Month: January 2004

Wow. Whenever I need a dose of fanboy wanking-ness, AICN never fails to disappoint. Case in point: this article on some casting for a new Superman movie.

Apparently, whatever producers are currently working on the long-dead, consigned-to-development-for-the-last-ten-years-purgatory Superman franchise are close to signing Beyonce Knowles to play Lois Lane. And, as you might expect, this has the TalkBackers all a-twitter. Just go scroll through the TalkBacks. Not the actual posts themselves; I couldn’t even inflict those on myself, much less my unwitting readers. Just looking at their subject headers is enough to establish how seriously these people need to get out once in a while.

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Bara and the Alps, revisited.

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I finally finished The Odyssey the other night, and I just have a couple of things to add to what I wrote the other day, when I was almost done.

:: The battle in Odysseus’s house, and how it began, made me think: Just how old is the storytelling convention of the “True King”, or whatever, being the only one able to perform a certain task? In some places, it’s pulling a sword from a stone; in others, it’s fitting one’s foot into a slipper of glass; here, it’s stringing the bow and shooting the arrow through the twelve axes. I wonder what the earliest occurence of that motif might be.

:: I found it easier to accept, on the basis of the morality of an earlier day (much earlier, of course), the killing of all the suitors. I found less acceptible the subsequent killing of all the women.

:: I’m not entirely certain as to why Odysseus found it necessary to make up yet another fictional account of who he is for Laertes’s benefit.

Now, by looking at my 2004 reading list, it’s clear that a big goal of mine is to delve into the “source material” for so much Western storytelling: the ancient works and national epics whose themes and motifs still wind their way through our culture. However, I also believe in “changing the tone” quite often, so after pushing myself through The Iliad and The Odyssey back-to-back over the last few months, I’m ready for a “cleansing of the palate” before I move on to either the Icelandic sagas or the Nibelungenlied. So now I’m reading Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, which I have seen cited elsewhere — and more than once — as “the funniest book ever written”. Well, we’ll see — but the book’s initial scene, in which our narrator becomes convinced he suffers from every malady known to the medicine of his day save one, quite funny indeed.

And here is a neat looking HTML edition of Three Men in a Boat, which I found via Professor Bainbridge. The edition I’m reading, which is borrowed from Buffalo’s wonderful library system, has no date but does include the ilustrations featured on this site and is clearly quite old, so I wonder if this is one of the 1889 editions.

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Most of the world’s great violinists and cellists, people such as Nadia Solerno-Sonnenberg and Yo Yo Ma, ply their trade on the famous instruments made by the great instrument-makers of Cremona, Italy over two hundred years ago — names such as Stradivari and Guarneri. Sadly, though, as these instruments continue to soar in value, they are less and less likely to be owned, and played, by musicians. Classical musicians simply can’t afford them, which means that they will end up being owned by large institutions such as banks and large museums.

It appears that the great violins and violas and cellos will fall silent over the next few decades, as the instruments pass into the ownership not of those who can play them but those who can afford to own them.

(Link via Sean, who finds some pretty good stuff when he’s not scanning Ebay for used jerseys once worn by Tom Brady.)

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Michelle reports on Bridge of Birds, the book I in turn reported on a few days ago. Michelle brings a bit more perspective to the book, knowing as she does slightly more about Chinese history than I do.

I know that Chairman Mao is dead, and that’s about it. He had been dead for ten years or so when I took the high school class in which we covered Chinese history — for a month or so — and the textbooks we had for that class had been printed while Mao was still alive. In fact, at a lot of points in that year’s history classes, our teacher had to amend the text: “This guy they’re talking about in present tense is dead now, and you’ll notice that the book speaks favorably about that guy, but he turned out to be a dictator and killed a lot of people before he was exiled. Oh, and he’s dead now, too. And we’re gonna skip the chapter on this country, because that country doesn’t exist anymore.”

So, can anyone recommend a good, preferably one-volume general history of China and/or the Far East?

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OK, is there anyone else who suspects that a peyote-induced vision might well look like an episode of The Teletubbies?

And do they ever make new episodes of Sesame Street, or are we doomed to watch the same fourteen or so shows in rotation until adolescence? I’m getting pretty tired of the whole “Baby Bear’s family has a new baby” story arc.

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Teresa Nielsen Hayden points out that Joe Lieberman looks like Senator Palpatine. I guess he does, sort-of, but it’s hard to imagine Lieberman saying things like, “Viceroy, I don’t want this stunted slime in my sight again!”

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Mickey (who, btw, is a Prince Among Men), reports on the Oscar nominations for Return of the King. In honesty, I have to admit that I liked The Two Towers more, but I hope that these filmmakers get their due recognition for what really is a pretty staggering accomplishment.

(BTW, the “circle-strikethroughs” on his sidebar aren’t helping. Mickey’s blog still makes me hungry.)

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One of Saddam Hussein’s many misdeeds was the draining of the marshlands of southern Iraq, not just for the ecological impact but also for the complete disruption of a water-based culture that had thrived in that region for many, many years. John Hardy has a very impressive summation of that region. One of my hopes for post-Saddam Iraq is the restoration of those marshlands (inasmuch as they even can be restored).

Go read John’s post, and give the pictures time to load.

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I watched a bit of the film As Good As It Gets when it aired on TV a couple of weeks ago; this is one of those movies I can sit down and watch the rest of, no matter what I’m doing when it happens to come on. And in watching the final scene, I realized that Melvin Udall’s admission of love is one of the best-written such declarations I’ve yet come across, because it’s so perfect in the way it springs from his very personality.

Melvin, you may recall, is a terribly selfish individual, and even as he grows in the course of the film he still views nearly everything in the prism of how it affects him. He is in love with Carol (Helen Hunt), one of the waitresses at the local restaurant where he eats breakfast every day, but in the course of the film he continually comes close to saying the perfect thing only to ride it right off the rails by turning selfish again.

So, when it comes time for him to “get with the program” and tell Carol how much she means to him, he doesn’t go off on some weird tangent in which he objectifies her: he sounds like that’s what he’s doing, but then he routes the conversation right back to himself. This is what he says:

“Hey, I’ve got a great compliment for you….I’m the only one on the face of the earth who realizes that you’re the greatest woman on earth. I’m the only one who appreciates how amazing you are in every single thing you do — in every single thought you have… in how you are with Spencer — Spence [Carol’s son] … in how you say what you mean and how you almost always mean something that’s all about being straight and good… I think most people miss that about you and I watch wondering how they can watch you bring them food and clear their dishes and never get that they have just met the greatest woman alive… And the fact that I get it makes me feel great… about me!”

And hearing that last bit, Carol realizes that he’s not making this up, because he can only describe his love for her in terms of himself. She knows that he loves her, but that he frames it in a way that is still about him. Now, I’m not sure what kind of lives these two people can go on to have after the credits roll, but it delights me that these screenwriters (Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks) know their characters well enough to know the only way that Melvin Udall could ever tell Carol that he loves her.

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