolboy (estimate: £700-1,000 plus buyer’s premium).

I can’t find any information as to who got the book.
Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Poetry

A Fictional Lewis, Miłosz in California, and Blogroll

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Gina Dalfonzo reviews Once Upon a Wardrobe, the second book from author Patti Callahan with a fictional story that draws in many actual details of C.S. Lewis’s life and habitat.

Czesław Miłosz, born in Šeteniai, Lithuania, 1911, spent 40 years in California before his death in 2004. Cynthia Haven has labored over a book on this great poet of last century and Czesław Miłosz: A California Life released this month.

“The Nobel poet spent more time in California than any other place during his long 93-year life,” Haven writes. “He wrote poems about the California landscape, engaged with our culture, and taught generations of students at UC-Berkeley. Some of those students became eminent translators of his work.”

David Zucker has written some pretty funny scripts, which cross the line too often for my taste. In Commentary, he writes about an opinion he often hears from fans: “You couldn’t do that scene today.” (Via Books inq)

Humor happens when you go against what’s expected and surprise people with something they’re not anticipating, like the New York Jets winning a game. But to find this surprise funny, people have to be willing to suppress the literal interpretations of jokes. In Airplane!, Lloyd Bridges’s character tries to quit smoking, drinking, amphetamines, and sniffing glue. If his “addictions” were to be taken literally, there would be no laughs. Many of today’s studio executives seem to believe that audiences can no longer look past the literal interpretations of jokes.

Dracula: How did Bram Stoker’s novel become a pop-fiction hit?

Malcolm Muggeridge: “If it should prove to be the case that Western man has now rejected these origins of his civilization, persuading himself that he can be master of his own destiny, that he can shape his own life and chart his own future, then assuredly he and his way of life and all he has stood and stands for must infallibly perish.”

To close, here are a few words plucked from Miłosz’s “City Without a Name,” written in California, 1968.

The Earth, neither compassionate nor evil, neither beautiful nor atrocious, persisted, innocent, open to pain and desire.

And the gift was useless, if, later on, in the flarings of distant nights,
there was not less bitterness but more.

If I cannot so exhaust my life and their life that the bygone crying is
transformed, at last, into harmony.

Like a Noble Jan Dęboróg in the Straszun’s secondhand-book shop, I am put to rest forever between two familiar names.

Photo: George Joe Restaurant, La Mesa, California, 1977, John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress.

Uncategorized

‘The Most Reluctant Convert’

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I have paid insufficient attention to the upcoming movie, “The Most Reluctant Convert,” scheduled for release on November 3. Sadly, it looks like a limited engagement, but I suspect the DVD will be easily available. If it’s as good as the trailer makes it look, it might climb up beside the original BBC “Shadowlands” as my favorite Lewis movie (an admittedly small field to choose from, especially if you omit the Narnia films. Which I do, pretty much). Max McLean seems very good in the role.

Reading, Uncategorized

‘Weariness and water were our chief enemies…’

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The war itself has been so often described by those who saw more of it than I that I shall here say little about it…. Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gum boats with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire. Familiarity both with the very old and the very recent dead confirmed that view of corpses which had been formed the moment I saw my dead mother. I came to know and pity and reverence the ordinary man: particularly dear Sergeant Ayres, who was (I suppose) killed by the same shell that wounded me. I was a futile officer (they gave commissions too easily then), a puppet moved about by him, and he turned this ridiculous and painful relation into something beautiful, became to me almost like a father. But for the rest, the war—the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E., the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscapes of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet—all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. (C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Chapter XII)

I floundered for something to post tonight. Like so many Americans, I’m upset over a war strategy that seems both foolish and suicidal, with the fighting men (as always) paying the costs. Add to that that I’m reading a novel about the aftermath of World War I, the same sort of thing on a massive scale. So I settled on the excerpt from Surprised by Joy above, Lewis’s greatly softened public reminiscence of his war experience. (For a more candid view, see if you can find a copy of Jack’s Life, by Douglas Gresham, in which he relates what Jack told him in private about the war.)

I’d love to do a political rant, denouncing certain officials who shall remain nameless. But I haven’t the heart for it these days.

Authors, Bookselling

Buy my books. Someday they’ll be worth this much

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Dale Nelson drew my attention to this book offering at AbeBooks.com. It’s an original review copy of C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (one of my favorite novels in the world), autographed by the author himself to George Orwell and his wife.

Posted price: $30,000.

I’m sure some of our elite blog readers are in a position to purchase this book, and then donate it to the Marion Wade Center or some other worthy institution.

I wish we had a referral arrangement with AbeBooks, as we do with Amazon, so we could get a piece of that action.

In case you’re wondering what Orwell thought of the book, he called it “worth reading,” but was not in love with it.

If you’re on a budget, you can get the book slightly more inexpensively here. We do get some of that.

Authors

25 Minutes on C.S. Lewis on BBC Four

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Here’s a segment on BBC Four’s Great Lives program on C.S. Lewis. Suzannah Lipscomb, a historian, says she has not heard Lewis’s voice prior to this, calling it more “plumby” than she had imagined. She talks with Matthew Parris and Malcolm Guite about his faith, books, appearance, his marriage, and how he very much valued his privacy. (via Twitter)