Platypus of Truth

Every year, in honor of Michael Ward's groundbreaking Planet Narnia , I award seven Summer reading books with to one of the seven heavens of Medieval cosmology. Prior awards can be found by following the "Summer Reading" tag at the bottom of this post. This year presents a bit of a challenge, as most of the books I read were technical in nature, but I think there were still enough idle hours to get us to our requisite "Seven Heavens". Moon: The Heaven of Madness and Change belongs this year to Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, as he appears in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman . I kinda, sorta, got this series in grad-school -it was perhaps too much for me at the time. All things have their season, however, and right now seems to be my time for The Sandman . Mercury: The Heaven of Language goes to the most well-written grammar for any language I've studied: Wheelock's Latin . All one has to do is pick up Hanson and Quinn's Greek to see the massive differ...

Here's yesterday's church bulletin with the drawings colored in. Polychrome on Greek pots was muted, but Etruscan funeral painting had quite a bit of life to it and may hint at what all those lost Greek panel paintings looked like. That said, the colors I picked for the designs still have a vibrantly modern look though I tried to restrain my pallette somewhat as a nod to the originals.

Happy day after Hobbit Day everyone! In addition to language learning, much of the past few months has been taken up with studying archaeology and art history including a trip to the Getty Center (Egypt: Beyond the Nile) and a symposium at the Lanier (United Israelite Kingdom Seminar). Along the way, I've been studying the distinctive designs of Greek polei, Scythian tribes, and Etruscan city-states. So, to get all that out of my system, I decided to illuminate this Sunday's church bulletin in a medley of styles with a little Art Nouveau thrown in for good measure. As Summer is also on its way out, I will be trying to put together another "Seven Heavens of Summer Reading" awards list. We'll see if there's enough "summer reading" to qualify, given how technical things have been lately. In the meantime, the Platypus speaks Truth.

We were in L.A. for a few days and that necessitated some in flight distractions. So, in between reading Juvenal's Sixteen Satires , I tried my hand at a bit of design work with a ballpoint pen. I'm hoping this sort of doodling will help up my game a bit. You can see earlier attempts studding the edges of a few of my Sabriel  series below.

 Pictured: Kerrigor and Sabriel in Pitt pen and Brush Marker on sketch paper. It's been several years since I last did a blog-through of a book. Returning to live-blogging and Garth Nix's Old Kingdom have both been fun. So what are my final thoughts now that it's over? Nix is a much more accomplished writer than contemporary Terry Brooks. While I have fond memories of reading the Shannara series in the early 90s, I wish I had been reading Nix's stuff instead. On the other hand, even though Sabriel  is a Y.A. novel, its darkness might have disturbed me and vitiated my ability to appreciate the world the book creates. Turning to the Sabriel  and Clariel  as an adult, I find myself able to appreciate the tightness of Nix's writing as well as the genuine novelty and cohesiveness of his imagined world. I also feel much more able to appreciate Nix's Realism. There are rules to the Old Kingdom, and Nix plays by them. Many writers of Fantasy seem to confuse Real...

Today's post continues my blog-through of Garth Nix's dark fantasy, Sabriel , picking up where we left off with chapter 26. We're getting down to the end and there are spoilers galore. So, if you don't want to know how a 23 year old novel (so what if it spends every weekend binge-watching Parks and Rec , it can stop any time it wants to!) ends, don't keep reading. So here we go. The end run of Sabriel  is all about locating Kerrigor's bronze coffin (pictured at left: marker on boarding pass stub) and putting an end to his preserved remains ala Dracula  or The Mummy .  As I said before, we're now out of Brooks and Le Guin territory and into Room With a View  and All Quiet on the Western Front . Signs and portents gather as Col. Horyse, like Yates' Irish Airman, foresees his own death. We also learn that there was an incident 20 years earlier with the dead crossing The Wall in large numbers and that the towns of northern Ancelstierre have been drilli...

We're continuing our blog-through of Garth Nix's Sabriel  starting at Chapter 24. The image is of The Clayr, who I thought deserved stained glass (or Conte marker on the backing of a pack of Bic pens). We're getting closer to the end now, so if you don't want to what Nix penned 23 years ago (under no circumstances is it moving back in with Mom and Dad! -that would be weird...) really, really don't keep reading. Ok, you're still reading. Nix keeps the pressure up as Sabriel goes into shock (nice touch of Realism, that) and the scavengers from earlier begin hounding her and Touchstone (Mogget went awol when Abhorsen slipped his collar). When Sabriel is wounded, Touchstone gains super-powers and runs all the way to the top of the hill before collapsing. If we've read the prequel, Clariel , we know that berserking runs in the royal family. At the top of the hill, as promised, Sabriel encounters the Clayr. The Clayr are apparently a family of mystics that ca...