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Thursday, December 22nd, 2005
Today and yesterday, I read Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, by Annie Proulx. (A better verb than "read" might be "drank in" or "devoured".) What an amazing book -- Flannery O'Connor has some serious competition for my favorite author of short stories. I got interested in reading Proulx from the story Brokeback Mountain, which I read last week prior to seeing the movie -- what struck me about that story was the fullness of characterization, and the palpable sense of time passing; I loved it and wanted to read more. So on my way to the movie theater I stopped at Montclair Book Center where I picked up Bad Dirt and Shipping News. Bad Dirt mixes gravity and whimsy deftly, I particularly loved how The Wamsutter Wolf -- maybe the most moving story in the book -- is sandwiched in between The Contest and Summer of the Hot Tubs, both lighthearted, almost superficial stories. The characters are great -- the two I identified most closely with were probably Creel Zmundzinski (who opens and closes the book) and Buddy Millar (who is only in one story, The Wamsutter Wolf). But I got to know every character well and to feel for them.
posted evening of December 22nd, 2005: Respond
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Sylvia and I have finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and moved on to the second Narnia book, Prince Caspian. (We are reading them approximately in order of publication, rather than in chronological order as Lewis recommended -- see this Wikipaedia article for more info.) Sylvia is getting the plot tie-ins between the two books very strongly. Tonight we read Chapter 4, in which the dwarf begins telling the children the story of how Prince Caspian came to learn of the history of Narnia. Early in the chapter, there is a confrontation between Caspian and his uncle King Miraz, with Miraz telling Caspian that the stories of Old Narnia are old wives' tales and lies. Sylvia was at first a bit perplexed; she knew the stories were accurate as the matched up with the previous book. She quickly figured out that Miraz was lying and each time he told Caspian not to believe in Old Narnia, she was quick to interject that he was wrong. That seemed to me like fun and like a fairly complex level of understanding the books.
posted evening of December 22nd, 2005: Respond
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Sunday, December 18th, 2005
This afternoon I'm going to watch "Brokeback Mountain" -- I've been really looking forward to this movie ever since I saw the trailer, when we went to watch "Capote" 2 months ago or so. I am thinking that this movie coming out could signify a new moment in mainstream acceptance of male homosexuality; for at least half a century the homoerotic subtext of the American Old West mythology has been made explicit by people like Burroughs and Pynchon -- lots of really intelligent authors with big names and small readership. But it seems to me like this is the first time it is crossing over into mass culture. Frank Rich's op-ed piece today, on the movie and what it signifies for the culture, is well worth reading -- unfortunately it is "Times Select" so you will have to spring for a newspaper if you want to read it.
posted morning of December 18th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, December 10th, 2005
We just got back from the movie -- it was both unexpectedly delightful, and disappointing. Nice how they adapted it to the screen -- I was really surprised and happy that there was no voice-over. But the dialogue was a bit weak, really -- that it was anachronistic was the least of its problems. A high percentage of lines in the script did not ring true as what that character would say at that moment; and a related problem was that the characters were not very well developed. I'm not sure whether to blame this on the writers or the actors, who were (with the exception of Georgie Henley as Lucy) not great. This is coming out sounding a little like a pan; but I enjoyed the movie. It had a lot of weaknesses but it communicated well the joy and immediacy that is in Lewis' books. And the problems with the script were mostly in the first half of the film -- in general the second half (starting about when the children get to Aslan's encampment) was much stronger, and the cast really came together and started convincing me. One niggling problem: I have always thought of the Pevensie children as younger than they were portrayed in this movie. Like I would have thought Lucy was about 4 or 5 and Peter no older than 13 -- the characters here were from 8 or so to 16 or so. And I'm not sure why they tied the movie in to the historical moment so strongly with the first scene, of the Pevensie family in their bomb shelter. It might be a good idea to do so but I think it would have required some development in the rest of the movie to ring true -- otherwise it just seems tacked on. (It knocked Sylvia for a bit of a loop; she thought we were watching a preview for a different movie until the scene about 5 minutes in, where the children come to the Professor's house.) The visual effects and animations were in general great -- Aslan in particular, breathtaking. The only exception was the bit where the children are on the breaking ice in the stream, which looked pretty cheesy to me. (And note: this is something that was not in the book, appears to have been added in just to show what cool tricks they could do with CGI. That seems to me like a mistake.)
posted evening of December 10th, 2005: Respond
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Sylvia and I are off to watch the movie of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe this afternoon.
posted afternoon of December 10th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, December 9th, 2005
Bedtime stories for the past week or so have been chapters of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Reading Chapter 11 tonight (in which the children and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver begin their journey to the Stone Table and meet Father Christmas), I realized the narrative is reminding me a lot of The Phantom Tollbooth. It struck me while Father Christmas was giving his presents to the children, that that was like Milo getting his presents from the Mathemagician and Azaz -- and thinking about it, I am sure Juster modeled his book in some respects on Narnia. I read all of the Narnia books when I was quite young, and possibly had some of them read to me; my memory of them is faint but I do remember liking them. I am reading to Sylvia from a very nice edition that we bought when we visited the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst, MA. A really great discussion of the Narnia books has been taking place over the last few days in the comments to this post on Unfogged.
posted evening of December 9th, 2005: Respond
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Sunday, December 4th, 2005
...I'm sick in bed with a cold. Hoping it clears up tonight because I've gotta go to work tomorrow -- I was out all last week sitting on a jury. That was a trying experience, which I would like to write up; but I am not going to until I can get to something more than "I went here, I did that, then this happened, and I had another thought" kind of stuff. I watched "The Squid and the Whale" last week and liked it a lot, and started reading Unamuno's "Abel Sanchez". Three fun dates coming up: on Thursday I have my final exam in Operating Systems; next Sunday the Pynchon-l folks are meeting up to watch a puppet theater production of Gogol's "The Nose"; the following Tuesday many commenters from Unfogged are meeting for drinks. All of this seems like stuff I could write about but the creative impulse does not seem to be there.
posted evening of December 4th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, November 25th, 2005
Tonight we were driving home from Ellen's parents' place, and Sylvia wanted me to tell her a story. A Just-So story. Getting progressively more specific, she asked me to tell her "The Elephant's Child". Well I didn't really feel into that; but I started off, "In the high and far-off times... the Lion, o best beloved, had no mane." Sylvia immediately reacted -- that's not how it goes, it's an elephant -- but almost as immediately, she saw the possibilities, and she let me make up a story. It was a pretty lame one frankly, and not particularly long; no Kipling I. But as soon as the lion had gotten his mane, Sylvia asked to hear one about how the tiger got his stripes. I saw my opening and asked her to tell that story to me. And she did. It was mostly sound effects -- "In the high and flying times there was a tiger with no stripes. And he crashed into the lion and bang and whoosh and boom and he crashed and..." until he eventually crashed into the Mookoo, who had stripes, and they traded. For the rest of the drive home we were regaled with similar stories.
posted evening of November 25th, 2005: Respond
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This morning I started reading Leslie Savan's Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever. Ms. Savan is in Ellen's writers' group, and she was signing books at Marshall School's (where Sylvia attends) Library Day. I was interested in the book because of a strongly negative review in the NY Times, by P.J. O'Rourke, who is not the first person I would have thought of to review a book on pop culture. (O'Rourke offers a quintessential lack of self-consciousness with such lines as: "I didn't learn any fresh ripostes, topical quashers or new verbal conveniences from 'Slam Dunks and No-Brainers' except 'What is the dilio?' I take this to mean 'What is transpiring here?' I tried it on my children. They looked at me blankly.")
posted morning of November 25th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, November 12th, 2005
Last night for bed-time story, Sylvia requested a Just-So story. (An "old favorite" -- about 9 months ago we were reading from that book just about every night; but it's been on the shelf untouched for a little while now.) After a consideration of the contents she settled on "How the Leopard Got his Spots", saying even though "The Elephant's Child" is her favorite story, she wanted to see about this one. (When we were reading it regularly, she would ask for "The Elephant's Child" about one night out of three; I got so used to it that I was able to recite it from memory one night when we were driving a long distance and she really wanted to hear a story.) Well "How the Leopard Got his Spots" is one of the more objectionable stories in the book but with a bit of editing you can get most of the racism out and just have it be about colors. So that's what we read. Now our edition of "Just-So Stories" has two sets of illustrations, line drawings that I think are from the original edition -- they have captions that read as if Kipling wrote them -- and more recent color prints.* When we were reading about Baviaan, the "dog-headed, barking baboon" who is the wisest animal in South Africa, there was a line drawing of him, a drawing which looks nothing like a baboon. Sylvia objected -- "that's not a baboon with a dog's head, that's a person with a lion's head -- like a backwards sphinx!" (She learned about the Sphinx recently and is pretty into the idea.)
*I wish, I wish that I could find the edition of "Just-So Stories" that my dad read to us from when we were young. It was oversize and the illustrations were just beautiful. It's possible I am misremembering and they were the same as the color illustrations in this book, just bigger; but I'm pretty sure they were more abstract and symbolic.
posted evening of November 12th, 2005: Respond
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