As soon as it gets cold and dark the lights can go up. I'm fine with that.
Continuing to wind up the review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months, November saw a lot of these going up late – over a week late sometimes – but I made up for it in the end, and the delay actually made it easier to work out what I was going to write, so there are a lot of posts I like from November but this one made me smile the most. It provides a nice coda to September's complaint of feeling like I hadn't really "recovered the knack of experiencing", and as a return to Forbidden Planet also ties in nicely with July. I'd pretty much forgotten I'd written it – I'm thinking a lot about schools, aren't I? – but the argument I stumble across for at least one way in which comics are superior to books still seems sound. It's nominally from Thursday, November the 5th...
Can you see a white arrow in the centre? I think you can press that.
The
following four posts will all begin with me confessing that I'm posting
them on the evening of Saturday the seventh. Now I've cleared the air,
here is a video of Forbidden Planet that I took on Monday before the
second lockdown. It's a bookmark more than a record: I was feeling
something, and thought if I took a video of the place where I felt it,
it might help me to remember it – as good a use for my new phone as any I suppose.
I tried to describe this feeling later to Joel Morris and Will Maclean
whom I happily bumped into at the queue for the cashier upstairs. Will had just had a book published.
It was now in the shops. We had coffee, our shopping at our feet, and
were happy. Men of our age had not been the majority in the shop
however; it was full of girls now – not women, girls – doing what we'd
done as boys: looking for worlds built on messages. The toys were
upstairs on the ground floor but here in the basement were the warnings,
the comics that let you know the future might be cruel and that coping
might mean fighting in bright colours. It felt peaceful because comics
make no noise, even when they're full of fighting. That's what I was
feeling, and although I hadn't read any recently and I'm always in
Forbidden Planet and was never into super-heroes, for a spot of time
just before I took out my camera, I felt
like I was looking round an old school again, a school I had been
allowed to
choose for myself. The covers on the shelves facing outwards felt like
allies, a
feeling I don't get in bookshops. Covers of books without pictures have
scenery on their cover, or handwriting, and rarely look at you with the
faces of young people ready to fight your corner.
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