Profanity aside, this reminder of what things were like when we were young is pretty funny. (By ‘we’, I’m talking about people who grew up in the early 1980s.)

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There was a fascinating segment yesterday on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday about the “Millennium Problems”, the most important or most notorious unsolved problems in mathematics. I’d step up and try to solve these — the million-dollar prize for each solution is tempting — but I’m afraid I would be undone by those three words that struck terror (and still do) in the hearts of millions of math students: Show All Work.

Also via NPR: One of my favorite bits of Shakespeare is in King Richard II, Act II, Scene 1, where John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, gives a speech about England that includes the lines:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars…

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…

After reading this, I wonder whether the Bard, if writing these lines today, would have to include a phrase like “This land of trousers”.

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I’m pretty sure Stephen King is skeptical about the war, for example. I know his politics. But he hasn’t made the leap so common to others in the scribbling, warbling and gesturing arts – he doesn’t think we’re all dying to hear his prescriptions for Middle East foreign policy. Oh, interview him on the matter and he might pop off, but I can’t imagine him sitting down, firing up a Winston Light, and telling himself that this 1200 word essay will change the world, because people will think: hey, it’s Stephen KING talking! He wrote “The Stand,” and his fictional account of the repercussions of biological weapons programs gives him a unique perspective. Let’s lend an ear!

That’s James Lileks, in an introductory paragraph to his response to an antiwar article written by novelist John LeCarre. I confessed last week that I’m no longer a regular reader of Lileks, because quite frankly I had my fill long ago of “Bomb Iraq; bomb Iraq; dumb liberals; Isn’t Gnat cute; bomb Iraq; I took Gnat to the mall; dumb liberals”. But this quote is not only dull and predictable, it’s actively stupid.

First, it’s predictable because no prominent left-leaning person in the arts can open his or her mouth these days to voice a left-leaning opinion on any issue without being met by a chorus of right-leaning persons yelling for him or her to shut up and just keep making movies or writing books or whatever and leave the Important Political Stuff to the grownups who know all about such things, as if a person’s occupation has any a priori bearing on the quality of any commentary they might provide. It’s always, “Shut up, Barbra Streisand! Shut up, Ed Asner! Shut up, Sean Penn! Shut up, John Le Carre! Shut up, Martin Scorsese! You’re actors and writers, not pundits, so shut up and just do what you’re supposed to do!” The obvious rejoinder, I think, is that these people are Americans (well, not Le Carre, but he’s being tarred with the same brush) and thus they have the same rights of free speech as anyone else, and thus the same right to push for their causes as anyone else. The right-wing meme, that famous people should be quiet, is pretty weird — ironic, even, considering the previous occupation of the right’s patron saint, Ronald Reagan. So, I think that if the right is going to hand an open mike to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Selleck and Ted Nugent, they should stop complaining when the Streisands and Asners and Scorseses of the world do their own thing on their own respective “open mike nights”.

But further, in the specific case of Lileks whining about John Le Carre, I wonder if Lileks knows the first thing about Le Carre. We’re talking about a writer who, before he became a novelist, worked in the British foreign service; and we’re talking about a writer whose novels deal with geopolitical realities. Now, are there any novelists who are taken seriously by the right in this country, by virtue of their subject matter and expertise on such things? Tom Clancy, perhaps? I don’t agree with all of what Le Carre says; I’m pretty much on the side of invading Iraq, for instance. But quite frankly, on matters of international perspective and foreign relations, I have to say: Yes, James. I’m going to listen to what John Le Carre has to say about these things, based on his experience and his fictional accounts thereof. In any case, he’s got a lot more by way of credentials in that regard than a pseudo-humorist from Minneapolis.

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After a layoff of a couple of weeks, I’m back to selling books on Ebay. The current batch is at left, under “Marketplace”, so have a look.

They shall bidssss, oh yessss, nassssty Hobbitssesss….

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Sometimes I think that the real reason I read Steven Den Beste is because, by reading him, I spare myself the annoyance of getting my updates on military hardware via Tom Clancy novels.

Steven also has been lately given President Bush and his administration a lot of credit for manipulating the administration’s opponents. While Bush has certainly managed to make something of a cottage industry of being underestimated, I’m not prepared to elevate his political strategizing to the level of genius that SDB assumes — especially given the gutless, “Thank you sir, may I have another!” nature of the Democratic party these days. Beating the Detroit Lions on a regular basis doesn’t make one the 1985 Chicago Bears.

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Occasionally I will re-watch a generally highly-regarded movie that I personally didn’t like, in an attempt to see what it is that I’m missing. More often than not I end up not changing my mind. Dead Poets Society is a prime example.

I was in my freshman year of college when DPS opened, and it made a pretty big impression then; as I recall, the on-campus screening of the film was packed. It’s pretty easy to understand why; the John Keating character (Robin Williams) is everything that most students would want in a teacher — funny, challenging but not in a boring way, wise without being condescending, unorthodox, et cetera. He’s one of those teachers who has the uncanny ability to connect with just about every student in his class, but his methods of connection and liberal views end up getting him fired. It’s not a terribly new story; there was an episode of The Wonder Years that followed the same track, albeit without a suicide.

So I just watched DPS again, and I still report the same reaction: the film’s message is not presented fairly, the characters are all cyphers, the stirring ending is not stirring.

First, the message. The film is basically a paean to the sentiment Carpe diem!, and it shows us a group of prep-school boys who each, in their own way, come to an opportunity to “seize the day”. This is Mr. Keating’s apparent real goal in his teaching, because although he is ostensibly a poetry teacher he is shown teaching relatively little poetry. A film about poets, with the word “poets” in its very title, should be loaded with poetry and thoughts thereof, but in DPS there is almost no emphasis on poetry as art, as opposed to poetry as a source of inspirational slogans. Just about every poem quoted in the film is only quoted in part, and even then the parts quoted are selected to embellish Mr. Keating’s preachings of non-conformity. Predictably, one of these poems is Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”, even though it is not at all clear that this poem actually celebrates non-conformity the way so many people immediately assume it does. (More on that here.) Further, many of Mr. Keating’s school lessons are so bizarre that they seem to have little, if anything, to do with poetry at all. What is the point of the scene where the boys line up, shout a line of poetry and then kick a ball? or the scene where they are marching about in the school courtyard? I guess these “lessons” are intriguing in themselves, but I kept wondering: if Mr. Keating is such a teacher of poetry, then why is it these kids never seem to develop a fascination with poetry? That’s what a good teacher does: he or she makes the student interested in something that they had never been interested in before, or at least he teaches them something about it that they never forget.

The best teacher I had in high school was my geometry teacher, even though she was a very prickly soul and few people would ever describe her as pleasant. (Imagine the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld reincarnated as a high-school geometry teacher, and you’ve got her.) Why do I consider her the best teacher, then? Because I still remember things from her class, to this day. I remember something about geometry, and I still tend to think along the lines of the proofs she required us to do, over and over again.

Mr. Keating’s students, though, never come to love poetry or develop an attachment to it, a need for it. They only come to love him. Watching DPS, I never get the feeling that these boys are learning anything.

Second, the characters. You name the stereotype from a movie set in academia, and it’s represented here. There’s the nerd who is constantly worrying if every utterance by the teacher will end up on a test; there’s the kid whose dreams are being trampled by the overbearing father; there’s the youngster who is terrified to open his mouth; there’s the rebel-wannabe; there’s the strict headmaster; et cetera. We are shown a school dominated by a faculty of white-haired old men, and a single brown-haired young teacher.

But worse, the characters don’t even really stay in character if the script does not call for them to do so. Mr. Keating counsels young Neil Perry to talk to his father about his passion for acting, but we are shown time and again that Mr. Perry has no regard at all for young Neil’s feelings. So, in a scene toward the end when Neil finally, desperately shouts, “Let me tell you what I feel”, the last thing that should come out of Mr. Perry’s mouth is “Okay, tell me what you feel.” But this is precisely what he says, and not only is this completely out of character, but it dooms the entire story-arc concerning Neil Perry. Given his opportunity to speak his mind, Neil clams up and says nothing; his next act is to get his father’s gun and kill himself. Neil’s suicide, then, shifts from being about Neil’s dreams being hopelessly stifled to being about Neil’s cowardice. In the end, Neil turns out to be the real coward of the film. Perhaps this was intentional, but I don’t think so — nothing in the film is subtle, so I have a hard time accepting subtlety here in the film’s seminal event. I think we’re really supposed to feel sorry for Neil and his plight, but as he sits alone in the study after his father leaves the room, I’m thinking, “You gutless twerp.”

Finally, the falsity of the ending is as stupefying to me as ever. We’re clearly supposed to know that Mr. Keating is being unfairly railroaded, but an air of cluelessness surrounds him, so as the film’s last twenty minutes or so play out I can’t help but wonder how he hasn’t seen any of this coming. We get the obligatory scene where one of the boys sings to the administration like a stuck pig — a handy, convenient villain in a story that in the hands of better writers would have had no real villains — and then the horrid last scene, where Mr. Keating’s former students salute him after his firing by standing on their desks and calling him “O Captain! my Captain!” for the last time — in front of the headmaster, to boot. Rebellion wins out, and in some small way the boys do the right thing in the end, and we’re allowed to believe that Mr. Keating has made a difference, or something like that.

But the problem here is, the boys do their desktop climb after they’ve all signed the letter that gets Mr. Keating fired. When presented with the administration’s whitewashed version of events, they say “Yep, that’s how it happened, we’re sorry, sir”…and only when everyone is safe do they climb atop their desks. Well, I can’t buy that. What the boys are really saying here is, “Gee, Mr. Keating, we had a chance to do the right thing but we didn’t do that, so here’s a nifty consolation prize.” If they had to end the movie with the boys standing on desks, then it should have been done this way: The boys are brought to the classroom, where the headmaster waits with the boys’ parents, Mr. Keating, and the Trustees or whomever. There the boys are confronted with Mr. Keating on the one hand, and their families and everyone else on the other; and there they are each given a copy of the letter containing the administration’s version of events and a pen. They’re all told to sign it, and Mr. Keating is already packed because he’s about to be fired. Then Ethan Hawke can climb atop his desk and tearfully say “O Captain! my Captain!”, followed by the other boys. Sure, they’d all be expelled; sure, Mr. Keating would still be fired on some half-assed pretense; but the boys will have done the right thing. They’ll have struck a genuine blow for Integrity and Truth and Justice and the American Way, instead of the pretty much useless gesture they strike otherwise. The way the film ends as is, only one of the boys actually stands up for his principles; only one of the boys is given the chance to save his own neck and decides not to do so. That’s Charlie (“Nuwanda”), who gives the turncoat boy a bloody nose and gets expelled for his troubles.

Basically, Dead Poets Society is a very watchable movie — wonderful photography and acting, nice music — but it’s also a very false one. These themes were explored to much truer effect in The Man Without a Face, a film of complex relationships in which there are no easy villains and no false gestures. If you want to see a film about the complexity of the relationship between a good teacher and a good student, watch that film and leave Dead Poets Society on the rental shelf.

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Writer Cory Doctorow, one of SF’s leading up-and-comers, has just come out with his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Doctorow has made the novel available for free download, in addition to the “dead tree edition” available at your local Borders. (Link is to the download site.)

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Naturally, there are questions in the second act that will have to be answered in the third act. I guess it depends on what you go to a movie for. I figure there was at least $11 worth of entertainment in Empire. So, if you paid four bucks and didn’t get an ending, you’re still seven bucks ahead of the game.

That’s Harrison Ford, speaking way back in 1982 during filming of Return of the Jedi. Naturally, I’m bringing this up because I saw Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers two nights ago.

Much has been made of the “Middle Installment” problem where trilogies are concerned: the fact that the middle segment of the story poses special difficulties, specifically that it can have neither a proper beginning nor a proper ending, and thus makes an unsatisfying stand-alone experience. The problem I have with this “problem” is that in the best trilogies I have encountered — Star Wars, Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry, Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever — the “problem” doesn’t occur; and if the problem does occur, as it does in the LOTR novels by Tolkien, to note the existence of the problem is to confuse the nature of the work in the first place. The Lord of the Rings, in book form, is not a “trilogy” at all, in the sense of being a story told in three distinct segments. It is a singular story, divided into three parts more for convenience than for narrative reasons.

So, does the “trilogy problem” exist in the film version of The Two Towers? Many critics have complained that it has, but I have to report that as far as I am concerned, it does not. Certainly, the story is left wide open with many things unresolved; but there are still arcs within the film that are completed to some level of satisfaction: the fate of the people of Rohan in their war against Isengard, the fates of Merry and Pippin, the fall of Frodo and Sam into the hands of Faramir. Reading a lot of the reviews, I was left with the distinct impression that The Two Towers simply began, and equally simply it reached a cliffhanger and allowed the credits to roll, but that wasn’t the case. Of course, maybe it’s that I know the books well and thus I know what is to come, and thus I am not particularly vexed by the cliffhangers. I walked out of the theater perfectly satisfied that I had seen a good film, partly in and of itself but also partly because of the deepening and extension of the story which began a year ago. (It should be noted that this is part-and-parcel of trilogies that tell a single, larger story, as opposed to trilogies like the Indiana Jones movies which are only trilogies in the sense of there being three of them.)

Some other observations on the film follow.

:: My biggest complaint about Fellowship of the Ring was addressed in The Two Towers: the sense of journey and of location. All the traveling that went on in FOTR was not grounded very well, because the film didn’t convey a sense of Middle Earth’s geography. One of the pleasures of reading the books is constantly referring to the maps to track the progress of the characters; I have even found that the novel FOTR takes on a sense of impending doom as the Company gets ever closer to Mordor. But, in TTT, there were several shots of maps. There weren’t quite enough, but it was still nice to see.

:: Gollum was amazing, the best CGI character I’ve ever seen. (Full disclosure: I am one of nine persons in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy who felt that Jar Jar Binks was actually a good character.) It wasn’t just that his movements and interactions with Frodo and Sam were lifelike; it was that his CGI features actually conveyed emotion. I could sense the conflict racking this character, the tiny flicker of good within him that is nevertheless completely dominated by the part of him twisted by the Ring. It was absolutely crucial that the film nail this, because we have to know what awaits Frodo if he fails in his mission. And nail it they did. (Andy Serkis’s voice work as Gollum was superb, but since his body-movements formed much of the basis for the animations of Gollum, I think he should be Oscar-eligible. Of course, he won’t be, because the Academy is a collection of stodgy farts who would rather reward a dull, paint-by-numbers effort like A Beautiful Mind than recognize a film that is likely to stand as a milestone in cinematic history like FOTR….)

:: I envisioned Edoras being a bit bigger.

:: Some people have complained about the degree to which Gimli provided comic relief in the film, but it didn’t bother me much.

:: I liked actually seeing Merry and Pippin going to war with the Ents, and Pippin’s clever (!) bit of inducement. In the book, we saw very little of this; instead, Theoden and friends arrive at Isengard to find the whole place overrun and Merry and Pippin lounging on the front step, smoking and whiling away the time. This worked better.

:: Sorry, Sean: now that I’ve seen TTT, I am firmly in Liv Tyler’s camp. Not only do I like her as Arwen, I endorse her. So there. Release the hounds!

:: The film could have been helped in the transitions department. The cuts from one storyline to another were a bit jarring at times — particularly one transition from Merry and Pippin to Frodo and Sam. This is one reason why, in the Star Wars movies, George Lucas uses wipes in his transitions.

:: At times I felt as if the film assumes that one has seen the Extended Version of FOTR. I’m pretty sure the camoflage aspects of the Elven cloaks were not established in the theatrical version of the earlier film; ditto the leaf brooches that the members of the Fellowship wore. And how did Frodo know Gollum’s original name? Was that also covered in the Extended Version of the first film?

:: If these movies don’t bring back long hair and beards in men’s fashions, I don’t know what will. I’m halfway there, though! (I have the long hair. I used to have a beard, but not currently.)

:: Another complaint of mine about FOTR — the fact that the earlier film didn’t really establish, for me, Tolkien’s idea of the Ending of the Third Age — was also dealt with beautifully. I found the entire “Status of the Elves” passage in the middle of the film utterly mesmerizing.

:: I loved the way Jackson set up the Battle of Helm’s Deep, so that it was able to just keep getting worse and worse and worse, although toward the end of it I was thinking like the poor fellow in Monty Python’s Life of Brian who has been condemned to death for saying “Jehovah”, and is warned before his stoning not to make things worse for himself: “Worse? How could it get any bloody worse? Jehovah! Jehovahjehovahjehovah!!!” In short, Jackson really pushed my suspension of disbelief to the absolute edge here. First, they retreat to the wall, then they retreat to the keep, then they retreat inside the keep, then they retreat inside the King’s hall, and so on. I was this close to uttering the Magical Words of Disbelief Death (“Aww, come on!”) when Gandalf showed up with Eomer. Of course, at that moment I nearly cheered, and I might have if I’d been seeing this film on opening day in a packed theater. (Resolution: See The Return of the King on opening night.)

:: Howard Shore’s score is wonderful. I’ll probably generate a longer commentary than that sometime, but for now I’ll note that I loved the way he turned his ethereal, Middle-Eastern flavored theme for Lothlorien into a battle march for the Elves. The sound mix, though, didn’t help matters as the music was often too loud and overwhelmed some of the dialogue.

I guess that’s it for now. I found The Two Towers remarkable. Bring on December!

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Kevin Drum reports today on NASA’s desire to start developing a nuclear-powered drive for space travel, presumably for a future manned mission to Mars. (He got his information from a Los Angeles Times article, to which registration is required for reading. I’m not registered and I blanched at providing the LA Times all the information that they say they needed for their registration, so I didn’t bother and thus was not able to read the article in question.)

I’m really of mixed mind on this. It’s always been my conviction that, if we don’t kill everyone somehow, five or six hundred years from now this era that we’re in right now will be seen as the time when the true Space Age began, when humanity first started on the road to leaving its home planet. It’s always been my conviction that space travel and eventual colonization are absolutely essential to the long-term survival of our species; and thus, we should absolutely be devoting a substantial amount of our resources to establishing a permanent human presence in space, and then on the Moon, and so forth.

But on the other hand, I’m not sure if we’ve gone about it in anything resembling the right way. The International Space Station, currently under construction, is a low-orbit item that probably won’t serve as any kind of long-term outpost; we’ve ignored the Moon entirely ever since we accomplished our real goal of beating the Russians there; so on and so forth. If we are to begin working on a manned mission to Mars, then I think such a mission needs to be performed not with the goal of “going because it is there”, but rather, “going because we know we’re going to have people living there”. In short, I’d like to see NASA and our space industries shift from the going as their primary justifications, toward colonization.

So, if we’re still interested in Mars (and we’d better be), for now our focus should be on robotic missions there. Instead of developing new propulsion systems for interplanetary travel, let’s work on colonizing the Moon. Let’s actually develop the “spaceplane”, and start moving beyond the Shuttle — whose core technology is approaching thirty years of age. I sometimes get the feeling, and this is one of those times, that NASA is trying to follow up the space-age equivalent of the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk with the development of the SST.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

“Hansel and Gretel”, by Kay Nielsen (1886-1957).

:: Although Kay Nielsen’s work was underappreciated during his lifetime, so much so that he died in poverty, he has recently been “discovered” as one of the 20th century’s great illustrators. His greatest claim-to-fame was in the conceptual artwork he did for the “Night On Bald Mountain” sequence in Walt Disney’s film Fantasia. The image links to a good biographical precis of Nielsen’s life and work; this site contains a very large repository of Nielsen’s work.

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