Daily Devotional Reading: Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas

 Check out this beauty:

It lists for a hefty hefty HEFty $275--$55 per volume 🤯--but our friends at Amazon will let you have it for $247.50. Believe it or not, I...with my little Retired Too Early Pension...thought about buying it. (Or maybe the paperback version, which Amazon will let you have for $131.10-- $26.22 per volume.) 

Because I've been thinking...this fiction reading...even popular fiction with the Slough House series and maybe some other stuff...is fine and fun, and I've certainly chowed down on more pages than I can imagine doing without a "disciplined" reading program...but it's not really what I started this thing for. I started it because there was a book series... A History of Philosophy by Frederick Copleston, S.J....that I'd wanted and tried to read since I was a teenager, but it had kicked my ass. So I thought I'd apply the Longest Journey Begins With A Single Step adage. At first that meant 15 minutes (minimum) per day. And it took a long time...but I did it. It wasn't about how many books I read or how many pages I averaged, it was about taking on a big challenge and sticking with it. 

So I decided I wanted to get back to that concept. And I've been wanting to head into some religious waters...so I decided to try out Aquinas' Summa. Honestly...I don't know if I can do it. We're talking about  3,020 pages of heavy material. And there's no way I can do 30 pages a day of that, so I'm setting my sights on 10 pages per day. Which means that reading this will take about ten months. It's more than a little bit intimidating.

The Louisville Free Public Library has volumes 1, 2, 3, and 5 (go figure), though, so I decided to give it my best shot. Picked up Volume 1 today. Will commence reading tomorrow.

Wish I had some company. If you're tempted, go to https://archive.org/details/summatheologica0000thom_h1q3/mode/1up and throw down. 

And for the record, Volume I has xix + 580 = 599 pages.

Day 1 (DDRD 2,636) January 17, 2025

Read to page xix--none of which was written by Aquinas.  It wasn't easy going, but I made it. 

Tomorrow page 1 and St. Thomas. 

From "Encyclical of Leo XIII":  "Now men, blasphemous, proud,  deceivers, go from bad to worse, wandering from the truth themselves and leading others into error." (xiv)

Does this remind you of anyone?

And here's a good word I've never encountered before:

heresiarch

noun

he·​re·​si·​arch hə-ˈrē-zē-ˌärk  ˈher-ə-sē- 

Synonyms of heresiarch

: an originator or chief advocate of a heresy

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/heresiarch

So.

Day 2 (DDRD 2,637 January 18, 2025

Read to page 

The Band of the Crow: The Unboxing

It has arrived. Live it with me:

 

In the interests of Full Transparency, I will confess upfront that I love Arvid Nelson. And have loved him for many years. Ever since I first laid eyes on Rex Mundi, which is still one of my favorite comic book series of all time. (And I've read A LOT of comic books. At least 10,000...and possibly twice that.*) In Rex Mundi,  Arvid created an alternate universe where...well, take it away, Wikipedia: "...where magic is real, feudalism persisted, and the Protestant Reformation was crushed by a still politically powerful Catholic Church."

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Mundi_(comics)

Yeah. (He had me at "magic is real," but the rest is quite nice, too. In fact, I loved the comic so much that after I'd bought all of the single issues (first from Image, then from Dark Horse), I bought the six collections (of the same books), and then bought the two omnibus collections (of the same books) Dark Horse published later on. 

After that, I followed Arvid's writing through quite a few other books, including Zero Killer, JSA Classified, Kull, Thulsa Doom, Red Sonja, Warlord of Mars, Dejah Thoris, Lord of the Jungle, Lords of Mars, and, believe it or not, other stuff as well. 

So when I saw that Arvid had a Kickstarter going on (with artist OReN) for a comic book called The Band of the Crow, of course I was in. And, as you can tell from the video above, it arrived today.

I couldn't believe the packaging. I was expecting a Manila envelope, maybe with a piece of cardboard for backing if I was lucky. Instead, I got the lovely box you see me dismantling above. Inside, a nice slab of that air bubble stuff and two bagged and boarded copies of the first issue of The Band of the Crow. 30 big pages. 

I'd expected a rollicking good story from Arvid, and I got that in spades. The story is fairly straightforward: young magician in training (YMIT) is attacked by trolls, woman magician shows up to foil them. Next day there's to be a test for all of the YMsIT. Complications ensue. But there are so many resonances here. Arvid clearly knows a whole lot more about these characters than he's telling us here. It's almost as if he wrote a whole novel about them and is now distilling its essence into comic book form. Needless to say, I am seriously longing for the next issue of this book to come out.

What I hadn't expected was to be absolutely overwhelmed by the art. It is so meticulous, so beautiful, that after I'd finished reading the book I went back just to savor the pictures. I don't know if I've ever seen comic book art like this before. Check out this back cover, for instance:

Blow that picture up to full size to get a real taste of the magnificence.

Holy mazoli, man. It reminds me of some of the art I see in the better European comic books...but even better. 

The Kickstarter campaign for this book has ended, so you can no longer get a copy there, but if you go to  https://thebandofthecrow.com/ , you can sign up for a free newsletter which will alert you when it becomes available elsewhere.

* PROBably twice that. I have 9,000 of them in my basement, hundreds more e-comics in my ComiXology account, and have read many more from the public library. Yeah, probably more like 20,000. But hey, I've been reading them since 1966.) 

The Best Song of All Time to Listen To When You're Stoned

 Just discovered it. And I've been listening to John Cale for 50 years. (Saw him live at The Marble Bar in Baltimore in the 80s. Literally* sat at his feet with my best friend Eddie. We even got sweated on. **)

"Sun Blindness Music." Almost 43 minutes of uninterrupted What The Fuck Was That?

Go get stoned, then come back and give it a spin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ezVnrnGXSI&list=PLNINWcxxj9hHMJx4_oFVWNLznPeMWKRVW&index=1

* And I mean that LITERALLY.

** Queer *** as it might sound, we enjoyed that aspect of the show.

*** Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Mick Jagger, Lady Gaga, & Gimme Shelter on the Teleprompter.

I was watching a video in which Mick Jagger was joined on stage by Lady Gaga to sing "Gimme. Shelter." It wasn't very good. It really seemed more like two young children competing for their mom's attention than a duet. 

It also struck me as funny that they were using a teleprompter for the lyrics. I mean, come on, there's like a total of 40 words in this song, most of them being "It's just a shot away."

 

The Comic Book I Read: Parliament of Rooks #1

 

I'm not sure why I picked this book up Friday. Partly because it was a light week (only two other comics). Partly because Saga and Daredevil, which were due out, hadn't yet hit the stands because of a shipping problem, so I had a two book hole in my heart. Partly because I liked the cover and title. Partly because when I opened it up the art was mostly black and white, with occasional splashes of red, orange, and yellow. And partly because UT had such high quality paper's like a slick magazine--but still listed for $4.99. (And to think that I grew up on 12¢ comic books. 👴)

When I sat down to read it, it took 2 1/2 pages of moody, entrancing art before I hit this line:

"The howls carried on the wind...She knows what they proclaim and she wonders if they might deafen the stars themselves."

And I said, "Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh...what a feeling."

That line's worth at least a buck by itself. 

And get this: the story is 34 pages long, and the only ads are after the story pages. And speaking of the story...which was created, drawn, and co-written by Abigail Jill Harding*...is interesting. An architect who lives in a huge (and rotting) mansion designs a library for the princess of the kingdom. King says no way and throws the architect out, then things get tricky. In a supernatural / horrorish way. 

I'll definitely be back for issue 2 next month. You can also get an e-version of this book on the cheap ($2.99) from Amazon, the whole five e-book series for really cheap ($6.99), or, if you have a Kindle Unlimited membership, for F.R.E.E. (And if you have that membership, you can also read (for free) the novel A Matter of Reason by Thomas Paul Kalb. Tell him BrotherK. sent you. 😉)

* I don't see too many writer / artists anymore, so that was a plus, too.