Fiction

Primer, Watching a Time-Travel Movie Cold

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I watched the 2004 movie Primer with barely any knowledge of it, which may be the best way to watch it. Shane Carruth wrote, directed, and stared in this detailed sci-fi story about four entrepreneurs who hope to make some kind of breakthrough on one of their garage-lab projects. When Abe discovers that a box they made does something unexpected, he tells Aaron and the two decide to pursue it. The scene below gives you a taste of the movie’s style while showing Abe and Aaron conducting their first experiment.

That’s the pace of the first quarter–realistic talk from scientific engineers who aren’t spelling anything out for the viewers at home. In this scene, I’m not sure Abe knows what’s going on yet, but he works it out and then tells Aaron everything. They’ve invented a time machine.

Since Abe draws this conclusion first, he experiments with the necessary components to make the box work, to make the box larger, and to survive within it–all before introducing it to Aaron.

That’s when the story goes from a bit tedious to mind-bending. Carruth hasn’t given us a simple lark about time-traveling engineers trying to better their lives or two ordinary guys trying to change the course of history. He’s written a story that pushes into the paradoxes bound to occur when someone breaks time’s linear progression.

For example, if someone could go back in time a day or a week in order to prevent a major crime or gain a windfall in the lottery or stock market, once he goes back to do this he removes his motive for going back. If on Saturday he decides to return to Monday in order to stop a crime and he succeeds, what happens when he returns to Saturday again? Having stopped the crime, he doesn’t have any reason to go back to Monday. So what happens? Are the first days overwritten by the second? What if he had discovered time travel during that week; would revisiting the week delay or prevent the discovery that enabled him to go back in the first place?

What if you began to see it the opposite way, as a way to avoid consequences? What if you could go back in time, punch a jerk who deserves it, and return to the same morning as if (no, because) none of it ever happened? What if you could press a reset button to undo everything you’ve done over the last several days?

Primer is a story about all of that, and while it’s easy to understand the danger presented at the movie’s conclusion, it’s difficult to follow everything occurring up to that point. What happens at the birthday party? Who is the guy following them? Where does the man who looks severely beaten come in? The story pushes into these paradoxes without full explanation, giving rise to explanatory videos like this one as well as webpages dedicated to spelling it all out.

Abe: “I’m not into the whole ‘destiny, there’s-only-one-right-way’ thing.”

Aaron: “Abe, I’m not either, but what’s worse? You know, thinking you’re being paranoid or knowing you should be?”

I enjoyed it overall, but it is dense. One reviewer said that though it’s a short movie, it feels longer due to the many details packed into every minute.

Goofing

Spontaneous reaction

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US Department of Spontaneity

Dear Friend:

We have received your application for a Spontaneity Grant. Please fill out the enclosed forms in triplicate, and return them to us complete before the specified date. In addition, you are required to provide a detailed timeline of your plans for spontaneous acts, along with an estimated budget and certified copies of applicable local permits.

Thank you for your support for the Spontaneity Initiative.

Uncategorized

Taking up space

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Disabled parking permit
Photo credit, Tony Webster, Creative Commons

Let me sing you the song of my ethical struggles.

One of the nice things that came from my last hip surgery, aside from rapidly diminishing pain, was my temporary disabled parking tag (it’s like the one pictured above, but red). When I asked my doctor about getting one, during my pre-surgery examination, he said, “Sure, I’ll fill out the form for you. How much time you want on it?”

I said, “I think the last time I got about three months.”

He said, “Ah, I can do better than that for you. I’ll give you one that goes till August.”

And thence comes my ethical dilemma. Barring complications, I can’t foresee needing such a permit anywhere near that long. In fact I’m relatively sure that I won’t be able to justify using it (to myself) much past next month.

And yet there is a voice, somewhere inside, that cries, “You earned it! You paid your five bucks for it! Use it as long as you can!”

I am ashamed of that voice. I once knew someone who obtained a disabled parking permit he didn’t deserve, “through a friend,” and used it regularly. I judged him pretty harshly for it.

I’m even a bit ashamed to use the permit right now. Objectively speaking, I’m in a lot less pain than I was for years before the surgery, when I had to park with the cis-abled folks. I can make an argument that I should destroy the permit now, that I’m cheating on a moral level.

My evil inner voice replies, “Even more reason to use the thing as long as you can! Society owes it to you! Don’t you deserve something for your suffering?”

No, I don’t really think so. There are people with genuine, serious disabilities who need those parking spots. I can easily imagine someone who uses a wheelchair circling the lot, unable to find a space because posers like me are taking them up.

I got groceries tonight, and used a convenient disabled spot in front of the Cub store. When I was done, as I was driving out of the lot and thinking about writing this very blog post, I saw a young man walking toward the store. He was painfully thin, and he leaned heavily on his cane. “He can’t even drive,” I thought. “He walked here from home.”

Was that a sign? I think that was a sign.

Writing

Good Commonplace Books

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Commonplace Book

A great book of quotations would embarrass certain of your relatives and be banned by lesser school districts. When a writer says something new and real, it can be shocking, like a surprise emission from a bodily orifice. The books of quotations that rarely let you down are commonplace books, those intellectual scrapbooks made for personal use and compiled by a single avid reader.

(via Prufrock)

Fiction

Yearning for Wonder, “Something, Anything”

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If you’re looking for a good Christian movie that would work well as a discussion starter for a thoughtful group, look up Paul Harill’s Something, Anything (which is available on Netflix streaming).

While the trailer gives you the tone of this film, it doesn’t spell out the story. Peggy, the woman whom you see agreeing to be married, hits a wall when her first child is miscarried. The grief overwhelms her, causing her to question herself and her lifestyle. In the trailer, you see one of her friends asking her what she wants. In the movie, that friend recommends she try to have another child and recognize her role as a wife. Life, she says, is about pleasing a husband, raising children, and supporting them so that they can repeat the cycle of marriage and child-rearing. Peggy used to accept that, but now it all rings hollow, and she doesn’t know what to believe.

So we watch a normal, East Tennessee woman leave one life for another, exchanging a self-centered materialistic life for one that may have moments of wonder, like synchronous fireflies in the Smoky Mountains.

One wordless scene appears to capture the entire story of “Something, Anything.” Peggy and her husband, Mark, are preparing to move, and he finds the journal she has been pouring her heart into throughout her spiritual journey. Mark picked it up and began to read a page, when Peggy saw what he was doing. She stands in the doorway, silently open to talking to him about what he read, but he just puts it down and walks out. The two of them were living in completely different worlds at that point, and Mark wasn’t curious enough to ask her about hers. He wanted a comfortable, worldly life; she wanted eternity.

I liked this slow, quiet film, and it will provoke discussion in an attentive group with its references to worldly comforts, Thomas Merton, monastic life, and the Sermon on the Mount.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Styrbiorn the Strong,’ by E. R. Eddison

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Styrbiorn the Strong

The hood of her cloak was fallen backward, baring the flame-like splendour of her hair above the smooth brow and stately and lovely face of her. There was in her face, as she gazed south with haughty lip and level chin, so much beauty as the Gods might throw up hands and strive no more to better it were they to frame the world anew; and so much gentleness and womanish pity and softness as a man shall find in the rain-cold rock of the sea.

I’d heard of E. R. Eddison’s novel Styrbiorn the Strong for years, but never actually saw a copy. And I was a little reluctant to read it because I’m not a big fan of the author’s most famous work, The Worm Ouroboros. Although that book has its virtues (Lewis and Tolkien both admired it), I disliked its amorality, along with its ending, which in my view rendered the whole tale pointless.

But Styrbiorn (I prefer to spell it Styrbjorn, but this is a review) himself gets an interesting scene in The Long Ships, which I reviewed a few inches down. And that whetted my curiosity. So I got the Kindle version.

Having finished it, I find myself floundering to make a judgment on it. There are elements I dislike – that same amorality, some Nietzchean concept that the truly great are above mere kindness to their “inferiors.” And I generally don’t care for affected antique diction. But Eddison was a master of affected antique diction, and when he’s got the wind in his sails he soars to the level of real poetry, and can carry you along with him. This book is very effective and even moving, in its way.

Styrbiorn the Strong is a character whose own saga has not survived, but he gets mentions in various sagas and historical sources. Some scholars nevertheless dispute whether he ever existed in the real world. As portrayed by Eddison, he’s a character beyond realism, the mightiest of warriors, almost a demigod. The son of a joint king of Sweden, his loving uncle promises, in all sincerity, to give Styrbiorn his father’s half of the domain as soon as he reaches 16 years. Styrbiorn, with the madness of a man doomed before birth, manages to throw these prospects away through impetuosity and passion.

Another saga character whose existence has been questioned is Sigrid the Haughty, who also plays a major role in the book. She appears (to me) to be inspired by Gudrun Osvifsdatter of Laxdaela Saga, who famously says in her old age that, of all the men she knew in her life, “I treated him worst whom I loved best.” Eddison pictures Sigrid as a kind of Gudrun on stilts, a woman apparently void of tender feelings, motivated wholly by pride and vengeance. I almost said that she’s at fault for Styrbiorn’s tragedy, but that’s not fair. He brings his defeat and death on himself.

Styrbiorn the Strong is not an easy book, but it’s highly effective of its kind (which it’s pretty much the only one of) and difficult to forget. Recommended, if you’re up for this sort of thing.

Uncategorized, Writing

Plans: How to make God laugh

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I have to get back in the habit of blogging five times a week, even when I don’t have a book to review or some link to share. I think I won’t go back to talking about my personal pains and neuroses, or at least not as much. Anyway, I’m presently enjoying one of the most pleasant periods I’ve enjoyed in some time. I’m done with grad school – nothing left but getting the document in the mail. I’m still adjusting to the freedom. And I’m coming up on two months since my surgery, so my incision’s largely healed up and I’m suffering more from the stiffness caused by learning to walk straight and unsupported again, than from post-procedure discomfort. I don’t recall ever feeling so stiff as I did last week, but then I’m calling on muscles I’ve permitted to dog it for more than two years.

My obvious next project is to start the next Erling book. Don’t have a title yet (I do know the title of the next book, assuming things fall out as I plan), but I know the period of history I need to cover. The days of purely imaginative Erling novels (West Oversea, Hailstone Mountain) are over. Now we get back to established fact, and the epic face-off between Erling and King Olaf Haraldsson, who was destined to be Norway’s patron saint.

But I wasn’t sure how to approach this stretch of the story. Part of the problem is that it’s going to involve the lowest moment in Erling’s life. You’ve got to finesse that kind of plot point with great care.

Last night, driving home from work, my mind sparked across one of those synaptic gaps that puts two things you’ve been thinking about separately into bed together. And I figured out – I think – a way to approach this book. So I sat down and wrote about a thousand words.

This is what we writers call “a start.”

Oh yes, it’s time to start playing Viking in earnest again. Next event – we’re helping with the Icelandic horse exhibit at the Minnesota Horse Expo at the state fairgrounds in St. Paul, April 22 and 23. I plan to be there both days, if my body fail me not.

Authors, Religion

Did Christopher Hitchens Believe in God?

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A remarkable book was released yesterday: The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist. Samuel James talks us through it.

September 11 may not have been have been Hitchens’s Damascus Road moment, but it did much to disarm his innate hostility to those outside his ideological family tree. By pivoting to the right on terror, Hitchens was forced to doubt the categorical identity politics that so often dominate American discourse. This doubt—this shaken faith in the inherited doctrines of the Left—created the space into which Christian friendship, and Taunton himself, entered.

http://mereorthodoxy.com/reviewing-the-faith-of-christopher-hitchens/

Douglas Wilson praises the book as well. “And as far as the eyewitness testimony goes, I can say that his account rings completely true. The man he traveled with and debated is the same man that I traveled with and debated.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘Death Among the Sunbathers,’ by E. R. Punshoh

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Death Among the Sunbathers

Not long ago I gave high praise to E.R. Punshon’s first Bobby Owen mystery, Information Received. Death Among the Sunbathers is the second book in the series, and to speak frankly I was a little disappointed in it. However, I have reason to believe the series will find its feet again in the third book.

Despite its sensationalist title, Death Among the Sunbathers isn’t a racy story featuring a lot of naked people running about. The fictional sun-worshiping organization featured here is a pretty mild one where most of the members wear something like bathing suits most of time.

In this story, a young female newspaper reporter is murdered in an engineered automobile accident, and Superintendent Mitchell, whom we know well from Information Received, is on the scene in the victim’s last moments. This motivates him to give special attention to this crime. Bobby Owen, now promoted to Detective, is in the story, but mostly off stage. He dogs the criminals unseen, until they come to fear him as an inexorable, almost superhuman Nemesis.

This approach, in my opinion, doesn’t work as well as the amusing mentor/mentee relationship established between him and Superintendent Mitchell in the first book. Without that magic, the narrative here seems theatrical and artificial.

Also I figured out the Big Surprise well before the author revealed it.

But I shall press on with the series, in hopes that balance will be restored in the next installment.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Ships,’ by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson

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The Long Ships

Meanwhile the fire had caught the straw on the floor, and eleven drunken or wounded men lying in it had been burned to death, so that this wedding was generally agreed to have been one of the best they had had for years in Finnveden, and one that would be long remembered.

Sometime last week it occurred to me that, although I’ve been praising the book to people most of my life, it’s actually been decades since I read Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships. My old copy, printed in the 1960s, with a cover that doesn’t even appear on Amazon, is pretty much going to pieces, but it’s not terribly expensive to get a Kindle copy.

I’m happy to report that the book is as good as I remembered. Better. I still nominate it for the best Viking novel ever written – though a lot of Viking novels have been written in the last few years, and I haven’t read most of them. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine how anybody could do it better than this. (Pay no attention to the 1964 movie starring Richard Widmark. It’s a travesty.)

The Long Ships (Swedish title, Röde Orm), is the story of Red Orm Tostesson, younger son of a chieftain in Scania, which is part of Sweden today but was Danish back in the Viking Age. Early in the story he’s kidnapped by a Viking crew, who take him away into the Baltic and then south to Spain. There they, more or less by happenstance, “rescue” a Jewish slave from another Viking crew. He directs them to a rich city they can plunder, which eventually leads to their enslavement by the Moors, slavery in a galley, and then military service under the caliph of Cordoba. Further adventures bring them back to Denmark, into the favor of King Harald Bluetooth (the guy your wireless device was named after), and then home again. Followed by participation in Thorkel the Tall’s invasion of England, and an epic voyage into Russia in search of a hoard of gold. Continue reading ‘The Long Ships,’ by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson →