The Denis Review (One N Silent S)

Alice in a 3D Spectacle

2010-03-06T11:57:00.007-07:00

Yesterday I saw Tim Burton's new Alice in Wonderland. I saw it in 3D, which is definitely the way to see it, as the key to enjoying the film is to let yourself get caught up in Burton's spectacular visual imagery.

The story is a pretty standard Hollywood female-empowerment adventure about adult Alice's return to Wonderland (more properly called "Underland," in one of the little plot points that are potentially confusing without adding any meaning), but just like Avatar, the plot is just there string together the moments of visual wizardry that are the real meat of the film. The use of computer animation to make Alice shrink and grow is the best of the visual effects, and Helena Bonham Carter's performance as the Red Queen is well-complimented by the visual of her giant, heart-shaped head perching on her tiny body.

The movie only uses Lewis Carroll's work as a jumping-off point, so an essential part of enjoying it is being willing to accept the ransacking of classic literature. Of course, that's pretty much essential for watching anything with literary origins that comes out of Hollywood, so if you enjoy Tim Burton's style of film-making then you'll find something to like (though probably not love) in Alice. It's the sort of movie in which amazing visuals are held back by flawed writing, leaving the final product pretty good but not great.

The DCPA is giving up on the future of theatre in Denver

2010-02-21T18:19:00.011-07:00

This blog went on something of an unannounced hiatus last spring when my free time and writing energy were consumed by finishing my masters thesis, but that's all done now, so here is my return to action (at least until April, when I leave with the Peace Corps to teach English in Kyrgyzstan, at which point I hope to transition this into a blog about that experience).

* * *

It should be clear from some of my previous posts that I go pretty regularly to see shows at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and the availability of good theatre in Denver is important to me. In light of that, I was shocked and appalled by the news today that the DCPA is cutting the National Theatre Conservatory. At first glance this may seem to be just one more of the countless tragic minor tragedies of the recession, but a closer look reveals just how much the DCPA board is shortsightedly and dangerously throwing away something of great value to the future of theatre in the city of Denver.

The NTC is one of the top theatre graduate programs and the only congressionally chartered MFA program in the country. Like all forms of education, training top-notch actors is an investment in the future of theatre. In the same way that giving a man a fish is less work on that one day than teaching him how to fish, education rarely looks like a good deal if you only focus on short-term return on investment. The DCPA claims that the recession (including less success from recent touring Broadway shows) is forcing them to end the program in order to save $1.2 million that will redirected toward making sure that there are no cuts to the Denver Center Theatre Company and the Denver Center Attractions (those big Broadway shows). I don't dispute that maintaining the quality of the DCTC should be the top priority, but completely ending the NTC for $1.2 million/year is throwing away the future in order to avoid any uncomfortable belt-tightening in the present.

Like it or not, the value of an education is closely related to the reputation of the institution, and by completely ending the program, the DCPA board is throwing away all of the value that has been accumulated by the NTC name, and the tricky thing about good reputations is that they are easy to lose and very difficult to regain. Whatever the financial situation of the DCPA, their decision to eliminate the NTC rather than simply changing it says one of two things. One possibility is that they are so foolishly short-sighted that they cannot see that completely ending the program to save money during a time of hardship is like a panicky investor who sells his valuable assets when their price is at their lowest and then rues his folly when things recover and he sees how much value he has thrown away. The more frightening possibility is that they have bought into the prophesies of the doom-sayers who argue that theatre is a dying medium, and that they have decided to sacrifice the NTC in order to prop up their core programs for as long as possible until the whole institution goes belly up. Either way, this incredibly short-sighted decision casts doubt upon the future of the DCPA and the whole Denver theatre community.

I've groped for some way to see this as anything other than a disaster, and the best that I could come up with is that maybe the DCPA board is only pretending to be stupid and is really cynical and manipulative. The phenomenon of donor fatigue is well-documented, and one of the best ways to get people to open their wallets is to manufacture a crisis (just look at the way campaigning politicians have mastered the art of spinning each new development into an opportunity for their supporters to give money). They are saying right now that they will be eliminating the program with no plans to ever bring it back, but everyone knows that they would reconsider in a heartbeat if a deep-pocketed donor offered a big gift to keep the NTC going. Sad as it is, I actually find myself hoping that the board decided that making this shocking announcement suddenly and without warning was the best way to galvanize potential donors into providing the support that they need to get through the recession. Unfortunately, it seems equally possible that they might be killing the NTC as a way to spur donors into giving money that will go towards the theatre company and Denver Center Attractions: "Better donate now, or the plays you enjoy might suffer the same fate as the conservatory."

I could keep listing all of the different reasons why this surprise decision is really stupid and dangerous, but there's little to be gained by it. It all boils down to the fact that throwing away the future to "save" the present is a horrible mistake, and I can only hope that we will not someday look back at this as the beginning of the end of quality theatre in Denver.

Next to Normal is Extraordinary

2009-05-08T14:49:00.007-06:00

Back in January I had the chance to see an absolutely fantastic musical at the Arena Stage in Washington D.C. Next to Normal is now on Broadway, and I strongly encourage anyone who is or will be in New York to see it. It is one of those rare works in which every character is both unique and profoundly compelling, and this montage can barely begin to show how engaging and deeply thought-provoking the show is.

At long last: an official "Where the Wild Things Are" trailer!

2009-03-26T09:58:00.005-06:00

Of all the movies that have come out in the last few years or are currently in the works, this is the one I am most excited about. This is so lovely that it manages to simultaneously give me chills and make me feel warm inside.

My Favoritest Animal Ever!

2009-03-18T14:36:00.003-06:00

Like most people, as a child I had a favorite animal that I was passionate about. I would get excited about anything that had even a tangential connection to dolphins, and I often felt that being one would be much more fun that being a human. Watching this video made me feel like I was ten years old again:

Magic bullets are for werewolves, not education reform

2009-02-09T12:15:00.003-07:00

My mom passed along a recent piece by Malcolm Gladwell on education reform in The New Yorker. At the very least, the article does a good job of provoking thought and discussion, even if (especially if) one disagrees with him.

Gladwell is right about the problem of selecting teachers when there are no reliable predictors of quality, but the comparison to financial services is a bit misleading. "What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?" is the wrong question to be asking. If it were just a question of spending as much money on teaching candidates as we do on financial advisers, then it would have been solved already. Because teaching has so much more social significance than how we manage our money, there are different political pressures that would come into play.

Imagine what would happen to a financial services firm if their shareholders had a bunch of other priorities above making money. There are lots of self-described "single-issue" voters, and I have yet to hear anyone present a way insulate a teacher selection process like the one Gladwell suggests from the pressures of taxpayers who would reject, say, all teachers who believe in evolution or anyone who opposes gay marriage. Even post-Obama, there are lot of people who would be rejected by most voters based solely on who they are, and it would be a disaster if teachers were subject to the same sort of social/political litmus tests.

That said, the status quo is not working, and the system does need reform. The trouble is that the issue is far too complex to be solved by any idea that is simple enough to be summed up in an Op-Ed piece. I understand the temptation to throw out the existing dysfunctional system and start over based on a new model, but as satisfying as that might be, those sort of revolutionary changes always create more problems than they solve. Precisely because education is so important, it will take careful, incremental changes, and the first step is for everyone to understand that there is no magic bullet.

Inauguration Day

2009-02-02T14:55:00.000-07:00

I had the extreme good fortune to get a ticket to the presidential inauguration ceremony from my congressional representative, and I traveled to Washington DC for a week to attend the historic event. The following is my attempt to record as thoroughly as possible my Inauguration Day experience.

My Aunt Laura works for the National Park Service, and I stayed with her while I was there. All of the National Capitol Region employees (and park rangers from other regions who were brought in to help out) were doing much of the work for the inauguration, and because of the bridge and road closures, everyone had to come in and spend the night at the NCR headquarters (near the Jefferson Memorial). Most of them had to spend the night on cots in a giant tennis bubble, but those who had offices spent the night there.

Because we knew that the Metro would be strained beyond capacity from the moment it opened at 4:00 am on the 20th, I came in with Aunt Laura and we both spent the night on Red Cross cots in her office. We got MREs, which I wanted to eat primarily for the novelty factor, and the new kind of MREs have really cool self-heating chemical packs. They also distributed sweet Red Cross blankets that we got to keep because it was easier for them to give them away than deal with disinfecting them, so I've got a pretty awesome souvenir.

I got up at 5:30 in the morning to get ready for the inauguration, and on my way to take a shower I walked in my pyjamas through a group of rangers in the middle of a briefing in the lobby. I had a shock (though it shouldn't have been surprising) because the shower in the building had no hot water. Even though my shower was just a few moments of splashing ice-cold water on my face and armpits, I still ended up running a little bit behind.

It was very cold, so I bundled up in boots, two pairs of warm socks, two pairs of jeans, a t-shirt, a long-sleeve thermal layer, a sweater, and my jacket. I wanted my Obama shirt to be visible, and luckily it was large enough that I could pull it on over my layers and then put my buttons on it. I capped off by wrapping my neck and lower face in the thick wool scarf that Laura had lent me and doing a fold and loop with my other scarf to hold it in place, then I wore my LSU hat with Laura's big wool hat on top of it. The advantage of spending the night there was that I only had to cross a bridge and I was basically right on the Mall, so I had planned on leaving at 6:30, but I ended up missing that by a few minutes.

When I walked across the bridge there was a solid stream of buses inching along beside me. I was by myself until I reached L'Enfant Promenade, but I quickly was absorbed into major crowds when I reached Independence Avenue (the south side of the Mall). At times I had to fight a tide of people who were heading towards the entrances to the non-ticketed areas to make my way toward the silver gate entrance on 3rd.

As it turned out, I was far too optimistic about where the end of the line would be, and around 4th I realized that the people standing on the side of the street for the last few blocks were the line. There were two girls who realized the same thing at almost the same time, so we walked together as we walked all the way back to 7th. I'm not actually sure if that was the end of the line, but at that point it got muddled by the flows of people, so we picked an unoccupied spot and planted ourselves in it.

One of the girls was wearing a bright red OU Sooners hat (which made it easier to keep track of her in the crowds), but it turned out that she was a college student from Nebraska. Her friend was a student in Richmond, and they had spent the weekend together there before coming up by commuter rail early that morning. We were joined in line by a friendly older couple from the DC suburbs. The girl with the Sooners hat didn't stay in line very long before she went off to find one of the thousands porta-potties that lined the Mall, but she didn't make it back before the gates opened.

The line ended up not meaning as much because there was a space in between the gate that they opened at 8:00 and the actual security screening area. There was such a rush to fill up that space in front of the security bottleneck that the line devolved into a bit of scramble to move forward. A handful of people actually tried to run and weave their way forward through the crowd, but the bulk of the former line moved forward at a brisk walk, and the only people who got passed were those unwilling or unable to keep pace.

I stayed with the older couple and the girl from Richmond until we reached the first bottleneck in front of security. The girl left at that point to try to reconnect with her friend because she had both of their tickets. We moved forward slowly in the crush toward the security screening area.

The police had 3rd blocked off as buffer between the two parts of the silver section, and the security checkpoints fed into the west section (further from the Capitol). They were preventing a headlong rush that would crush people into the Capitol reflecting pool by only allowing small groups to cross 3rd at regular intervals. I got across pretty quickly, and I positioned myself a little bit to the right of center. They had the area right in front of the pool blocked off while they got people settled in the handicapped section, and when they opened that final fence I was able to position myself in a great spot. I was just a couple feet back from the railing with only one person in front of me, and the spot I was in allowed me to see a jumbotron as well as glimpse the distant speck of the podium through some tree branches.

My immediate neighbors were several younger black women from South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia. A few of them were vocal about placing a high value on "respecting the office," which mostly seemed to mean that they disapproved of booing George W. Bush. They did not represent the majority of the crowd, and when his face showed up on the big screen he was jeered by a rousing chorus of "Na na na na, hey hey, goodbye!" They clearly were prepared for the crowd to have a negative response to Bush, and they quickly drowned out the chant by cranking up on the volume of the music. I expected that Palin would also provoke a significant response from the crowd, but they once again stage-managed things to avoid it. As the governors were being shown coming out of the Capitol building, the camera panned away before Palin came to the front of the line, so the crowd never got a chance to boo her. Interestingly, John McCain did not get jeered or booed at all as far as I could hear, and the only other person besides Bush to get booed was Joe Lieberman.

The excitement continued to build as we watched Obama's girls come in, and the air was thick with enthusiasm by the time he reached the podium. The miscue during the swearing in was barely noticeable in the crowd, and it was only later when I watched clips that I understood why people who'd only watched it on TV were making such a big deal about it. The cheer that surged through the crowd when he completed the oath of office was not the loudest I've ever heard, but unlike cheers at sporting events or concerts, it was all about personal emotion rather than making noise for its own sake. There were tears of joy on almost every face around me, and although I did not come close to crying, that has more to do with the fact that only certain very specific kinds of emotional distress get me cry. My primary emotion was excitement, with my whole body feeling highly charged in spite of the cold.

President Obama's speech was fantastic, and one of the most incredible moments of the whole day came when everyone went silent as he began to speak. All morning there was a constant happy murmur from all of the people packed in together, and not only did the Mall go completely silent, but all of the little movements of people brushing against each other in the crowd ended too. The feeling generated by two million people suddenly becoming completely still and silent is like nothing I have ever experienced before. It was like the abstract notions of importance, gravity, and historical significance were suddenly transformed into something visceral and powerfully tangible.

The content of his speech was no less powerful, and there were a few things that particularly stood out for me as I was experiencing it live. On Monday afternoon, I had talked with my friend Ben about the sad shape of the country and the inevitability of America's decline from the position of superpower, and Obama grabbed hold of me right from the start when he declared that the end of America's greatness is not inevitable. Normally I would not be moved by such a declaration from a politician, but he lifted it above the usual rhetoric of American exceptionalism by making it clear that the nation's problems would not solve themselves and that America's continued greatness depends on a lot of hard work from everyone. I also took heart in the fact that he included nonbelievers in with the Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus. I was tempted to cheer at that point, but that line did not go over as well with the rest of the crowd, and I hesitated and lost my chance. His declaration of support for science and education was a welcome poke (among others) at the outgoing president seated a few feet away from him, and I'm looking forward to having a president who doesn't treat academia like a punching bag. Last but not least, I was inspired by his call for a spirit of service among all Americans to work toward solving our problems and achieving our goals together.

Different people in the crowded reacted more strongly to different parts of the speech, but overall the feeling was extremely positive, and the surge of emotion at the end of his address was such that one woman near me actually fainted. I suspect that fatigue and cold were probably major contributing factors, but it was clearly his stirring conclusion that was the trigger. All of the surges of emotion before that moment were dwarfed by the flood of joy and relief that overwhelmed me at that moment. Usually a state of shock is caused by something traumatic, but I was stunned with happiness as I listened to the inaugural poem and closing prayer.

As the shock wore off, I was sad to see how quickly the mood turned more selfish in the aftermath. The police didn't even waste their time trying to prevent people from jumping the barriers and sliding all over the frozen reflecting pool (the sun had been shining on it all morning, and several times it cracked and people would scurry for the sides, but I was disappointed that there was no karmic justice in the form of people actually falling through). There was lots of pushing and rudeness as people tried to set up their ideal photos. It seemed vaguely like a disaster movie when I got through the crowds around the reflecting pool and saw the huge quantity of newspapers and other trash being blown all over by the wind amidst the mass exodus of people from the Mall.

It was surreal to be walking with huge crowds of people in the middle of the eight lanes of Independence Avenue. I saw the massive bottlenecks as hundreds of thousands of people tried to crowd into the Metro, and I was really glad to be able to avoid it. The walk back to Laura's office was a remarkably easy, and the people selling food and Obama stuff to the exiting hordes on L'Enfant Promenade were doing huge business at impressively high prices ($25 for a cheap t-shirt, postcards 2 for $5, knit caps $30, etc.).

When I got back to Laura's office, she was dying to get away, and they hadn't really needed her to work the phones anyway, so we were able leave at 3:00. They had done such a good job of keeping cars out of the city that we had wide open roads as we made our way to her boyfriend's house on the Virginia side of the Potomac. Laura's place is in the Maryland suburbs on the opposite side of the city and doesn't have TV, so we picked up a bunch of Yuengling (yay!) on our way and then settled in to watch the parade and relax after a superlative day.

Five Years of Theatre

2009-01-15T21:54:00.001-07:00

In January of 2004, I began a semester of study-abroad in England. One of the great things about it was that I had the chance to see a lot of West-End shows, and during that semester I decided to start keeping track of every piece of theater that I saw. In a lovely bit of unplanned symmetry, I saw the world premier of Inana at the DCPA this evening, exactly five years after I saw Les Mis during my first weekend trip to London.

Here is the complete list of all 86 shows (82 different productions if you subtract the 4 that I saw twice) that I've seen in the last five years (favorites in bold):

Les Miserables, January 16, 2004 (Palace Theatre, London)
Stones In His Pockets, January 17, 2004 (New Ambassadors Theatre, London)
The Cherry Orchard, February 13, 2004 (Abbey Theatre, Dublin)
Macbeth, March 6, 2004 (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
Anything Goes, March 8, 2004 (Drury Lane Theatre Royal, London)
His Dark Materials I, March 11, 2004 (National Theatre Olivier Theatre, London)
Endgame, March 15, 2004 (Albery Theatre, London)
Jerry Springer- The Opera, March 19, 2004 (A Really Useful Theatre, London)
His Dark Materials I, March 20, 2004 (National Theatre Olivier Theatre, London)
His Dark Materials II, March 20, 2004 (National Theatre Olivier Theatre, London)
Le Papier Peint Jaune, March 27, 2004 (Théâtre du Grütli, Geneva)
Romeo and Juliet, March 31, 2004 (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
Handler, September 30, 2004 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
A Bright Room Called Day, October 21, 2004 (May Studio Theatre, Evansville)
Jane Eyre: The Musical, November 13, 2004 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
Flyin' West, February 25, 2005 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
Months on End, March 23, 2005 (May Studio Theatre, Evansville)
Our Town, April 15, 2005 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
The Birthday Party, May 19, 2005 (The Duchess Theatre, London)
The Importance of Being Earnest, May 21, 2005 (Bristol Old Vic, Bristol)
The Tempest, May 22, 2005 (Shakespeare’s Globe, London)
Henry IV Part 2, May 24, 2005 (National Theatre Olivier Theatre, London)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, May 25, 2005 (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
Solstice, May 26, 2005 (The Other Place, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
A New Way To Please You, May 27, 2005 (Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
Twelfth Night, May 28, 2005 (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
The Knot Garden (Opera), June 3, 2005 (Theatre Royal, Bath)
Henry IV Part 1, June 17, 2005 (Royal National Olivier Theatre, London)
The Barber of Seville (Opera), August 16, 2005 (Santa Fe Opera, Santa Fe)
Anatomy of Gray, September 23, 2005 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
Anatomy of Gray, September 30, 2005 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
Landscape of the Body, October 14, 2005 (May Studio Theatre, Evansville)
A Little Night Music, November 11, 2005 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
A Little Night Music, November 19, 2005 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
Little Shop of Horrors, December 24, 2005 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
Six Characters in Search of an Author, February 17, 2006 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
Wonder of the World, March 24, 2006 (May Studio Theatre, Evansville)
Tartuffe (Opera), April 1, 2006 (Wheeler Concert Hall, Evansville)
The Taming of the Shrew, April 28, 2006 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
One Last Hope for the Lonely, May 1, 2006 (May Studio Theatre, Evansville)
Hay Fever, May 26, 2006 (Theatre Royal Haymarket, London)
Titus Andronicus, May 27, 2006 (Shakespeare's Globe, London)
Julius Caesar, May 31, 2006 (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
Avenue Q, June 15, 2006 (Noël Coward Theatre, London)
Sunday In The Park With George, June 16, 2006 (Wyndham's Theatre, London)
Speed-The-Plow, June 17, 2006 (Library Theatre, Manchester)
As You Like It, October 7, 2006 (Eugenia Rawls Courtyard Theatre, Denver)
Amadeus, October 25, 2006 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
The Magic Flute (Opera), November 19, 2006 (Ellie Caulkins Operahouse, Denver)
365 Plays/365 Days, November 26, 2006 (Cafe Europa, Denver)
I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, January 18, 2007 (Town Hall Arts Center, Littleton)
King Lear, January 24, 2007 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, January 28th, 2007 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
Ragtime, March 8, 2007 (Boulder Dinner Theatre, Boulder)
The Sweetest Swing in Baseball, April 4, 2007 (The Ricketson Theatre, Denver)
Working- A Musical, April 11, 2007 (Tramway Theatre, Denver)
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, May 16, 2007 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, May 22, 2007 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
Wicked, June 1, 2007 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
Urinetown, August 17, 2007 (The Space Theatre, Denver)
Third, September 13, 2007 (The Space Theatre, Denver)
You Can't Take it With You, September 20, 2007 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
Monty Python's Spamalot, September 21, 2007 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, October 28, 2007 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
La Traviata (Opera), November 11, 2007 (Ellie Caulkins Operahouse, Denver)
Pride and Prejudice, November 15, 2007 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
Lydia, January 17, 2008 (The Ricketson Theatre, Denver)
Plainsong, January 24, 2008 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
Spring Awakening, February 2, 2008 (Eugene O'Neill Theatre, New York City)
Rock 'N' Roll, February 2, 2008 (Jacobs Theatre, New York City)
Mad Forest: A Play from Romania, March 19, 2008 (Jones Theatre, Denver)
Merry Wives of Windsor, March 20, 2008 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
My Fair Lady, March 28, 2008 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
Gee's Bend, March 29, 2008 (The Space Theatre, Denver)
Harvey, April 17, 2008 (Tramway Theatre, Denver)
The Laramie Project, April 24, 2008 (Tramway Theatre, Denver)
A Writer's Diary (Adapted from Virginia Woolf's diaries), June 20, 2008 (Hamilton Recital Hall, Denver)
Sweeney Todd, June 29, 2008 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
Henry the Eighth, July 20, 2008 (University Theatre, Boulder)
Love's Labour's Lost, July 25, 2008 (Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre, Boulder)
Avenue Q, September 20, 2008 (Ellie Caulkins Operahouse, Denver)
Noises Off, October 2, 2008 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
Glengarry Glen Ross, October 9, 2008 (The Ricketson Theatre, Denver)
The Miracle Worker, November 13, 2008 (The Space Theatre, Denver)
Anywhere But Rome, December 18, 2008 (Buntport Theater, Denver)
Inana, January 15, 2009 (The Ricketson Theatre, Denver)

The RSC production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is not only my favorite show on the list, but it is absolutely the best piece of theatre that I've ever seen in my life. The list includes 15 out of 36 from the Shakespeare canon, and for my lifetime I've seen 16 total (the other was Othello my freshman year at Evansville). I will add one more later this month when I see the Richard III at the DCPA.

I'm off to attend the presidential inauguration in Washington DC, so I should have some interesting stuff to write about when I return next week.

Money Troubles in America: Is there anything left that we can claim to be good at?

2009-01-04T19:18:00.005-07:00

The NYT has a fascinating and thoughtful Op-Ed piece about the financial crisis. The main thing I take away from it is that the cliche of thinking about the big picture has been absent from our financial system for so long that now we're in such a mess that the first steps toward a solution all fall into the category of "stop doing really stupid stuff."

Thus far I have not been directly effected by the financial crisis, and I actually spent several hundred dollars in the last week to build myself a new computer. For an impoverished grad student with no prospect of ever making a lot of money, my financial situation is actually fairly secure, but that doesn't mean that I'm not still frightened of what might happen if Obama is not able to fix what is clearly a deeply dysfunctional financial system.

Accomplishments and objectives

2009-01-01T12:19:00.005-07:00

A year ago I posted a list of things I had done in 2007 and things I hoped to accomplish in 2008. There's not much point in recording such things if you don't go back and compare them to what did happen, so here's my review of 2008 and forecast for 2009. To start, this is the list from that entry a year ago, with successful accomplishments in green, failed accomplishments in red, and black being partial or incomplete:

Things I would like to accomplish in 2008:

Break out of my patterns of procrastination.
Be more proactive about dating.
Make more of an effort to write new poems, without getting away from the good revision work that I've been doing.
Find out why my brother gets under my skin and learn to be at peace with him.
Commit the time to write an academic paper that represents my very best work.
Make more connections among the department's faculty and graduate students.
Restore the university's chapter of Sigma Tau Delta to viability with undergraduate leadership.
Find ways to travel without screwing up my budget (my upcoming trip to NYC will be a good start).
Learn more about teaching methods, effective classroom skills, and good pedagogy so that I'm more prepared to teach college-level courses.
Embrace the fantastic path I'm on without closing myself off to unexpected opportunities.

I've also done a lot of cool things in the last year that weren't a part of that list.

Things I accomplished in 2008

Visited New York City for the first time, and I had an absolutely fantastic time.
Kept up my quasi-regular correspondence of hand-written letters with a dear friend.
Was an alternate delegate to the country convention for Barack Obama. I didn't get a chance to participate, but it was a great cherry on top of the very inspiring caucus process.
My awesome trip to Germany and the Czech Republic.
Developed a topic for my masters thesis that I'm genuinely excited about.
Applied to PhD programs.
Made significant quantities of fruits and veggies a regular part of my diet.

I feel pretty good about where I stand right now, so major, life-changing resolutions don't feel particularly neccessary. Of course, the next stage in my life will be shaped considerably by which PhD programs I get into, if any, but for now I just need to concentrate on reaching a positive finish to my masters program and writing a thesis I can be proud of.

Goals and Resolutions for 2009

Write my thesis and defend it in time to participate in the June graduation ceremony.
Build a new computer from scratch.
Take another big trip. (California?)
Buy a more adult set of clothing.
Go on a date.
Maintain my level of political awareness and engagement.
Change my own oil.
Write the play I've been thinking about.
Keep in touch with people in Denver after I move away.
Get better about procrastination.

May we all bless one another

2008-12-27T21:26:00.003-07:00

This evening I rewatched one of my favorite films of the last few years. Joyeux Noël is a fictionalized account of the WWI Christmas Truce on the western front in 1914, and it is a very touching film. Sometimes we all need to be reminded that whatever differences we may have, even the ones that lead to anger, are very small in comparison to all that we have in common as human beings.

Injustice forgotten is injustice committed

2008-12-23T22:46:00.004-07:00

President-elect Obama has said that he will close down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

That is a great thing, but it is not enough. All Americans should feel ashamed of the horrific things that have been done in our name, and we must make sure that what happened at Guantanamo is preserved as a lesson for future generations.

Please check out Remember Guantanamo.

Things to read on the internets

2008-12-16T20:16:00.004-07:00

I like reading Bill Simmons' writing.

He also has a podcast.

The B.S. Report led me to this blog.

I read the whole thing and enjoyed it very much.

In other news from the series of tubes:

There's more to life than annotated bibliographies

2008-11-15T19:06:00.003-07:00

Once again, major thanks are due to Molly for providing just the right video to get my head back in the right place on a day when Foucault was on the verge of souring me on this whole thesis.

Guantanamo: We must learn the truth and remember it always

2008-11-08T00:48:00.004-07:00

Barack Obama has declared that he will close down the detainee facilities at Guantanamo Bay, but that long-overdue act will mean very little if we never find out what occurred there or if we are allowed to forget.

The place and the records must be preserved so that future generations may be reminded of a time when America strayed from its ideals. Justice demands that we cry out, "Never again!" We owe it to our children to preserve what we would prefer to deny, so that the lessons of the past will never be forgotten.

Our next president has asked us to all take part in the work of changing this country for the better. He has invited everyone to share their input here: http://www.change.gov/yourvision

I just sent him the following message, and I would encourage everyone who feels the same way to add your voices.

Dear President-Elect Obama,

Everything about the situation at Guantanamo Bay makes it one of the most shameful things in American history, and I do not doubt that you will restore justice and human rights to our nation by ending that disgrace. What I would ask is that when you close the down the prison camp at Guantanamo you do not let it be erased from our history. End the unlawful detention of the men held there, reaffirm the rule of law by giving them due process and fair trials, and close down that legal black hole, but do not bulldoze the prisons, do not allow the records of what happened there to be destroyed, and give the American people a chance to the know the truth about what was done in our name.

Although it is painful, the world benefits from being forced to remember such tragedies and constantly declare "Never again." It was only through the hard work of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps that those sites were persevered to be memorials. Although its location makes it unlikely that schoolchildren will ever be able to walk those grounds and learn first-hand the lessons of one of the dark moments of American history, it is your responsibility to preserve as much as possible and allow the American people to know the truth of what happened there, no matter how much we would prefer to deny our sins.

This country is in great need of change, but it will be a great injustice if the restoration of this nation's dignity involves denial of the errors that made that change necessary.

Thank you

Yes We Can... Be Inspired

2008-11-06T01:11:00.003-07:00

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I have been working on Lord Byron's poem "Darkness" for one of my grad school courses, and it has been on my mind so much that I've internalized it to a degree. Over the last few days I have occasionally found myself reshaping Byron's apocalyptic vision into a vision of Obama-inspired hope, and then I decided to just go ahead and actually write something. I drew heavily on Byron's poem and composed this re-imagining of "Darkness":

Light Returns

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
Eight years of darkness ended, and the stars
That had been mere pinprick spots of Hope,
Brightened, and grew, and the icy prospects
Of our country were thawed by Change in the air;
Morn came and the people brought about a new day,
And men remembered their passions and their dreams
Of this their country; and all hearts
Were warmed into a hopeful prayer for Change:
And they did live that change--and the desks,
The offices of the powerful—the homes,
The many homes at risk of being lost,
Were turned into beacons; cities were inspired,
And men who had gathered to cast their votes
Looked once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who'd felt eight years
Of fear invoked to trample down their rights:
A glowing Hope was all the world contained;
Jobs were still in danger—and hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the banking firms
Extinguished with a crash—but there was Hope.
The brows of men by the growing light
Wore the marks of their troubles, as they worked
To make the country whole again; they'd not lie down
And hide their eyes and weep; and some did rest
A moment to see what they had done, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and backed
Their words with deeds, and looked out
With resolute Hope on the wounded land,
The pall of the past eight years; and then again
With passion cast them back into the work
For healthcare and a living wage: the right-wing shrieked,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And spout their useless hate; the red states
Came together with the blue; and they united
And twined themselves to form one country,
No longer hopeless—they were America again.
And the war, which had done so much ill,
Was finally brought to an end;—the mistake was bought
With blood, and each sat and remembered
The brave who had been thus misled into gloom;
All earth was but one thought—and that was Hope,
Immediate and in the future; and the pang
Of the past fed their drive for Change—men
Would work to end the tragedy in which
The meager for the rich were devoured,
The country had assailed its people, all were wronged,
And none could trust that secrecy which kept
The press and anyone with questions at bay,
Till they gave up, and thus their actions had
Disdained all laws; himself sought no consensus,
But with a vicious and perpetual drive,
And a will to unchecked power, spurning Congress
Which answered not with censure—he was done.
The crowd was angered by degrees; but two
Republicans did present themselves,
And they were desperate: they met beside
The boardrooms and ill-used altar-places
Where had been heaped a mass of fear
For their usage; they raked up hatred,
And angrily flung their most divisive words at those
Who wanted change, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then the people lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
That Hope was real—saw, and turned away—
Even of their savage attacks they lost,
Unknowing that the people were tired of hearing men
Who called each other Fiend. The world was energized,
The populous and the powerful would unite,
Thoughtful, careful, truthful, purposeful, hopeful—
A land of Hope—the Change we needed.
The radio, TV, and papers all were still,
And for a moment all was silent thought;
The sun rose over the White House,
And a new government took shape: as it changed
The country's reputation surged—
Guantanamo was closed; the soldiers were brought home,
The mission they should have been on was achieved;
The country had security and civil rights,
And the economy recovered; Obama led the Change
They needed—Hope restored America.

Hope is real

2008-11-05T14:45:00.004-07:00

When Barack Obama announced his candidacy, my first thought was, "He would make a great president. What a shame that the system is stacked against him."

When he won the Iowa caucuses, I was overjoyed and filled with enthusiasm, thinking that politics and dreams might not be irreconcilable.

After the New Hampshire primary, I felt the status quo reasserting itself, and my spark of hope was almost extinguished by the cynicism that I had learned from seeing politics work as a machine for crushing dreams for my entire adult life.

I kept that spark of hope alive, and on Super Tuesday I caucused for Obama. The sight of dozens of Obama supporters filling that room was the fuel that brought that gave that spark a chance to take hold. I volunteered and was selected to be one of the alternate delegates for Obama to the county convention.

I left for my trip to Europe in August full of pride and confidence that Change was on its way.

I returned shortly after the RNC to discover that the selection of Sarah Palin had incomprehensibly shift the polls toward McCain. The ghosts of the last two elections came back to haunt me, and I felt a gnawing fear that our democracy would once again disappoint me.

I resolved to resist my pessimism and trust that the American people would eventually see through the illusion of Sarah Palin as a legitimate candidate.

As Election Day drew near, I felt a fear of the TV election coverage that had its roots in the traumatic memories of two previous November evenings. The thought of watching states turn colors on a computer generated map made my stomach clench. The two states where I have lived (Colorado and Indiana) were both states that I had only ever seen turn red on those maps. Although victory could be achieved without either, the memories of watching the networks call them for Bush made me sick with dread.

There was no nightmare, and my hope was vindicated. I embraced the best friend with whom I had discussed every twist and turn of the campaign, lifting him up when he grew fearful and drawing on his passion when my own hope grew faint. I even shed a couple of tears of joy and relief while I watched Obama address that crowd that seemed to stretch forever.

Smiles keep coming to my face unbidden, goosebumps of excitement rise on my arms without warning, and my heart feels warm. This is what it feels like when a dream comes true, and I hope that we can make this feeling last forever.

"Darkness" by Lord Byron

2008-10-26T14:35:00.004-06:00

I'm working on a presentation about one of my favorite poems, Lord Byron's "Darkness." It's popularity was such that there were a few paintings based on it, and I had hoped to find at least one of those images to use in a handout, but I haven't have any luck with that search. One thing I did find was this video, which I probably won't use in my presentation, but I'm going to share it here:

Sometimes words are not necessary

2008-10-26T00:37:00.003-06:00

This was exactly what I needed to break up my recent cloudy mood and brighten my spirits:

Many thanks to Molly.

Philly fans put their booing skills to good use

2008-10-11T20:31:00.004-06:00

Well done Flyers fans. The sport of hockey has enough problems without being tainted by a parasite like her.

Update: I replaced the video with a different one with better sound.

I get to choose "my friends," and I pick "that one."

2008-10-08T15:08:00.007-06:00

The media loves soundbites, and the three debates so far have not provided them with much of a fix, which is why I expect that we'll be hearing a lot of "that one" references in the coming weeks. It's silly because that is far from the most uncivil thing that John McCain has said about Obama, but expecting rationality to apply to American politics is a sure-fire path to disappointment. The media is already disillusioned by the shift from the reporter-friendly, independent-minded McCain of 2000 to the new disciple of Rovian political manipulation and media-bashing, and the many headlines and other mentions of the "that one" moment make it clear that the media is not going to resist the allure of a lovely soundbite just because it is unfair to 2008 McCain.

In an otherwise boring debate, that brief cringe-worthy moment will be the only thing that is remembered. John McCain has established the soundbite that will cling to him as he struggles over the next four weeks to overcome the growing support for Obama, and the words that will be ringing in his ears as his campaign goes down in defeat will be "that one."

Of course, it doesn't help that the record that John McCain is constantly crowing about shows that he does not support breasts:

I think the whole McCain campaign's problem is summed up pretty well by this picture that my Aunt Laura sent me:

Who needs a thousand words when you've got trains?

Sarah Palin Saves her Career

2008-10-03T14:52:00.006-06:00

The debate last night was every bit as meaningless as I thought it would be from the moment that I found out that the joke of a debate format would allow Palin to spout canned responses for 90 seconds without ever being forced to deal with a follow-up question. Her strategy is presented very clearly in this flow chart from Aden Nak (via Boing Boing):

It's a shame for Joe Biden that this debate was framed by recent events in such a way that it was all about Palin, as the only way that his performance would be noticed was if he had put his foot in his mouth or had gotten Palin to self-destruct (which the format made almost impossible). Joe Biden presented himself very well to those who didn't know him, and more importantly he showed the people, myself included, who thought we knew him, that he's not just a good vice-presidential pick, he's outstanding.

Biden gets a win for presenting himself to the nation and showing us how lucky we are to have had him as a public servant for the last few decades. Palin gets a win for salvaging her collapsing image by exceeding the subterraneanly low expectations for her, thus avoiding becoming a national joke and a shoo-in scapegoat for a McCain loss. The loser in this debate was John McCain, who got ripped to shreds by Biden and who gains very little from Palin stopping the bleeding about her disastrous interviews because his campaign still has a sucking chest would in the form of his inescapable connection to the Republican policies that have led us into an inexcusable war and a spiraling economic crisis.

A Whole New World

2008-09-26T23:01:00.002-06:00

I'm still not sure what to make of the presidential debate (a draw?), so instead I'd rather share something posted by a friend on facebook. It's good to be reminded that amazing beauty does exist in this messed-up world.

The World is a Mess, and I Just Need to Flee It

2008-09-25T21:14:00.005-06:00

I have been watching clips of Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric (very dangerous if you're already feeling depressed about humanity), but this is the most messed up thing I've seen today.

I may never uncross my legs, but thank goodness for Sarah Silverman:

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

Letterman smells what McCain is cooking, and it ain't good

2008-09-25T12:46:00.005-06:00

Unlike the Palin Hail Mary, it doesn't look like the latest McCain gamble is going to pay off. How much of his once-stellar reputation will be left by Election Day?

From Jess:

jaredm: claudia: cajunboy:

Not sure how this got leaked to YouTube almost three hours before the broadcast, but here’s Letterman ripping into McCain for canceling an appearance on his show tonight. The best part comes at about the seven minute mark when Dave gets wind of the fact that McCain is actually down the street being interviewed by Katie Couric and they cut in live as McCain is having his makeup done.

(via spiegelman)

Play along if you'd like (and please link back if you do)

2008-09-18T17:34:00.003-06:00

I was traveling for several weeks (Germany & the Czech Republic are fantastic), and since I've been back I've been up to my eyeballs with work and school, so it takes a game to get me to start posting again. I'm following along from Shawn's post.

Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
Post that picture with NO editing.
Post these instructions with your picture.

More Fun with Word Clouds

2008-08-05T15:40:00.006-06:00

As you can now see on the left-hand side of this page, I've added tag cloud for this blog. It was a piece of cake thanks to these great directions.

That cloud is only made up of the labels that I've selected for each post, but I've also been playing around with a site that generates clouds like the ones in my previous post that are based on the frequency of words in a given body of text. Wordle is far and away the most attractive one that I've been able to find. If you enter a link it will only generate a cloud based on whatever is on the front page, but with a little bit of copying and pasting I was able to produce this word cloud out of all of my posts:

Obama does well in the clouds

2008-08-03T13:23:00.004-06:00

Since I started playing around with Goodreads, I've been exploring the odd aesthetics of tag clouds (aka word clouds), and I'm still debating whether I want to add one to this site.

This morning I came across an interesting meta-data experiment conducted by the Washington Post in which they generated word clouds based on the two presidential candidate's campaign blogs. The one on the left if Obama's and McCain's is on the right.

If you've got sharp eyes, you may actually be able to find the "McCain" tag.

I'll be taking Zombie Lit as an elective for my PhD in Horribleness

2008-07-31T23:13:00.009-06:00

Haiku are easy
Unless your brains were eaten
By the living dead.

From Boing Boing (with an additional recommendation from my fellow zombophile Aunt Laura)

Losing Love's Labor on the Eastern Front

2008-07-26T17:07:00.003-06:00

Last night I went up to Boulder to see the Colorado Shakespeare Festival perform Love's Labour's Lost. I had read the play previous to seeing it, and I was sure that they would make significant changes because the original text relies heavily on topical humor and wordplay that a contemporary audience simply won't get when it is performed. Also, it would be quite long if it was performed without any cuts, and it's quite tough to get audiences to sit through anything that goes over three hours. One consequence of the cuts (I suspect I was the only person in the audience to even notice) was that they chopped up some of the sonnets and made a mess of the iambic pentameter. I know that the typical audience member would struggle to even notice it, and I would have forgiven them that change if they hadn't made other choices that were far more questionable.

I knew ahead of time that they had chosen to set it in America in 1917, and I gather that the decision to set it on the verge of one of the two world wars is relatively common for 20th century productions, and it provides a useful way of framing the ending, which turns the traditional ending for a comedy on its head. I didn't object to the decision to change the setting, but I was quite curious to see what they would do about the scene in which the four lords disguise themselves as Russians to come woo the ladies, only to have the women outwit them and make them the butt of the joke.

It's no problem in an Elizabethan setting to play the young men in Russian garb as straightforward ridiculous comedy, but I was curious to see what the director would do about the fact that image of Russians in 1917 was something quite different from simply being goofy foreigners. To my great disappointment, they did nothing to address that issue, trusting that the historical ignorance of a typical audience would allow them to get away with it. Judging from the laughter of the rest of the audience when they came out in fur caps and did the stereotypical Russian dance, the director didn't pay a price for dodging the hard questions raised by that choice of setting, which made it all the more disappointing.

The other element of this production that I had a real problem with was that the cuts ended up taking much of the life out of the role of Rosaline. Their Rosaline was an actress with auburn hair, and rather than put her in a black wig or have her dye her hair, the director completely cut everything about "black" Rosaline. In and of itself those cuts didn't disrupt the plot, but together with some of the other, smaller cuts to her wordplay with Berowne, the result was that her role was reduced to the point that she no longer stood on the same level with him. Among the lovers, the King, the Princess, Rosaline, and Berowne are clearly the primary characters, but the balance of the play falters when one becomes secondary to the other three.

On the whole I did enjoy it and didn't regret going, but that was largely because of the fine job that the actors did (the actors who played Costard and Moth were especially good), and in spite of the poor choices the director made.

Introverts and separations

2008-07-22T18:51:00.004-06:00

The realization that my summer is rapidly drawing to a close has resulted in a lot of aimless wandering through the goody-filled halls of the Internet, and today I came across an old article from The Atlantic that does a better job of expressing what it means to be an introvert than anything else I've ever read on the subject. Now if only there were a way to make extroverts realize how true it is...

I've also been following the horrified responses to recently upheld law in South Dakota that forces doctors to read a scripted statement (which was written by the legislature and has an only tangential relationship to science and reality). Even before you get to the free speech problems and the garbage science it is based on, the statement has a serious problem with basic logical coherence. As pointed out in the Human Nature blog on Slate, if a fetus is "a whole, separate, unique, living human being" then nobody needs to worry about getting an abortion, which the state defines as "the use of any means to intentionally terminate the pregnancy of a woman known to be pregnant with knowledge that the termination with those means will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of the fetus." If the fetus is already whole and separate, then who could think that there's a reasonable likelihood that removing it from the womb would cause its death?

I love books (and hilarious online video thingies)

2008-07-18T01:59:00.006-06:00

I've been meaning to check out Goodreads for a while now, and this evening I finally got around to it (along with discovering the delightful online series The Guild). It would be madness to try to go back and write reviews for all of my favorite books, but there are a some books that are too dear to me for a simple star rating to suffice, and I'll cross post them here (I'm also filling in some of them with past posts from here in which I talked about books I'd read).

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ender's Game captured elements of my childhood that no other work of fiction (or anything in any other medium) has ever presented in a way that felt believable. There have been countless works in which I sympathize with the protagonist, but the character of Ender captured something about me that I probably couldn't even have articulated before I read the book.

Dune by Frank Herbert

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
The sublime is a pretty elusive quality, but my definition has always been closely tied to a sense of transport. A truly sublime work of art is that which transports me out of myself, and Dune is one of the few books that achieves that rare feat. The rush of ideas in the passage describing Paul's emergence into his power managed to produce in me a visceral sense of vertigo. It's hard to imagine a more compelling example of the power of fiction.

Paradise Lost by John Milton

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Milton's masterpiece is not only the greatest epic ever written in English verse, it has actually had significant influence on the way that people think about the Christian mythology. In my conversations with mainstream Christians, the things that they say about things like angels and Satan are much more consistent with the way that those concepts are depicted in Paradise Lost than how they a represented in the Bible.

His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This trilogy starts off as a seemingly simple jaunt into the realm of adventurous fantasy, but the intellectual depth quickly reveals itself. Few books even attempt capture the agony of the conflict between romance and responsibility, and of the few that try, it's rare to see an author avoid the slippery slope of melodrama. The worlds that Pullman conjures are magnificent in and of themselves, but his true achievement is that he captures the joy and pain of growing up without romanticizing childhood or looking down on it.

View all my reviews.

Also, if you haven't checked out Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, what are you waiting for? Act II is up now (and is even more super-awesome than Act I). Even my friend Ben, who hates musicals, loved it, so nobody who is reading this has any excuse for not checking it out this weekend while it's still available for free (magic word!). I'll be done with my MA soon, so you'd better take my advice lest you find yourself on the wrong side of a guy with a PhD in Horribleness (I hear Duke offers five years of funding).

Dr. Horrible!

2008-07-15T20:48:00.003-06:00

Watch it.

Geeking out on the work of pre-theoretical knuckle-draggers

2008-07-13T22:26:00.004-06:00

I started reading Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash this weekend and finished it earlier this afternoon. Part of what I enjoyed about it was that it played around in the territory of genres like cyberpunk without setting down its roots in them.

Because of that interesting feature of the novel, I was all the more intrigued when I came across a post on Boing Boing with this video of a recent lecture by Stephenson on the topic of literary genres.

Learning from movies

2008-07-07T21:31:00.003-06:00

This afternoon I went to see WALL-E, and I was quite pleased that it managed to live up to the elevated expectations that I had as result of all the good reviews and positive word of mouth. To make a movie about a trash robot, and to do it without any dialogue for 90% of the movie is an unimaginably bold move for a Hollywood film of any sort, but Pixar has proven their brilliance once again by crafting a touching and thoughtful film that is a stellar example craftsmanship in cinema.

It's not giving anything away to say that it has a surprisingly subversive message about how our wasteful consumer culture is destroying both the planet and the human race. The movie makes its point seamlessly, without any blunt didacticism, and it's hard to imagine a more compelling way to communicate concepts of conservation and good stewardship of the Earth. Unfortunately, the power of the film's impact on me made it that much more depressing to see that it did not penetrate the minds of my fellow movie patrons, who engaged in the typical movie theater behavior of leaving all of their scattered trash behind for someone else to clean up. If a film like WALL-E couldn't get people to change their behavior, it leaves me with little hope that we'll be able to achieve a happy ending of our own.

Speaking more than one language? How un-American!

2008-07-02T14:18:00.006-06:00

In an especially idiotic expression of xenophobia, a school-board member in Louisiana objected to the use of a few sentences of Vietnamese directed towards their parents by the co-valedictorians in their graduation speech. He has also put forward a policy proposal to forbid the use of any language other than English in graduation speeches.

That sort of foolishness is appalling no matter where it comes from, but it's especially ridiculous when it comes from a part of the country that was originally settled by French-speakers. But wait, there's more! Not only does the location have French roots, but the school-board member in question has that decidedly non-English last name of Pitre (for extra bonus fun, look up what that translates to in English).

There is one possible bright side to such a policy, as it would save audiences from any more commencement addresses peppered with little bits of Latin. Anyway, who would ever want to graduate Magna Cum Laude when you could graduate Mega Super Awesome instead?

The world is bit less awesome

2008-06-23T10:22:00.002-06:00

RIP George Carlin

Can't Anybody Tackle Bo Jackson?!?

2008-06-21T20:20:00.005-06:00

The unstoppable force that was Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl has already been written about, but now he lives again!

I upgraded to Firefox 3.0 today, and I discovered a truly magnificent add-on. FireNes lets you play all of the games from the original NES system, including Tecmo Bowl and all of the other classics of my childhood.

Needless to say, I've been busy making sure that not even super-human Bo Jackson can defeat my beloved Broncos. Bo knows... defeat: 42-27!

Words are pretty

2008-06-13T13:19:00.004-06:00

Kudos to Jess for introducing me to Visuwords, a graphical dictionary/thesaurus. I found it very relaxing to type in the first word that came to mind and then free associate based on the results to find new words that might yield interesting results.

These words gave my favorite results so far:
Character
Jerk
Heart
Bust

There's a reason why the Second Amendment has all that "well-regulated militia" stuff

2008-06-11T18:18:00.007-06:00

Can someone please invent a gun that you fire from your crotch? The gene pool is in danger, and these are clearly not the sort of people who will use conventional birth control.

Coronation to Yes We Can in 517 seconds

2008-06-08T11:14:00.004-06:00

Slate has a great video summing up the entire Democratic primary in just eight minutes. It says a lot about how much happened since last fall that even going at warp speed it takes them that long to get through it all.

Snuffing out other people's candles to make yours look brighter

2008-06-04T11:11:00.004-06:00

Finals are still going on, so I'll keep this to some quick links. A larger post on the long-awaited conclusion of the Democratic primary contest is forthcoming.

ESPN.com has some news that Tiger Woods is apparently unaware of how boring his sport is to watch on television, so he's dissing hockey.

There's an interesting piece in Slate about how Eugene McCarthy's stubborn unwillingness to reconcile with the Kennedy supporters weakened the party in the months after RFK's assassination. In addition to the obvious political interest, there's also a fascinating bit about how McCarthy insulted the state of Indiana (which supported Kennedy) because they hadn't produced a poet to rival his friend Robert Lowell. It's amazing how much things have changed since 1968.

To finish, the Onion has an especially funny piece poking fun at John Grisham.

Happy Mothers' Day

2008-05-11T20:49:00.003-06:00

ESPN.com has a great article for Mothers' Day about the impressive achievement of the women who have become mothers without giving up their athletic careers as members of the US women's soccer team.

I Can't Believe My Ears

2008-05-08T21:24:00.003-06:00

I'm generally up for pretty much any kind of theatre, but I considered skipping this evening's free day performance of 3 Mo' Divas at the DCPA. Initially I thought it was a musical of some sort, but then I saw that it would just be three women singing a bunch of different songs.

A lot of singing and no trace of a plot? Not usually my cup of tea, but I feel very glad that I didn't miss this show.

This was amazing three women singing everything from La Bohème to His Eye is on the Sparrow, with stuff like Defying Gravity (from Wicked, one of my favorite musicals), Summertime, and even It's Raining Men in between. I didn't recognize the majority of the songs, but even a musical imbecile like me couldn't help but appreciate the unbelievable skill that it took to weave together so many different styles of music.

Hi, I'm an ad campaign... And I'm a parody.

2008-05-05T17:16:00.004-06:00

I find the Mac/PC ads (and television ads in general) pretty annoying, which means that I'm generally not too receptive to the massive number of parodies of them, but as someone who enjoys comics and has followed the buzz for the two big comic-book films that are coming out this summer, this one actually tickled my fancy:

Blaaa! I am a colossal squid from the sea!

2008-05-01T11:27:00.004-06:00

A thousand pounds of 26 foot long squidtastic awesomeness. With eyes the size of beach balls!

How to Use a Sledgehammer

2008-04-24T22:40:00.003-06:00

I just got home from a performance of the The Laramie Project by the graduating MFA students of the National Theatre Conservatory. One of the great challenges of art is dealing with intense emotions without descending into melodrama, and in many ways it can be harder to avoid that pitfall when the material is drawn from reality, as opposed to a purely fictional situation. The great achievement of this play and the triumph of these actors was that they were able to reach the most dramatic peaks of emotional intensity without ever sacrificing the intellectual thrust of the narrative.

Back in January I saw and commented on the play Lydia, and it failed where the Laramie Project succeeds. This play reached the same levels of emotional intensity, but that visceral impact never felt like a gratuitous or manipulative action on the part of the actors, director, or playwright. On the contrary, the play was brilliant because it took the great aesthetic risk of having a purpose. It was neither didactic nor melodramatic, and yet it contained an almost frightening emotional intensity.

Subverting conventions

2008-04-20T12:57:00.003-06:00

A few weeks ago I went to see the film Run Fat Boy Run, and although it wasn't bad, I left the theater feeling disappointed. Simon Pegg had won me over with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and I went into this one expecting to see it do for the inspirational sports movie what the other two had done for zombie gore-fests and buddy cop action flicks. Unfortunately, what I discovered is that as stale as the cliches of the sports movie genre have grown, it has yet to reach the point where a film could get away with reversing them. Just think what would happen if you tried to make a sports movie in which the hero triumphs by quiting in the face of adversity. Perhaps someday it will happen, but this film didn't even try.

What a cinematic painting! It's so much better than that theatrical novel.

2008-04-17T11:16:00.007-06:00

Robert Pinsky has a piece about poetry in Slate today that I couldn't let pass without comment. Why Don't Modern Poems Rhyme? is set up as a casual FAQ about poetry, and he makes some interesting points, but some of his responses are oddly lacking in analysis for a piece that is supposed to be answering questions. "Read this" is a rather unsatisfying answer when one has a legitimate question. He also makes a great point about the false nostalgia that imagines that there was some kind of Golden Age in which poetry was "easy to understand and great".

What I really wished he had addressed in more detail was the question of song lyrics as poetry. Ben (who is a musician) and I have debated this point on a few occasions, and the point I always come back to is that they are two different forms of art that work in different ways. One of the flaws that turns me off to a lot of contemporary music is that each song is so packed with lyrics that the balance between the emotional content of the words and the emotional content of the sound is thrown completely out of whack. The claim that song lyrics are poetry implies that music cannot stand on its own merits, that it needs to draw upon poetry because the medium lacks artistic validity.

It's a back-handed compliment when an artistic work is compared to another medium in a way that implies that the other medium is inherently superior. It reminds me of a recent class discussion about what it means to say that Henry James has an "Impressionist" style of writing. A novel is not a painting, and it is demeaning to the writer's craft to give up on trying to understand a piece of writing on its own terms by clumsily applying the language of a different artistic discipline.

Congratulations! Here's your aluminum-alloy medal.

2008-04-10T09:57:00.003-06:00

While watching the latest edition of the always entertaining Zero Punctuation reviews, I noticed them encouraging people to vote for them in the Webby Awards. I'm quite happy to support the sites a like when all it costs me is a few minutes of my time, so followed the link and prepared to cast my vote. What I didn't count on was having to wade through literally hundreds of nominees to find the one that I wanted to vote for. With scores of different categories and five nominees in each one, it looks like a Webby is about as difficult to win as the prize in a Cracker Jack.

Television in the Wild Wild Far East

2008-04-08T14:20:00.005-06:00

It's fun to watch clips of Japanese television, as they tend to be either delightfully inventive or mind-bendingly weird. Jess recently pointed me in the direction of this lovely example of the first variety:

I love this as the premise for a game show, and they keep it interesting by having misleading openings that force the contestants to think beyond the body arrangement suggested by the shape. Plus, it never hurts to include some uncomplicated physical comedy.

That video reminded me of another one that I came across several weeks ago.

I'm still at a loss for words.

What goes up must come down, but it's rarely this much fun.

2008-04-06T17:25:00.004-06:00

My anti-television stance has been softening recently under the influence of cool things being produced by different shows. One of the things that I love is that they can do dangerous and/or expensive things and then I get to enjoy watching the results.

In the same vein as my earlier post on the Mythbusters cutting down a tree with a machine gun, I came across this brilliant clip not long ago. It's from the program Top Gear, and they're using old cars in place of clay pigeons, with increasingly heavy weaponry being employed against the flying automobiles.

Hello television. We meet again.

2008-04-01T00:44:00.007-06:00

It's going to be very tough waiting until Friday.

Frak you Ben.

Crazy week of activities (Having a social life is hard work!)

2008-03-30T12:40:00.005-06:00

Because the first week of classes is usually pretty mild, I decided that I would catch up on having a social life, as well as trying to get a head start on my coursework. Since Wednesday I have done the following:

Gave a big presentation on Madame Bovary for my graduate seminar on Modernism (and came up with vague notion for a possible thesis topic)
Watched the first disc of Battlestar Galactica Season Three with my friend Ben as we try to get caught up so that we can watch Season Four on TV (with a few more marathon sessions scheduled for the coming week because the first episode airs this Friday night)
Went to see an excellent touring production of My Fair Lady (the first time I had ever seen that show)
Went to a Saturday matinee of the play Gee's Bend and got an idea for how I might write one of my story ideas as a play
Cheered on the Nuggets in a thrilling victory over the Golden State Warriors in the first live basketball game I've been able to attend in years
Drank a few beers with my buddy Frank and had the first non-depressing conversation about academia that I've had in far too long

Now I must get back to all the reading that I neglected while I was having so much fun.

Wishes and Memories

2008-03-26T17:16:00.003-06:00

I recently received an email through my grad school list for a project that is collecting anonymous wishes and memories: www.nowisnotenough.com
This looks pretty interesting, and I regret that I no longer live close enough to Louisville to go see it when it goes on display.

It's getting eerie, what's this cheery singing all about?

2008-03-24T19:17:00.004-06:00

I find it odd that while I lack any passion for music, to a degree that I've wondered at times if there's something wrong with me, I do have a clear fondness for musicals. Part of it is my general enjoyment of the theatre, but there's also element of escapist longing to live in a different world where emotions can be expressed by bursting into song. In short, I sometimes wish my life was a musical.

A few weeks ago my Aunt Laura emailed me a link to what is now one of the my all-time favorite online videos, in which a group of people stage a seemingly spontaneous musical in the food court of a shopping mall.

Words cannot express how much I envy those people.

Some Guy Who Beat Duke for Governor!

2008-03-22T18:51:00.003-06:00

It's March, so it must be time to loathe the student-athletes of Duke University.

It is an interesting question whether there is a genuine competitive advantage to being hated and feared as a sports team. It certainly helps your players' confidence, and it is possible that it makes it easier to intimidate opponents, but it also means that no one overlooks you and you always get your opponents' best shot. The Duke men's basketball team has actively cultivated that sentiment, and they are far and away the most universally disliked team in college basketball.

I have no particular reason to dislike Duke as a school, but along with the rivals of the two schools I've attended and any school that's ever rejected me, they are one of the few teams that I actively root against in the NCAA tournament. I was disappointed on Thursday when they narrowly escaped being the victim of a gigantic upset at the hands of the lowly Belmont Bruins, and I happily followed all of the action today as they were beaten solidly by West Virginia in their second round game.

Beating Duke is an achievement that will probably be remembered far more fondly than anything else they achieve in this tournament. I couldn't help smiling when one of the CBS commentators shouted, "He's gonna get votes for governor!" after the second of a couple of key plays by a West Virginia player to seal Duke's defeat.

Mmm... sack.

2008-03-21T21:16:00.004-06:00

When it comes to seeing plays, they tend to come in streaks for me, and thus last night I went to see the Denver Center Theatre Company's production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. The DTC generally does a good job with Shakespeare, and I was looking forward to it because I'd never seen this play performed before. Unfortunately, while the play wasn't bad, it was wasn't great either. It was moderately funny, and they didn't fall into the trap of playing it solely for cheap laughs, but it didn't live up to my expectations because they failed to present a coherent treatment of Falstaff.

I had the privilege of seeing Michael Gambon as Falstaff in both parts of Henry IV in London a few years ago, and I certainly wasn't expecting to see a performance like that here, but I was disappointed by the fact that this production seemed uncertain about whether or not Falstaff should be a sympathetic character. Part of his popularity is that he is such a likable character even though the audience recognizes that he is a villain, but they seemed to be treating Falstaff as a genuinely unsympathetic character.

It's not enough simply to declare him a villain and spend the whole play abusing him. According to my ideal interpretation of the play, Falstaff should be a sympathetic character who is eclipsed by the greater sympathy that the audience develops for the wives, but in this production that was not the case. The wives were a bit too malicious for me to share their joy in Falstaff's suffering, and the end result was a comedy that drew chuckles instead of laughter.

Interesting may make life worth living, but sometimes it also makes me sad

2008-03-20T11:23:00.005-06:00

Last night I went to see my friend Jenna perform in her class project, the play Mad Forest: A Play From Romania. She is a friend from my undergrad years at Evansville, and now she is in grad school for theatre here in Denver. She is an outstanding actress, enough so that I would happily watch anything that she's doing, even a play about the Romanian revolution, which I actually knew enough about beforehand (thank you history degree and international studies minor!) to question whether it would be a good subject for a play.

As it turned out, the setting and subject did suit the play, providing good raw material for the energy and vitality that can only be fully expressed in chaos. When used effectively, confusion can be a powerful emotional tool, and the fact that it was difficult to tease out the humor and pathos made those elements more intense.

It was a very interesting play, and it succeeded largely because the performers brought a profound energy to what might have been a sluggish mutant of political satire and surreal theatre. That said, I can't say that I liked the play. It was interesting in the same sense of the word as the old curse "May you live in interesting times" and it makes me sad to think about how so much of the energy of life is the product of confusion and chaos.

Stop playing cards and start talking about our problems

2008-03-18T17:26:00.006-06:00

Over the last few days, I've been catching up on the some of the things I wanted to write about during finals, and one of the topics on my list was to examine the state of the race for the Democratic nomination. In particular, I wanted to post my belated responses to the results of the Wyoming caucuses and Mississippi primaries, and I figured I would wait for the the next big development in the race to talk about the long march to Pennsylvania and Obama's steadily growing lead in the delegate count.

The inflammatory sermons of Obama's pastor have been the main political topic of the last few days, and I figured that as the scandal du jour played itself out, it would give me a chance to write about the unhealthy dynamic that has developed between the two campaigns wherein supporters on one side or the other periodically say something they shouldn't, followed by a quick dismissal and a round of distancing (or rejecting and denouncing).

What I didn't count on was Obama delivering a brilliant speech on race in America that throws those political games out the window.

Like many people, I have often believed that the United States would always have racial tension, that it was an issue that might be improved but never wholly eliminated. I still don't believe that the dream of a truly colorblind America will happen in my lifetime, but after watching Obama exceed my expectations once again, I now have hope that it is possible.

Failing a saving throw against health problems and old age

2008-03-17T15:53:00.005-06:00

The news is a couple of weeks old now (and thus has already been on Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me), but I have to post something on the passing of Gary Gygax. In case there was any doubt about my nerd credentials, I am also a big fan of Dungeons & Dragons. The necessity of having a group was always a limiting factor, but I could fill in the gaps with computer versions like the excellent Baldur's Gate games. The only reason I'm not still playing it now is that the friends I played as an undergrad all graduated and went to different places.

I actually my first exposure to D&D in the form of Gygax's first edition of the rules, a set that had been left in our basement by my half-brother many years before. It is difficult to recall that many of the fundamental concepts of the entire genre of role-playing games were invented by just one man. It's disappointing that the business side of things and the various legal battles cast a shadow over the last few decades of his career, but he will be remembered for creating a game that made the trials of awkward youth a little less painful.

Food Fight

2008-03-16T22:55:00.005-06:00

An enthralling video from the excellent blahg of Shawn:

One might think that watching food act out an American-focused summary of major conflicts from WWII to the present would be funny, but it's even with such non-human actors, it's still a bit disturbing. I felt very impressed with myself that I was able to recognize pretty much all of the foods and all of the battles they were fighting.

When you treat English as a shiv, everyone sounds like a blackguard

2008-03-15T23:19:00.004-06:00

This video cracked me up when I finally had time to watch it earlier today. Beyond just being funny, it directs its mockery at one of my chief pet peeves, the attitude that "Our job is not to offer people the words they do use, but the words they should use."

It shreds stuff AND lights it on fire? Tell me more...

2008-03-14T19:15:00.003-06:00

While celebrating the end of the winter quarter with some classmates in a bar last night, the drunken conversation somehow ended up on the colossal geekiness of my teenage years (and all the nonexistent dates that ensued because of it).

I had consumed enough at that point that I told a story from my time playing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles role-playing game, in which my character (a teenage mutant ninja moose) defeated the heavily-armored villain who was standing on a shipping container full of Styrofoam packing peanuts by firing a machine gun at the container until the peanuts burst into flames.

The point of sharing that story is that it reminded me of the following unspeakably awesome video clip I watched a few weeks ago from the show Mythbusters, in which they demonstrate that you can in fact cut a tree down with a Gatling gun.

Tell me what you eat, and I'll smile and nod

2008-03-13T11:04:00.004-06:00

I have finally made it through the my winter quarter finals, having just barely finished both term papers in time. During that time I had to impose strict limits on myself in terms of how much I would sample the endless treats that the Internet dangles in front of me, and part of my method of self-control was to write down each nifty website and video I came across so that I can come back to it later. Now that I'm basking in the light at the end of the tunnel, I'll have time to check those things out and post about the cool ones on here.

My self-imposed Internet diet was necessitated by the fact that last week I wasted a bunch of time exploring the joy of Iron Chef clips on YouTube.

It all began with a presentation in my Style class on the writer M.F.K. Fisher, who wrote about food and the experience of eating in a way that deeply resonated with me. I hadn't heard of her before, but I'm now planning to read more of her work as soon as I have the chance, which may not be until this summer.

The class discussion ranged all over the topic of food, and eventually the subject turned to the original series of Iron Chef. At the time I classed it among the many interesting television shows that I might someday check out if I spot the DVDs in the library, but that changed when one of my classmates passed along this clip.

Of course I had to watch the next part, which led to watching the whole episode, and it went downhill from there.

Sad Day

2008-03-04T14:37:00.005-07:00

RIP Joseph M. Williams

I read Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace for the first time last night, and then I found out about his death this afternoon. I fell in love with the way that Williams debunked the invented rules that grammarians use to bludgeon writers and rant about the death of the English language. I don't agree with everything he said, but his book is the first style manual I've ever read that I would have no qualms about suggesting to others.

Leap Day

2008-03-01T10:34:00.011-07:00

Yesterday was Leap Day (2/29), and when a day comes along so rarely it deserves a bit of reflection (as pointed out by my friend Britannie). This was my sixth Leap Day (fourth that I was old enough to remember), and I spent the day basking in the 60° sunny weather and the evening having wine and brie with brilliant people at a house reading of poetry and fiction.

That's quite the contrast from the previous Leap Day in 2004, which I spent watching Leeds United struggle valiantly before losing at home to Liverpool on their way toward relegation in a tragic rise and fall from which they have still not recovered (they were relegated again last season and are currently laboring under a 15 point penalty).

It was my first time watching a live Premiership match, and I had a blast even though they lost. The atmosphere in the stadium for the entire match was charged with energy to a degree that I've rarely seen in American sports.

I think the idea of only having a birthday once every four years is fascinating, and someday I hope to make friends with someone who was born on a Leap Day so I can talk to them about it.

A muddy airport of linguistics

2008-02-29T12:09:00.005-07:00

Important news from The Onion: Idiom Shortage Leaves Nation All Sewed Up In Horse Pies

It's a tough situation, but this the price we pay for having had Dan Rather cover so many elections over the years. If he was still around for this race, our idiom deficit would be jumping like a one-legged iceberg.

Comedy Is War

2008-02-26T20:29:00.005-07:00

Although I've only watched the Jimmy Kimmel Show three times, that was enough for me to be familiar with his running joke about bumping Matt Damon. I fully enjoyed this hilarious "revenge" video he made with Jimmy's girlfriend Sarah Silverman:

That video was funny and hugely popular, which called out for a response. I was not surprised to see this video with Jimmy and Ben Affleck come out, but I wasn't expecting them to raise the bar this high:

I can only hope that they will continue to spur each other on to produce equally brilliant counter-attacks, though I don't know what anyone could do that would top this one.

The great American pastime- watching famous people do dumb things!

2008-02-21T14:06:00.017-07:00

I don't watch television or read the celebrity magazines, but that hasn't saved me from developing a knowledge of tabloid culture.

Yesterday I had the odd experience of having a writing tutoring session with Heidi Montag's brother, which was especially bizarre because a character sketch of his sister was a part of the descriptive essay he was working on.

It's disconcerting to hear a brother's glowing description of the sister he admires when you already have a clear mental picture of that same person as a vapid, reality-television quasi-celebrity with big fake breasts and a horrible music video. It's probably a good thing to be reminded that even the most unpleasant public figures can still have families who love them.

* * *

In a similar vein, Lindsay Lohan has taken the lead in poor decision-making with her brilliant decision to recreate a nude Marilyn Monroe photo shoot in New York Magazine. It is pretty much a given that to become a movie star or other major celebrity, one must possess an intense desire for attention, and Lohan is one of several celebs who clearly moved from intense to pathological.

I am firmly in favor of nudity that comes from a healthy attitude about sex and confidence about ones body, but it is much less appealing when it's a desperate cry for attention. It also doesn't help that, even though I'm a breast man who finds freckles oddly alluring, she looks only mildly attractive because of how poorly she has treated her body over the last few years.

* * *

I came across this funny video a couple days ago of a man getting rejected after making the foolish decision to propose at half-time of an NBA game, and before I got around to posting it here, I sent a message about it to ESPN's Bill Simmons, who included it in his weekly links page today (towards the bottom of the page). The best part of the video is Tracy McGrady's amused reaction to it as he takes the court to start the second half.

Obama gets fouled and scores anyway

2008-02-20T00:17:00.005-07:00

Immediately after Super Tuesday, the Clinton campaign started saying that nothing would be decided until March 4th, and it looks like that was the right strategy for managing expectations now that Obama has reeled off a string of ten impressive victories.

The result in Wisconsin makes it clear that he can win blue-collar workers, and it also serves as a clear response that the negative political games of the last few days are not going to be effective. The whole plagiarism claim was ridiculous even as the desperate attack of a floundering campaign, and while it doesn't seem to have made much impact on the voters at all, it is interesting to see how dismissive the media pundits have been.

Now the question remains whether Hillary will recognize the failure of going negative, or if she will conclude that the problem was that she didn't attack fiercely enough. I really hope it isn't the latter, because even though that would probably sink her campaign for good, having an influential member of the party like her slagging off the eventual nominee would only be good for McCain.

This video isn't about Obama, but it does present a rare instance of an influential sports icon displaying genuine conviction about substantive political issues. Charles Barkley's playing career ended before I had developed much of an interest in basketball, and I can't say that I'm a fan of his work as an analyst of the game, but his willingness to call out the hypocrisy of the religious right and declare his support of equal marriage rights and women's reproductive rights has made me a huge fan.

Breathing room

2008-02-19T19:38:00.004-07:00

The last few days have been quite busy and stressful, with back-to-back presentations in both of my grad school classes. I think they both went well, and now I'll be catching up on the last few days.

I had the odd feeling of having missed a lot when I heard the news this morning about Castro stepping down (by letter) and Kosovo declaring its independence (and having it recognized by the US and the major EU countries). The news from Cuba has a lot of symbolic significance, but considering that the transfer of power actually took place a year and half ago, it doesn't look like much will change. It would be nice to be able to legally visit Havana in the near future, but I won't hold my breath.

The situation in Kosovo looks much more complicated than it might seem, and I hope that we don't end up with a situation in which Russia decides to flex its muscles while the US is distracted by the election. It does strike me as very interesting that this most recent result of Milosovic's attempts to create a strong nationalist Serbia out of Yugoslavia is that an independent Kosovo has received immediate international recognition that would have been unthinkable if they'd made the same declaration twenty years ago.

* * *

When I saw this story in the New York Times about the use a semicolon in a subway placard, my initial reaction was to be pleased that it was used well in such an unexpected situation, but I ended up feeling discouraged that it became such a big deal. I also can't help feeling dubious when the story makes the following claim without providing any examples:

People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers.

I'd rather have a newspaper screw up a semicolon than to make huge unsupported claims about people being executed because of a punctuation mark.

Things suddenly get uncomfortably close

2008-02-15T15:14:00.003-07:00

I was having dinner in a bar and watching some college basketball last night when they switched over to the breaking news about the shooting at Northern Illinois University. At the time I registered it as another tragic event in the numbing litany of death and destruction that human beings are constantly inflicting on each other, but that detached emotional response was shattered this afternoon.

I've been working to reactivate the chapter of the English honor society Sigma Tau Delta here at DU, and this afternoon I was meeting with the treasurer to open a checking account for the chapter. As is often the case with that sort of seemingly simple task, we hit a roadblock when they needed a faxed confirmation from the society's central office. It should have been a simple enough thing to call them up and have them fax it over, but no one answered the phone when we called. It seemed odd, but we left a message and then tried to continue preparing to open the account. We got everything else in order, and they hadn't called back, so we were about to try again when I had a flash of realization.

As you may have already guessed, the central office of Sigma Tau Delta is in the English department at Northern Illinois University, which I'd known all along, but it wasn't until that moment that I put two and two together. The realization that the people suffering on television last night were the same ones I was talking to on the phone just a couple days ago was an unexpected shock. All of a sudden what had been a distant tragedy was brought uncomfortably close.

Shmashmentine's Day

2008-02-14T14:39:00.008-07:00

Mega-kudos to Jess for having the radical good taste to rock my mailbox with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card, and for this site that expresses my general feelings about February 14th with things like this:

It's funny to think that all of the atrocities against poetry that are committed on this day can be traced back to Chaucer. If it weren't for him, this day's saint would be just another Roman Catholic bishop who died a horrible death. Nothing says martyrdom like lingerie and chocolates!

In the same vein of bitterness, I really like this video that I found a couple days ago:

Obama Sweeps the Potomac

2008-02-12T21:20:00.004-07:00

Barack Obama's win in the Potomac Primaries is impressive, giving him eight victories in a row, but the bigger news is that he won among those who were supposed to belong to Hillary. Regardless of what the pundits say, the whole momentum factor remains minor because it takes effect when voters perceive that they would be throwing their votes away if they went against the momentum, and at this stage there's no way that Clinton supporters are going to conclude that she's a lost cause. Barring an a reversal in Wisconsin or Hawaii, Barack will be heading into the contests on March 4th (Texas, Ohio, Vermont, and Rhode Island) with a substantial delegate lead and victories in half of the states in the nation. So far, Huckabee has delayed McCain's nomination on the Republican side, but McCain's narrow victories in today's primaries will probably hasten Huckabee's withdrawal. Hopefully Obama can win both Ohio (looking increasingly plausible) and Texas (still doubtful, but winning among Latinos in Virginia gives hope), which would allow him to get the full force of the party behind him and start preparing for the general election.

* * *

I also came across a delightfully geeky website this evening. If you've ever wondered how a Star Destroyer and the Enterprise would look next to each other (or the relative sizes of any other science-fiction vehicles), this site has the answers. It's particularly nifty that he provides some real-world examples too. I like that Serenity is almost as big as a 747, and comparing things to the Empire State Building is far more fun than you'd think...

Driving in the middle of a two-way street

2008-02-10T20:16:00.001-07:00

As if our foreign policy wasn't dysfunctional enough already, the Bush Administration is trying to use visa-free travel to the United States to bludgeon the European Union into accepting new "security" measures. It's one thing when American citizens are frightened enough to exchange their privacy for the illusion of security, but pitting the EU member-states against each other in order to extract their citizens' personal information (including details about people who aren't even entering the US) is a good way to add to the already impressive quantity of ill-will that exists towards the United States.

Science gets head-butted

2008-02-08T17:50:00.001-07:00

One of the highlights of my visit to New York was the American Museum of Natural History, which was amazing for both its size and the quality of its collections. Some of my fondest memories from my childhood are of wandering through the Natural History Museum here in Denver (recently renamed the Denver Museum of Nature & Science), and my experience in New York was quite similar but on a much larger scale.

As I've gotten older, I've gotten into the habit of carrying a notebook with me when I go to museums, and I find that in addition to the actual items on display, the informational panels describing them are often a rich source of inspiration for my own writing. As I was exploring the dinosaurs and occasionally noting little gems of interest, I came across something that reminded me just far-reaching the conservative war on science has become.
It was a standard informational panel explaining the different theories about how pachycephalosaurs might have used their thick skull-caps, starting with the theory that they would have used them to establish dominance by butting heads like bighorn sheep, followed by an explanation that more recent research had indicated that their neck vertebra were too fragile for them to survive head-to-head combat and that they may instead have established dominance by butting a rival in the flanks. What saddened me was that underneath that information there was added placard reminding people in the familiar language of the anti-evolution movement that we cannot be sure about anything when it comes to extinct animals because those theories cannot be tested. It's sad enough that there are people who cannot tolerate scientific progress if it might threaten their fragile beliefs, but to see that sort of language creeping into such an important scientific institution raises frightening questions about the place of intellectual development in this country.

Germany and Prague via Broadway

2008-02-06T12:05:00.000-07:00

During my New York trip I set aside all of Saturday afternoon and evening for Broadway shows. I had several shows that I was interested in seeing, so I made my decision based on the availability of cheap student tickets, and I ended up get tickets to a matinée of Spring Awakening and an evening show of Rock 'n' Roll. Although I hadn't planned it that way, it worked out perfectly to give me a taste of both sides of the spectrum, with Spring Awakening representing the enthusiastic energy of the musical and Rock 'n' Roll was a thought-provoking drama.

Although it was clearly a Broadway musical, one of the things that I really enjoyed about Spring Awakening was that it did make some ambitious and unexpected choices. Using rock music to express the angst of 19th century German teenagers might have seemed painfully anachronistic, but the music helped the show to tap into the highs and lows of adolescence in a way that contemporary audiences can relate to quite readily. My primary impression of the show was its incredible energy. The actors had a very believable youthful enthusiasm, and the show did a great job of presenting the difficulty of achieving a balanced sense of self when your whole world is being distorted by the changes of puberty.

Unfortunately, the show's energy could not make up for the fact that all of the music meant there wasn't enough time to give significant psychological depth to the characters. I'm not familiar with the play on which it is based, but I suspect that the broad strokes are the result of trying to translate the emotional depth of a play into the medium of a musical. In spite of its weaknesses, Spring Awakening had more than enough passion and vitality to keep me thoroughly engaged and entertained.

Rock 'n' Roll had a very different feel, which makes sense considering that it came to New York from London and still has most of the original West-End cast. As I have learned to expect from a Tom Stoppard play, it was thought-provoking and had real heft, but it also had an emotional side to balance the intellectual discussions of the mind, music, and communism. Unfortunately, it also felt like a play more suited to a British rather than American audience, and I could tell that some of the audience members were almost angry at the fact that communism was being discussed by sympathetic characters who were not painting it as an ideology of pure evil.

My perception may have been skewed by the fact that on this night I had the misfortune to be in the most poorly behaved audience I have ever seen. People were getting up and trying to move to better seats during much of the first act, in some cases not even waiting for a scene break to do so, and at one point a cell phone started ringing and just kept ringing until after about the third or fourth ring, the actors simply paused the action, at which point the offender finally realized what a disruption it was and silenced it. It was real shame to have such an awful audience, because the play itself was remarkable in its subtlety and the depth of its passionate characters.

Caucusing for Obama

2008-02-05T23:01:00.000-07:00

It was an intense experience this evening when I headed into the local elementary school to caucus for Obama with my mother in tow. I had a bit of preliminary work to do during dinner when she revealed that she had some doubts about Obama's healthcare plan and was considering caucusing for Hillary. She said that as a doctor she is a "single-issue voter" with respect to healthcare, but I talked to her over dinner about the fact that both candidates share the same goal of making sure that everyone has access to quality healthcare, and I reminded her of our past discussions about the divisiveness that has soured so much of American politics and Obama's unique ability to inspire people.

The school was packed, and when we finally figured out which room to go to for our precinct, the little elementary-school library was packed. After we got signed in, I led my mother over to the other Obama supporters, and she came willingly. She still hadn't told me for sure that she was going to caucus for Obama, but I think that seeing the huge majority of Obama supporters in the room dispelled whatever lingering doubts she may have had.

The final numbers for our precinct came out to 99 for Obama and 37 for Hillary, and the mood in the room was very positive on both sides, even though the process moved slowly because there were so many people. The delegate numbers came out to seven for Obama and three for Hillary, and without any prior planning, I decided to put my name forward as a possible delegate for Obama at the county convention. There were quite a few other people interested, and to narrow it down the Obama precinct captain asked if anyone would be willing to be an alternate instead. I could see that some of the people were really keen on being delegates, so I took up that offer, and I'm currently one of the seven alternates. I'm glad to be involved even in that little way (and who knows, I might get called to replace one of the delegates), and it was hugely encouraging to see the physical manifestation of the growing support for Obama.

The results for the state of Colorado indicate that Obama across the state by a huge margin, and I feel very proud of my state for so heartily supporting his message of hope.

Interesting New Poet

2008-02-05T14:36:00.002-07:00

Because I didn't have internet access during my trip, I will continue to post thoughts and things from AWP and visiting New York as time allows over the course of the week. Here is the first:

At the AWP conference I attended a panel on translation that was very interesting, and one of the panelists was a poet whose work really resonated with me. Hélène Cardona is one of those gifted people who are able to do anything and everything. She talked about translating and how she uses it in her creative process, and she read briefly from her recently published first book, The Astonished Universe, a bilingual book with versions of the poems in both French and English, and the poems she read were fantastic. Listening to her read a poem in English and then in French highlighted for me the difference in how I experience poetry. The sound of the poem as she was reading it in French was a much more visceral experience for me than in English, and I think that the sublime feeling of losing myself in the language is harder to find in English because I have studied it so intensely. My knowledge has given me a depth of understanding that makes up for the loss of that sort of naive wonder, but having the French and English together allowed me to get the best of both worlds.

What ever happened to "Render unto Caesar..."?

2008-01-29T19:15:00.001-07:00

Reasonable people do realize that Mike Huckabee is a crackpot, right? The Republican party is already in pretty bad shape as a result of the last eight years, and it is interesting to see how the extreme elements now have greater weight as a result of the moderates distancing themselves from the GOP. Part of me would love to see Huckabee win the nomination because he could challenge Goldwater for the most lopsided defeat in history and the GOP would take years to recover, but if he did somehow win the general election I think there's a very real chance that it would tear the country apart.

Literacy- Without it, these funny black marks would be pretty boring

2008-01-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

In the 2007 edition of a study by Central Connecticut State University, Denver is now 4th on the list of America's Most Literate Cities. Having a good library system, two major daily newspapers, and a decent number of bookstores are the major factors behind Denver's ranking, and I feel quite fortunate to have grown up here for some of the same reasons. (As a side note, the most popular book at CCSU is "The Davinci Code." I'm going to have to stop looking at those stats or will take an army of Obamas to restore my hope in this country's future).

* * *

Tomorrow I leave for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs 2008 conference in New York City, and I am very excited about it. I had a fantastic time the first time I went to AWP in 2006 when it was in Austin, but this should be even better. In all my travels, I've never visited New York City, and the timing couldn't be better as several of my friends have moved there over the last couple years. Four days isn't much time to both enjoy the conference and visit the city, but I'm going to do as much as I can.

Hope is back in fashion, but good books need a champion

2008-01-27T22:13:00.000-07:00

The results from South Carolina confirm that the Obama tide is rising again. I was rather concerned about racially charged and aggressive things were getting, as he described it in his victory speech:

It’s the politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon. A politics that tells us that we have to think, act, and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us. The assumption that young people are apathetic. The assumption that Republicans won’t cross over. The assumption that the wealthy care nothing for the poor, and that the poor don’t vote. The assumption that African-Americans can’t support the white candidate; whites can’t support the African-American candidate; blacks and Latinos can’t come together.

Another instance of the same sort of significantly increased turnout that was a big factor in Iowa makes me increasingly confident that he can continue to mobilize people all the way through to November. Winning a majority instead of a plurality is huge, and it is striking that he won a fierce contest in South Carolina by roughly the same margin that Hillary won in Michigan when she was the only major candidate on the ballot.

The race is still not over, it probably won't be over after Super Tuesday, and it may very well continue all the convention (and wouldn't that make for some exciting times here in the Mile High City). I had thought that the days of having a President who could give me goosebumps (in a good way!) when he speaks were over, and I hope this election proves me wrong.

* * *

With thanks to Jess, I am fascinated by the looking at which books make you dumb. Of course, it's not actually about the books' impact on intelligence so much as the sort of books that dumb people like (or to be really precise, books that people on Facebook say they like sorted by the average SAT score of their school). It is completely unscientific and enthralling nonetheless. The fact that "I don't read" is even popular enough to be ranked is scary, and the fact that it scored as high as it did is downright terrifying. Shame on Lynn University, where "I don't read" is actually the #1 most popular book. I hope their alumni are embarrassed.

Most of the books that I have listed as favorites on Facebook aren't on the list, but here are the rankings of the ones that are: Great Expectations (1046), Dune (1086), Shakespeare (1101), The Lord Of The Rings (1102), 1984 (1120), Pride and Prejudice (1136), Ender's Game (1167)

Online Videos

2008-01-26T15:06:00.001-07:00

I don't watch TV, so I haven't been particularly bother by the foolishness of the writers' strike, but one of the great disappointments for me has been the fact that the vast majority of the online videos supporting the strike have turned out to be quite boring. I watch probably more online videos than is healthy, which meant I was all over Tom Cruise's "Yes, I really am crazy" Scientology video. To my great pleasure, they have been combined with hilarious results:

* * *

I also recently came across the most entertaining video game reviewer ever. Probably not the first choice in terms of deciding which game to buy, but the hilarity more than makes up for his idiosyncratic system of evaluation.

Matters of Medium

2008-01-25T15:02:00.000-07:00

Going from the page to the stage can be tricky enough when dealing with something that was written as dramatic literature, and trying to translate a work of art from one medium to another carries a lot of risks. A novel can succeed in a number of different ways, and not all of those elements can be reproduced on stage.

Plainsong at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts was a perfect example. I've never read the best-selling novel on which the play was based, but I have to wonder who thought that it would lend itself well to a stage adaptation. The Aristotelian unities are not and should not be iron-clad rules, but there is a reason his writings have been so influential. A novel can weave together different narrative threads into a coherent whole in a way that the theatre cannot.

The modern stage has the technical capacity to overcome many of the logistical challenges of such multifaceted storytelling, but simply being able to shift move rapidly through a series of short scenes is not enough. The stage adaptation of the His Dark Materials trilogy at the National Theatre in London was a good example of how it can be done well, and it succeeded because the heart of the novels was built around two central characters, and the stage adaptation was able to channel all of the action through that relationship.

Plainsong was engaging in spite of its structure thanks to skill of several of the actors, but it is a shame that they did not have more to work with. Several of the characters were clearly supposed to be emotionally significant, but in the rush to get everything from the novel on stage, they were not given any opportunity to engage with the audience. The fact that there were so many characters fighting for the audience's attention and sympathy made it all the more remarkable that some of the actors were still able to make those connections.

Caucus confusion

2008-01-21T12:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to a meeting at Barack Obama's Denver headquarters to learn how the Colorado caucus works. Although I've been an active voter since 2004, I've never participated in a caucus because Colorado only uses them for presidential elections and we were always irrelevant because we came so late in the season. This year they've moved it up to Super Tuesday, and that's why I was waiting outside with about half a dozen people while the Obama campaign volunteers tried to find someone with a key to get into the building.

My impressions of both the headquarters and the staff fit with the image that the media has presented of the Obama campaign: low-budget, young, and inexperienced, but with an earnest enthusiasm to make up for their lack of polish. It had the odd effect of cementing my support for him while simultaneously increasing my doubts about whether he can beat Hillary.

The Moral Aspect of a Sledgehammer

2008-01-17T22:26:00.002-07:00

This evening I went to see the world premiere of Lydia, a new play that was commissioned by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. It was extremely well-executed and powerful, but it also left me asking Why? The actors turned in excellent performances working with very difficult material, but I struggle to see what the playwright and the director were trying to accomplish. It was a brilliant sledgehammer of a play, but aside from the emotional spectacle of watching a family tear itself apart, I couldn't see that it accomplished anything.

That raises the question of whether art needs to have a "purpose" or if it should just be allowed to exist completely detached from moral considerations in a bubble of "art for art's sake". My feeling is that while art need not have a moral agenda, the artist must still take into consideration that it does exist in a moral world. Sometimes audiences need a play to be a sledgehammer that smashes ideas or expectations, but there's a reason we speak disparagingly of "shock value", and it is a shame that a play full of such beautifully crafted scenes ultimately did nothing more than revel in a spectacle of rage, guilt, and destruction.

* * *

A recent article in Slate has prompted a lot of thought on my part. I've actually never read anything by Nabokov, but I feel deeply conflicted about the question of whether his grandson should carry out his wishes and destroy his unfinished final novel. As a reader and scholar of literature, I have a knee-jerk reaction in favor of defying his wishes and releasing it to the public, but that thought sickens me when I consider that he clearly felt that it was incomplete.

At what point do the desires of the reading public override those the authors who provide the literature we crave? Does a writer's control over his work diminish in proportion to his greatness? I have no answers that can diminish my visceral feeling that the manuscript shouldn't be destroyed, and I feel like my inability to make up my mind on this issue is a failing on my part.

Occasionally a geek will actually have a date to the prom

2008-01-16T13:24:00.000-07:00

In a lovely bit coincidence, Ashley, an old friend of mine from high school, started a blog recently. She gave me a shout-out in her blog the other day (and was the first to comment here), so I'm returning the favor as part of my general policy of supporting anyone who gives me gratuitous praise.

Her boldly titled blog.

Coming from a mind crazy enough to be my date to senior prom, it's a safe bet that interesting will not be in short supply, so check it out. I've also added a list of links to some other blogs that I like.

* * *

In an earlier post I presented the following grotesque sentence that some friends and I came up with in class:

I have the awareness that the flesh of young humans, ideally humans within the age range typically defined as infancy, is indeed capable of being processed by the gastrointestinal tract, in ergo facto providing the necessary je ne sais quoi of a meal more delicious than the love of Baby Jesus.

After spending some time wandering through the Forest of Rhetoric, I thought it would be fun to list all of its stylistic vices:
macrologia- Longwindedness. Using more words than are necessary in an attempt to appear eloquent.
tautologia- The repetition of the same idea in different words, but (often) in a way that is wearisome or unnecessary.
cacozelia- Bad taste in words or selection of metaphor, either to make the facts appear worse or to disgust the auditors.
soraismus- To mingle different languages affectedly or without skill.
acyrologia- An incorrect use of words, especially the use of words that sound alike but are far in meaning from the speaker's intentions.
catachresis- The use of a word in a context that differs from its proper application.
hypallage- Shifting the application of words. Mixing the order of which words should correspond with which others.
cacemphaton- An expression that is deliberately either foul (such as crude language)or ill-sounding (such as from excessive alliteration).

* * *

Anyone geeky enough to still be reading at this point should get a kick out of this:

Stick figures+ violence= awesome

2008-01-15T13:45:00.000-07:00

The New York Times corrections page is often far more interesting than one would expect, but it really tickled me to see Hitler, Jesus, and Satan all in the same correction.

* * *

Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviant ART

This manages to appeal to both my geeky side and my masculine affinity for violent action. I especially like when he squirts water into the big laser rifle.

The Edge of the Bell Curve

2008-01-13T22:19:00.001-07:00

There's nothing like reading a nice Victorian novel to set the mind wandering on the subject of marriage.

* * *

It's somewhat old news, but I'm still amazed at the window-washer in New York who fell 47 stories and lived. I can even understand all the miracle talk, even though it's not too hard to understand if you accept his incredible good luck to have avoided injuring either his head or pelvis. People don't think very clearly when it comes to statistically improbable occurrences.

New Hampshire keeps things interesting

2008-01-09T01:11:00.000-07:00

It's probably a good thing that elections are still really difficult to predict. Everybody was forecasting a major victory for Obama tonight, which would have given him an almost unbeatable lead. Instead the New Hampshire voters produced a narrow victory for Hillary, which leaves the race still very open. Edwards was a distant enough third to be in trouble, but he'll stay in the race until South Carolina. Obama answered a lot of doubters (myself included) by winning Iowa, but one of the remaining questions was how he'll perform as the front-runner instead of the underdog. Obama still looks to be in pretty good shape, but it remains to be seen what was responsible for this upset victory for Hillary. If she's managed to make voters doubt his message of hope, then we're in for a tight race, but it's likely to shift back to Obama if this victory was fueled by the sympathy she got after the crying incident.

* * *

Of course, all that means very little in light of this clear sign of the coming of the apocalypse:

Children are edible

2008-01-08T17:41:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love about grad school is the fact that I'm able to sit down in classes full of creative people and create things like the following anti-Strunk & White revision of a sentence from Swift's "A Modest Proposal":

I have the awareness that the flesh of young humans, ideally humans within the age range typically defined as infancy, is indeed capable of being processed by the gastrointestinal tract, in ergo facto providing the necessary je ne sais quoi of a meal more delicious than the love of Baby Jesus.

* * *

When I travel, it is important to me that my tourism provides me with valuable experiences and helps to make me a better person. It's encouraging to learn that Henry James also felt that sightseeing is serious business.

Geaux Tigers!

2008-01-07T22:11:00.002-07:00

Literature and Linguistics

2008-01-03T15:45:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I came across the following article by Robin Sowards (a professor of English): "Why Everyone Should Study Linguistics". It's interesting to see someone articulating what I have often thought of only in vague terms, namely that students and teachers of literature should study linguistics.

My interest in linguistics comes largely out of my frustration when I have to get students to unlearn things they have been taught about writing that are counterproductive. He captures my thoughts exactly:

Surely grammar is the only domain in which virtually the entirety of literary scholarship is willing to accept uncritically the received wisdom of the nineteenth century.

He does a very good job of explaining how to develop an understanding of linguistics as a complement to literary analysis, but I worry that anyone who is not already at least somewhat interested in linguistics is unlikely to be convinced by this essay. It seems clear enough how important such knowledge is when working with students' writing, but I suspect that a stronger case must be made for linguistics' utility to literary criticism before anyone will start requiring linguistics courses.

Shakespeare AND the Beatles? It must be good for your cultural IQ

2008-01-02T16:53:00.000-07:00

Resolutions?

2008-01-01T21:32:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year for looking back and making grand pronouncements about what we will or will not do in the coming year, even though a year is a long time and New Year's resolutions rarely make it through January. It is nice to look back on where I've been and where I hope to be going in the coming year.

Things I accomplished in 2007:

Got into grad school.
Successfully taught a creative writing class by myself with a group of 3rd-5th grade students.
Helped establish my work with writing tutoring for 6th-8th graders as an ongoing volunteer program.
Made a friend unexpectedly who has already become one of the closest people in my life and who I expect will be a life-long friend.
Had a long relationship that taught me a lot about myself.
Found the courage to stand up for myself and end that same relationship when it grew increasingly unhealthy.
Began a serious and organized effort to get my poems published (aka, started a rejection slip collection).
Started to believe that I can be attractive to other people beyond my intellectual gifts.
Worked full-time and successfully navigated the minefield of a dysfunctional workplace.
Saved money and established a budget so that I should be able to get my masters without going into debt.

Things I would like to accomplish in 2008:

Break out of my patterns of procrastination.
Be more proactive about dating.
Make more of an effort to write new poems, without getting away from the good revision work that I've been doing.
Find out why my brother gets under my skin and learn to be at peace with him.
Commit the time to write an academic paper that represents my very best work.
Make more connections among the department's faculty and graduate students.
Restore the university's chapter of Sigma Tau Delta to viability with undergraduate leadership.
Find ways to travel without screwing up my budget (my upcoming trip to NYC will be a good start).
Learn more about teaching methods, effective classroom skills, and good pedagogy so that I'm more prepared to teach college-level courses.
Embrace the fantastic path I'm on without closing myself off to unexpected opportunities.

Things have changed significantly from where I was 365 days go, and while I don't foresee such dramatic changes in the coming year, I can only hope that my life improves as much in 2008 as it did in 2007.

The Soul of Wit

2007-12-30T16:47:00.000-07:00

I just got back from watching Juno, which a fine example of a well-written comedy. Lots of comedies are entertaining by virtue of the comedic talents of the performers, and the writing serves merely as a platform for them to express those talents (a good example would be Anchorman). There's nothing wrong with that sort of comedy, but it's not the writing that makes it good.

Juno had both witty one-liners and longer bits of clever humor, but it also had a coherent emotionally-potent story that did not rely on typical Hollywood manipulation to power its more touching moments. It reminded me in some ways of the stage version of Pride and Prejudice that I saw recently, but the big flaw in that show was that they tried so hard to work in so much of the novel's clever language. It was a very up and down show because the story's core is the love story, but it gave the witty lines so much weight that the romance lacked heft. Juno succeeded by building around the comedy, which allowed the romance to flourish in a secondary position.