Floyd at Threedonia posted this trailer for an upcoming movie from Randall Wallace, to be released next Easter. What troubles me is that it actually looks kind of good. You all know the general rule about religious-themed movies: If the theology’s good, the movie’s probably bad, and if the theology’s bad, the movie’s probably bad anyway. But this almost looks like it could work.
Which would be a miracle. And that would prove God’s existence, right?
Alissa Wilkinson writes about Christian artists who eschew identification as such:
Sometimes it’s because they’re afraid of being stigmatized, in some fields more than others. But just as often, what I hear is that they don’t because they’re afraid that the “Christian world” will glom onto them, making them the next poster child for the cause: “Look! Christians can be cool, too!” Then, precisely because the gears are ready and well-oiled, they fear they’ll be sucked into being packaged for “the Christian market.” (And often they want their art to be appreciated because it is well-made, not because a Christian made it and we all gotta stick together.)
(via Jeffrey Overstreet)
My father, Pfc. Jordan Walker, in the Occupation Forces in Japan, about 1946.
Thanks to all our veterans for your service and sacrifice.
Emily Temple has a brief, but long list of hard books: “Some books are only for the toughest readers on the block, your Sylvester Stallones of literature.”
If I’d known what I was getting into when I agreed to be one of the Vikings present last night at the American Swedish Institute’s annual “Loki’s Bash” Halloween party, I might not have done it. It was only after agreeing that I learned that one of the event’s sponsors was a local paranormal society, and that divination would be performed as part of the festivities.
But I’d given my word, so I set off. As it turns out, it wasn’t so bad. No doubt I was surrounded by people who would have considered me a Nazi if I’d shared any of my views, but that’s a less and less infrequent experience for me. And I don’t think anything went on, in terms of the occult, that didn’t also happen at the Science Fiction cons I attended. In any case, all of that was out of my sight.
What I did see was an endless parade of (mostly) young adults (total attendance, I’m told, was 1,600) adorned in costumes of varying degrees of quality, cleverness, and good taste. A fair number were dressed as they imagined Vikings would be, in keeping with the event theme. Many were identifiable characters from movies and TV shows. Many others, no doubt, were identifiable characters from movies and TV shows I’ve never heard of. Others were puzzles. Some were meant to be puzzles.
Take for instance, my favorite. There was a young woman there dressed in a black dress with white collar and cuffs. She wore a gray wig plaited in two pigtails. And she had an eyepatch and two toy ravens perched on her shoulders.
I finally had to ask. “Schoolgirl Odin?” I asked.
“No,” she laughed. “I knew it was too complicated. I’m Wednesday Addams. But Wednesday is Odin’s day.”
Makes perfect sense when you think about it.
I got home after midnight, and to bed after 1:00 a.m. My alarm clock picked this morning, of all mornings, to lose its bearings and set off its alarm about forty minutes early.
I blame witches.
“The pleasures of Moby Dick are more akin to the pleasures of a police procedural like CSI or NYPD Blue,” writes author and scholar Jonathan Rogers. “A better comparison, really, would be the Horatio Hornblower books or Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series.”
He says Moby Dick is a book about whaling, which is the reason there are so many details about whaling in it. He notes, “The piled-on detail seems oppressive to many readers; it truly is hard to handle. But the story begins to do its work on you when you stop trying to handle it.”
Moby Dick by ~scumbugg on deviantART
Had a small adventure today, a step outside my customary work orbit. It involved a connection with a fellow blogger, too.
Dennis Ingolfsland (a fine Norwegian name) is the chief librarian at Crown College in St. Bonifacius, Minnesota, a school of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. He’s also the blogger at The Recliner Commentaries, a fine blog I’ve been following for years. He doesn’t post as often as I’d wish, but then he’s a teacher as well as a librarian. Also the pastor of a church. That’ll eat into your time.
I’m in the last stages right now of composing a research paper on Theological Librarianship for my grad school class. One thing I was required to do for that project was to interview some working librarians in the field I’m covering. I e-mailed three, and they all agreed to help (librarians, I’m discovering, are a remarkably helpful and accommodating group. Which makes me wonder whether I’m cut out for the job). Dennis invited me to come out to Crown and look at their set-up, and I decided it would be a good idea.
He showed me through their library, which is far larger, better organized, and more sophisticated than mine is. He gave me some good suggestions for connections to online resources. And he bought me lunch, on the college’s dime.
I think they must have confused me with somebody else.
In any case, thanks, Dennis.
A still from Night of the Living Dead, 1968.
It’s Halloween season now, I guess, so I think I’ll speak my mind about zombies.
I don’t like them.
Not in the Bruce Campbell Evil Dead sense of, “I hate those bleeping zombies and I’m gonna blow them away.”
No, I dislike them because they’re boring. Of all the monsters invented by the mind of man, the zombie (as imagined in America ever since the movies altered a Haitian folk superstition into a semi-systematic popular mythology) is the least intriguing.
Zombies have no style, like Dracula. They (generally) have no pathos, or capacity for it, like Frankenstein’s monster. They have no tortured self-awareness, like the wolf man.
They just lurch around hungering for brains, compelled by mere appetite, without choice or agency.
They are a metaphor for modern humanity, as seen by itself.
And I hate that most of all.