Blogs, Socials

World domination update, updated

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Just to let you know that I’ve been invited to join the blogging crew at S.T. Karnick’s The American Culture blog. This will not affect my blogging here in any way. Mostly I’ll be reposting reviews from this blog over there.

The American Culture is not a conservative blog, as Sam Karnick describes it, but a classical liberal blog. Its two principle er… principles are freedom of expression, and personal responsibility as the mechanism that makes freedom possible. Sam writes:

I don’t have any formal ground rules on story/essay angles other than this: we’re for liberty, and we enjoy and appreciate culture, including popular culture. To wit, we don’t just complain about the culture but instead report on what’s good as well. To this end, it’s important to note a principle I consider essential and which nearly everybody on the right fails to understand: depiction is not advocacy. Instead of blindly totting up instances of various events in a work and then complaining about it being too dirty and not at all like The Sound of Music (which is of course a darn good film but not the only way to communicate edifyingly), we go deeper and consider the real meaning of it. Thus a book full of gory murders can be very edifying while a book about a Christian family can be very bad art. It’s the assumptions and thoughts they purvey that count.

I think that’s an extremely important principle. It means (which ought to be obvious) that a book that deals with adultery is not necessarily a book in favor of adultery. A book that depicts bigotry is not necessarily a bigoted book (a principle generally out of fashion today). A book that wrestles with questions about the goodness of God is not necessarily blasphemous. Any subject, no matter how disturbing, can be handled morally in a moral story. It’s all in the treatment of the material.

(Just don’t ask me to watch a movie with two guys kissing. Ick.)

Goofing

What Would Seuss Have Said?

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A friend on Facebook gave us this the other day: “Rewrite lines from famous movies as Dr. Seuss might have written them.”

Here are a couple starters.

Arne Duncan Joins Michelle Obama For NEA's Read Across America Event

1. Play it again, Sam. Play it for me. Play it for Suzy and Fibber McGee. Play it the way that you played it before on the flute, the kazoo, and violadore.

2. Inconceivable!

You keep saying that word, but do you know

if that word will take where you want to go.

Now, what will you do with that? I’m looking at you, Book. What will you do with that?

Authors

R.I.P. Benedikt Benedikz

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Our friend Dale Nelson sent me this nearly a year-old link to the Times (UK) obituary for his friend Benedikt Benedikz, an Icelandic-born English librarian and scholar who sounds like the kind of intellectual character they just don’t manufacture anymore. Singer, linguist, Viking scholar, and other valuable things too numerous to mention.

Fiction

Interview with Joshua Weigel

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Joshua Weigel directed The Butterfly Circus, which we linked to a while back. He says, “We have already had quite a few people approach us about turning The Butterfly Circus into a feature film and we will be spending the coming months writing the feature script. From the start we had a much bigger story in mind and feel it has the potential to be even better as a full length feature.”

I wish him the best.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Reading

But what do you call the thing beneath it?

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Just when I was wondering what to blog about, Loren Eaton at I Saw Lightning Fall uses… that word!

He links to an interesting book review by Newsweek’s Jennie Yabroff, dealing with the thorny subject of… subtext!

The title in question is Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed, a novel about a lawyer struggling with an undiagnosed compulsion to endlessly walk until he keels over. An odd and evocative premise, one that Yabroff wrestles with mightily. She initially wonders if the affliction may be a metaphor for environmental destruction or the search for the divine or the nature of addiction, but concludes that it doesn’t really matter. “What if the book is about nothing more than a man who takes really long walks?” she muses before launching into a discussion about the dangers of overanalyzing….

This leaves me no choice but to quote one of the best movies of the 1990s, Whit Stillman’s brilliant Barcelona, the story of two American cousins grappling with cultural differences, sexual mores, love, and anti-Americanism in 1980s Spain. This movie contributed one of the greatest bits of dialogue ever placed in two actors’ mouths:

FRED: Maybe you can clarify something for me. Since I’ve been, you know, waiting for the fleet to show up, I’ve read a lot, and–

TED: Really?

FRED: And one of the things that keeps popping up is this about “subtext.” Plays, novels, songs–they all have a “subtext,” which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind. So subtext we know. But what do you call the message or meaning that’s right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that. What do you call what’s above the subtext?

TED: The text.

FRED: OK, that’s right, but they never talk about that.

Note to self: Must get the DVD.

Poetry

Congratulations to Ashley Anna McHugh

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Congratulations to Ashley Anna McHugh for winning “the tenth annual New Criterion Poetry Prize, for a book length manuscript of poems that pay close attention to form.”

Here’s a good poem of her’s called “Shepherd Road.” It’s beautiful.

I believe she maintains this blog, Last Year’s Almanac.

Reviews

Film review: Gone Baby Gone

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Gone Baby Gone is my favorite of Dennis Lehane’s novels, which is saying a great deal. Fan of series that I am, I especially enjoy his series books about detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Genero, of which this one is (in my opinion) the best. I missed the movie when it was released (briefly) in theaters, but I finally rented it from Netflix and watched it this past weekend.

The movie is very faithful to the book. Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Genero (Michelle Monaghan) are called in by the family to investigate the high profile disappearance of a little girl, kidnapped while her drug user/alcoholic mother was distracted. In cooperation with the police, they follow various leads, trying to pry the lid off a story that seems at once too neat, and infested with too many loose ends. The final payoff prompts a heartbreaking choice for Kenzie.

It’s a well-done movie, worthy of its source. The performances are excellent, the Boston locations perfect. I think (my memory may be fooling me) that the final crisis may have been presented with more ambivalence in the book. As it stands here, Kenzie’s ultimate decision seems a little hard to understand.

I don’t remember the language in the book being as rough as it was in the movie. I suspect that’s only because it’s less jarring on the page than when the words actually fall on your ears in your own living room.

But I wonder if that didn’t contribute to the movie’s lackluster box office performance.

Somebody (it may have been Michael Medved, or one of his guests) has pointed out that there’s really no economic incentive for film makers to use a lot of profanity in their movies.

Other vices have (let’s admit it) market appeal. A sex scene with a nude actress will admittedly sell tickets. Extreme, graphic violence will put lots of bodies in theater seats.

But nobody thinks, “Boy! I sure want to see this movie! I’ll get to hear a lot of F Bombs!”

I suppose the makers of Gone Baby Gone would have felt they were selling out if they’d toned the language down. But I have an idea they might have made money by it.

Reviews

Film review: How to Train Your Dragon

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As announced last week, the other Vikings and I were on hand Saturday morning for a sneak preview of the new Disney animated flick, How to Train Your Dragon. We posed for pictures, gave away stickers and temporary tattoos to the children, and terrified people with our impassioned denunciations of horned helmets.

This was the big IMAX theater out at the Minnesota Zoo, in Apple Valley. The theater people couldn’t have been nicer, and we got in to see the film for free (I marched past the ticket takers brandishing my sword, crying, “THIS is my ticket!”).

How did I like the movie? Well, it’s complicated.

One of my companions put it well when he said, “I’d have loved this film when I was eight.” It’s a well-done and clever movie, with interesting characters, good dialogue, and outstanding visuals (we saw it in 3-D, which made it even better). If you’re thinking of taking your kids to it, I won’t tell you no. It was lots of fun, and pretty harmless.

And yet, I have objections.

And it’s not just to the horned helmets. Continue reading Film review: How to Train Your Dragon →

Book Reviews, Creative Culture