Apple Foot

Madeleine L'Engle

ETA: Full text of the commencement speech online.

Madeleine L'Engle has passed away. She was the speaker at my college commencement. Of course, I don't remember a whole lot of what she said. I do remember her talking about being an awkward child, and some of her teachers thought her stupid. One teacher who encouraged her interest in writing and to whom L'Engle was always grateful was Margaret Clapp, who went on to become president of Wellesley College. The library at Wellesley is named for Clapp. L'Engle went to Smith.

L'Engle's books are among those I want to share with my sisters' kids. I started a mental list of such books while the first child was in utero.

Amazons Attack! #4

I just logged into my various accounts for the first time since Friday night. I've been either reading Harry Potter, or recovering from reading Harry Potter. No spoilers here, but the last book is terrific.

And then there's my usual weekend reading.

There are comics that I buy even though they're awful. Some of them are so bad as to be enjoyable (Anita Blake). Some I buy largely out of habit--that's the only possible explanation for why I own the last couple years of "Uncanny X-Men". In the case of "Amazons Attack!" I keep buying the comic in the irrational hope that at some point this will all make sense.

A hope this wild is easily fed--you start seeing signs and portents everywhere. In this issue, I draw hope from the fact that Pfeifer admits that what we've seen so far is wildly out of character for the Amazons. He does this through Superman, whose speech starts with the words, "What's happening here?! What has happened to you [Amazons]?!?" Readers have been asking those questions for some months now. So, my wild, irrational hope is that now that the sheer wrongness of the premise has been acknowledged, it can be explained. I dare not hope for a credible explanation, however.

Question: in the last page, is Selina talking to Batman on multiple display monitors (when did Selina get those in her cozy little apartment, or the hotel she's hiding in now that the apartment's been exposed?) while wearing only a plain, white bra?

Amazons Attack! continues to be very difficult to read without all the crossovers--I've no idea what's going on with Grace Choi here.

Over in the Catwoman issue this week, meanwhile, in case we didn't understand who's really running the Justice League show, regardless of the chairmanship, when Batman hightails it for Gotham, TV news makes it clear that the metas' battlefield performance becomes "scattershot", without "any organization at all."

Gail Simone's farewell issue of "Birds of Prey" is mercifully free of Amazons attacking. What we have instead is the return of Zinda (who's not stuck in Siberia), Babs kicking ass, take-out Chinese, and an explanation for Misfit. In short, all the wonderful we've come to expect.