Alice in a 3D Spectacle

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.

I love books (and hilarious online video thingies)

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Shmashmentine's Day

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:

Interesting New Poet

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.

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

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

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)

Matters of Medium

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.

The Moral Aspect of a Sledgehammer

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.

Literature and Linguistics

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.