The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe: first thoughts

Utterly, utterly brilliant.  I laughed, I cried.  Simultaneously, at times.

How rare is it that a long-awaited Christmas special lives up, or even exceeds, expectation?  Rare.  But tonight: yes.  Moffat pulled it off last year, and now he’s done it again.

That’s all, for now.  Just needed to get that out of my system.

More from C. S. Lewis on lowbrow and highbrow art

I know I shouldn’t keep just retyping passages from Chesterton and Lewis and calling them blog entries, but really — Lewis is just too clear-sighted not to use.

Another common way of using the distinction tends to fix on ‘popular’ as the best adjective for class A [i.e. lowbrow books].  “Popular’ art is supposed to aim at mere entertainment, while ‘real’ or ‘serious’ art aims at some more specific ‘artistic’ or ‘aesthetic’ or even ‘spiritual’ satisfaction.  This is an attractive view because it would give those who hold it a ground for maintaining that popular literature has its own good or bad, according to its own rules, distinct from those of Literature proper.  [...] And since I observe that many my highest-browed acquaintances spend much of their time in talking of the vulgarity of popular art, and therefore must know it well, and could not have acquired that knowledge unless they enjoyed it, I must assume that they would welcome a theory which justified them in drinking freely of that fountain without forfeiting their superiority

– C. S. Lewis, High and Low Brows.

And a little later in the same essay:

What survives from most ages is chiefly either the work that had some religious or national appeal, or else the popular, commercial work produced for entertainment.  I say ‘chiefly’ because the work of the ‘pure’ artists is not always ephemeral; a little, a very little, of it survives.  But the great mass of literature which now fills class B [i.e. works now considered highbrow] is the work of men who wrote either piously, to edify their follows, or commercially, to earn their living by ‘giving the public what it wanted’.

– C. S. Lewis, High and Low Brows.

It’s striking that that last quote is so near to be being exactly what Ian Harac wrote in his comment on the Chesterton post.

C. S. Lewis on the lowbrow/highbrow distinction

A wise man wrote:

At present the distinction [between highbrow and lowbrow books] is certainly used to allow us the satisfaction of despising certain authors and readers without imposing on us the labour of showing that they are bad.

– C. S. Lewis, High and Low Brows.

Let the record show that Lewis, a man of classical tastes if ever there was one, was also a big fan of the ostensibly trashy novels of H. Rider Haggard.

Next time: I will reveal what Lewis decided was the true distinction between these two types of art.  (For those who can’t wait, the answer is to be found at the end of the very essay that I just quoted.)  [Update: it turned out that "next time", while relevant, did not reveal the punchline.  But the next post will.]

G. K. Chesterton on enjoying lowbrow art

A wise man wrote:

[The bombast in the novels of Sir Walter Scott] will always be stirring to anyone who approaches it, as he should approach all literature, as a little child. We could easily excuse the contemporary critic for not admiring melodramas and adventure stories, and Punch and Judy, if he would admit that it was a slight deficiency in his artistic sensibilities. Beyond all question, it marks a lack of literary instinct to be unable to simplify one’s mind at the first signal of the advance of romance. “You do me wrong”, said Brian de Bois-Guilbert to Rebecca. “Many a law, many a commandment have I broken, but my word, never”.  “Die”, cries Balfour of Burley to the villain in Old Mortality. “Die, hoping nothing, believing nothing–”  “And fearing nothing”, replies the other. This is the old and honourable fine art of bragging, as it was practised by the great worthies of antiquity. The man who cannot appreciate it goes along with the man who cannot appreciate beef or claret or a game with children or a brass band. They are afraid of making fools of themselves, and are unaware that that transformation has already been triumphantly effected.

– G. K. Chesterton, Twelve Types: The Position of Sir Walter Scott

I am confident that Chesterton, if he lived today, would be a big fan of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who.  And he would be right to be.

C. S. Lewis on intelligence in Christianity

I’m re-reading C. S. Lewis’s little classic Mere Christianity [amazon.com, amazon.co.uk] for maybe the fifth or sixth time.  Aside from some badly dated implicit sexism, it’s aged very well since it was written in 1942: it’s a delightfully lucid book, full of illuminating similies and piercing insights, and I always seem to come away from it from with something new.

On trying to read Pawn of Prophecy

In 1997 or thereabouts, a friend’s wife lent me a book that she thought I’d enjoy.  Three years later, my family and I moved to a different part of London; a couple of years after that, my friend’s marriage broke up; fast forward a few more years and we moved out of London, I got a Ph.D in palaeontology, my wife got an MA in Music Therapy, I started writing The Reinvigorated Programmer … and the book remained unread.

This is that book: David Eddings’ Pawn of Prophecy, the first volume in his five-volume masterwork À la Recherche du Temps Perdu The Belgariad:

I just can’t make myself read it.

On trying to read Dune

Matt Wedel is constantly telling me I need to read Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi epic Dune.  I’ve never been keen because of the vast number of sequels, but I finally gave in to his repeated requests and started on it last night, on my Kindle.

I got as far as page 4.  Since the Kindle shows small pages, I guess that’s part way down page 2 of a printed copy.  Here’s why:

Yes, Paul.  What is a gom jabbar?

Whither publishers?, part 2

Back in February, I was provoked by an article on Eric Hellman’s blog to write a post, Whither Publishers?, on the future of publishers in a digital world.  Today, in a completely different move that is certainly not just a retread, I find myself provoked by a comment on Eric’s blog to write … another post on the future of publishers in a digital world.

What’s worse, it’s almost the same post.  So try not to fall asleep.

Programming Books, part 5: Programming Pearls

To my astonishment, I see that it’s been a whole year since the last  installment in the Programming Books series (1, Coders at Work; 2, The Elements of Programming Style; 3, Programming the Commodore 64; 4, The C Programming Language).  I got distracted.  But today I want to write about what I would judge the second best book on programming I’ve ever read: Jon Bentley’s Programming Pearls [amazon.com, amazon.co.uk]

I tried to write about this book once before, but I was distracted by what it has to say about binary search, and that ended up being a whole series of its own (part 3, part 4a, part 4b, part 4c).

Whither publishers?

I wrote this a few weeks ago as a comment on Eric Hellman’s blog (which by the way is an excellent read).  But when I happened to re-read it today, I realised that the thoughts that comment are significant enough that they probably merit their own post.  Here is it.

Eric wrote in his article:

Although one attendee worried to me about pervasive complacency in the trade publishing industry, Gonzalez’s view is that publishing is an activity fundamentally essential to our culture, and that one way or another, publishers are finding ways to survive and thrive as their focus shifts from a print oriented supply chain to a digital ecosystem.