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Am I not smart anymore?

Here’s what I’m a little bummed about right now: I haven’t written what I consider a real blog post (primarily text, longer than a few lines, and not recycled) since “My month with Kenneth,” published on November 10.  When I think about writing an articulate, coherent post that has a meaningful message, I feel really tired.

For example, you need to have transitions in good writing.  Transitions are really hard to write!  (Maybe I need to lay off on my English 102 students.)  I don’t know how to transition into my next paragraph, so I’m just going to jump topics, if that’s okay with you.

There’s a difference between having ideas for writing and actually writing.  I experience the former all the time.  I have so many screenplay ideas in my head, I would probably have a good statistical probability of winning an Oscar if I actually wrote all of them and saw them made into movies.  Examples: Best Adapted Screenplay: Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, starring Tom Hiddleston and J. J. Feild (because the screenwriter gets to do the casting, obviously); Best Original Screenplay: Sam’s Home (there’s a pun in that title), a bittersweet comedy about a 30-ish guy with depression who’s had some setbacks and is now back living with his parents and working in the same Italian restaurant he worked at in high school (it sounds like it’s been done before, but I have fresh angles).

See, that paragraph was easy to write!  Because I didn’t have to put sentences together logically; I just used a lot of parentheses.

I used to be able to write really brilliant stuff.  The other day I was thinking about some of my best work: my master’s thesis about eating and bodies in George Eliot’s novels, the short story about Cain and Esau in a diner that I wrote in 2009, the paper I wrote on Moneyball and masculinity in a doctoral film class.  I’ve even written some blog posts that I’m pretty proud of.  (See my archives, at left.)  But now, this is the kind of writing I do every day: “Hey guys, we need to have a meeting about Topic X and Topic Y.  How does June 15 sound?”  After a day of writing that kind of stuff, I’m too mentally tired to write a blog post, or to actually start penning one of those screenplays (although I did read a couple of books on screenplay last summer), or (are you kidding me?) write something scholarly.

Does this mean that my creativity is sapped, that my argumentation skills have significantly waned, that my vocabulary has shrunk, or–as my title sadly suggests–that I’m just not smart anymore?

Or, is one of these three more optimistic things true (I know; “things” is a weak noun)?

  1. I just have to set aside time for writing, as Daniel Silvia has told me in How to Write a Lot.  Perhaps I was lucky in the past and was frequently struck with inspiration, but I shouldn’t expect that to be par for the course (ugh, cliche!).  Maybe if I actually sat down and said, “I’m going to write now,” I would come up with something brilliant.
  2. I can still write pretty decent prose–I mean, I’m writing this post!
  3. The “Hey guys” emails, the comments I write on my students’ papers, the Instagram photo captions–maybe those are actually just as brilliant as those old papers and stories I’m really proud of.  They’re just different kinds of brilliance for different contexts.  Maybe?
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#FakeSummerBlockbusters

 

I was going to tweet these, but since I haven’t posted here in a while, and I think people are just as likely to look at my blog as my Twitter, here are some movies that aren’t actually coming out this summer.

From Christopher Nolan, a football movie that rips the very fabric of time and space: InterCeption.

Which Zombie Is Eating Gilbert Grape? –starring the kid from Fear the Walking Dead who looks like young Johnny Depp.

A boring superhero who wears blue and always does the right thing vs. a rich guy who doesn’t have superpowers but wears a cool suit.

Oh, wait, this movie already has come out this year.  Twice. #justkidding #LuvUCapAmerica

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encore: Easter and The Walking Dead

Now I understand why people become professional bloggers. It’s a lot easier to remember to blog when it’s your job.

It’s not my job, but I do plan to get back into posting semi-regularly. Meanwhile, here’s a post I wrote three years ago around this time of year.

This will be a quick post in which I don’t intend to say anything new or profound, except in the sense that the gospel is always profound. I just think the co-occurrence of The Walking Dead‘s season finale with Easter Sunday is too good an opportunity to pass up. If you’re a TWD fan, you’ve probably already noticed this conjuncture and have been tweeting little jokes about it all week. While I can appreciate this subcategory of morbidly irreverent humor, I want to remind us all of a few basic yet important truths.

We often forget that Christ’s resurrection means our resurrection too. Do a search on occurrences of the term “first-fruits” in the Bible–in the Old Testament, you’ll get instructions about bringing your produce to the temple, but in the New Testament, you’ll find all kinds of good doctrine, most if not all from Paul, about how Christ’s resurrection was only the first in a series of resurrections. There will indeed be a day when “all who are in the graves will hear his voice and come forth” (John 5:28-29). It sounds a lot like a Romero-esque scenario in which “the dead will walk the earth,” EXCEPT THAT THEY WON’T BE DEAD. The difference between reanimation–when corpses become mobile–and resurrection–when formerly dead people live again–couldn’t be more pronounced.

So when you watch The Walking Dead tomorrow night and you see all those rotting bodies stumbling around outside the gate of the prison where our friends are holed up, don’t think for a minute that this is what the Bible means when it talks about the defeat of death. There won’t be anything creepy about the resurrection, just like there isn’t anything creepy about having an Easter sunrise service in a cemetery (I saw a sign for one of those while driving past Alta Vista, VA, yesterday). And when you attend a church service tomorrow morning, as I hope you do (whether it’s at sunrise or not), don’t think for a minute that Christ’s resurrection was just a past event that’s nice to remember but that has no effect on the present or future.

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.” I Corinthians 15:58

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#hobbitlife

Several times on this blog, I’ve stated or hinted that I feel I have quite a bit in common with a hobbit.  (See, for example, “I am not fast” and my comments on “Another schizophrenic post.”) Yesterday, I formulated my most thorough, yet succinct, statement of this resemblance to date.  I wrote it for a different venue, but I thought I’d share it here.  Enjoy.

If you want to understand me pretty well, you really just need to think of Bilbo Baggins. Like Bilbo, I love my house, and I’m quite proud of keeping it tidy and homey. I like my routine, my alone time, and my square meals. But if you show up at my door and ask me to go on an adventure–well, I might need a little prodding, and I might freak out about forgetting my pocket handkerchiefs, but once you get me on the road, you’ll find me a dependable traveling companion, and I might even pleasantly surprise you with my resourcefulness and (occasionally) courage.

Just as a clarification, I don’t have big ears or hairy feet.

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Happy Christmas from my tree

For my Christmas post this year, I thought I’d show you pictures of many of the 16 ornaments I bought while traveling in England (London and the Lake District) a few weeks ago.  I don’t have anything clever or profound to say this time–just that I hope you have a magical and blessed Christmas!

bird with carols written on its wings (from the British library) and bird on a post box (from Westminster Abbey)

bird with carols written on its wings (from the British library) and bird on a post box (from Westminster Abbey)

ornaments 2

Celtic cross from the British museum (bottom left), Hogwarts crest from the Harry Potter studio tour (top), Peter Rabbit painted on an egg from The World of Beatrix Potter (right)

ornaments 3

two Victorianesque ornaments: robins from Charles Dickens’s house and a Christmas tree from the British Library

ornaments 4

Here’s the postbox robin again, along with my other ornaments from Westminster Abbey. (That’s Queen Victoria.)

ornaments 5

These are from Harrod’s. I could have spent a fortune on ornaments there.

I forgot to take pictures of my Christmas pudding ornament, the heart-shaped ornament with Shakespeare’s face, and a few others.  But I hope these give you a taste of England at Christmastime!

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My Month with Kenneth

Kenneth Branagh, that is.  See what I did with the title, there?

I’ve loved Kenneth Branagh and his art ever since my mom made me read Much Ado about Nothing and watch his exuberant 1993 adaptation when I was in middle school.  I love his non-Shakespeare stuff too; in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, he makes the cringe-worthy Gilderoy Lockhart funny and even likeable.

A few weeks ago, I watched Branagh’s 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein twice within the space of four days.  I wanted to show it to the book club I’m faculty advisor for, but first I wanted to watch it (it had been quite a few years since I’d seen it) to make sure I could show it to the students in good conscience, considering that it’s rated R.  I decided that I could, but I prefaced our group viewing with a warning about why it’s an R-rated movie (mostly what the MPAA calls “thematic elements”–it is, after all, about a guy who sews and splices dead human body parts together).  Then I gave them another warning: There’s nothing subtle about this movie.  There’s weeping!  Screaming!  A huge house fire!  A bombastic soundtrack!  Dramatic gestures and facial expressions!  I told the students that I think part of the reason for this lack of subtlety is that it’s an adaptation of a novel from the Romantic period, a novel full of heightened language and unabashed displays of emotion.  (If I had a dollar for every time in the book that Victor Frankenstein flings himself into or out of a conveyance, or his eyes gush with tears…)  The dialogue in the 1994 adaptation is actually pretty understated, but the Romantic emotionalism appears elsewhere in the cinematic elements I mentioned above.

But I don’t think that’s the only reason for the heightened–well, the heightened everything of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, because the same over-the-top qualities appear in other Kenneth Branagh films.  I think the reason is that Branagh, like many film actors and directors from the UK, was first a stage actor and is still actively involved in live theater.  (More on this later.)  But unlike many others, Branagh has continued to bring that stage sensibility to the films with which he’s involved.  Everything is bigger on the stage because there’s no camera or audio equipment to swoop in and catch the flicker of an eyelash or a quiet sigh.  Over the years, the film industry has taught us to valorize intimacy and subtlety, and to view “stagey” as a derogatory term.  Kenneth Branagh’s films often challenge those conventions.  Just watch his wild and colorful Much Ado about Nothing, with its triumphant Patrick Doyle score, and compare it with Joss Whedon’s snarky black and white 2012 adaptation, with its smooth jazz score.

I thought about this more last night when I re-watched Thor (2011), which Kenneth Branagh shocked Hollywood by choosing to direct.  (The one that really shocked me was Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit–I’m still not sure what Kenneth was doing there.)  Because I’m preparing to write an essay about the Thor movies (I’m sure I’ll say more about this in future blog posts), I was taking notes and paying particular attention to the Shakespearean allusions and the stage conventions that appear in this first film.  I noticed that the dialogue, at least in the Asgard scenes, is very different from the snappy, jokey language typical in superhero movies.  This is a Shakespearean family inheritance drama.  Stakes are high, voices are raised, accusations are flung, tears are shed.  I think that may partially explain why some die-hard Marvel fans didn’t care for this movie–it didn’t fit their expectations.

GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, UNGRATEFUL PUNK!!!!

GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, UNGRATEFUL PUNK!!!!

FINE!! AND I'M NEVER COMING BACK!

FINE!! AND I’M NEVER COMING BACK!

"WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME I WAS ADOPTED???!!!" "BECAUSE I KNEW YOU'D FREAK OUT LIKE THIS!!!!"

“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME I WAS ADOPTED???!!!”
“BECAUSE I KNEW YOU’D FREAK OUT LIKE THIS!!!!”

Anyways.  I’m not very good at creating memes.  My point is that there are some fantastic actors in this movie, so we can’t attribute all that yelling, nor those facial expressions (!), to bad acting.  In fact, several of them are also stage actors, and my guess is that they were totally on board with Branagh’s unconventional choice to make a superhero movie look a lot like a live production of Henry V.  (I chose that particular Shakespeare play for a reason, since Branagh on numerous occasions has compared the two stories.  See this fascinating article for details.)

I’ll close this post by saying that next Monday night, my parents are going to see Kenneth Branagh in Harlequinade, a very meta comedy about a troupe putting on A Winter’s Tale, at the Garrick Theatre in London.  (You know that part in the Bible that says, “Thou shalt not covet thy parents’ theater tickets”?)  If this rambling post has been accurate, they will be watching Kenneth Branagh do on stage what he has been doing on film (and directing others to do) for years now in defiance of Hollywood convention.  Stick it to ’em, Kenneth.

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You and I are Edmund Pevensie.

I’m listening to the Focus on the Family Radio Theatre production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  (By the way, I’m pretty much addicted right now to the FOTF Radio Theatre adaptations of classics, and I’ve nearly exhausted my church library’s stash.  If you have any recommendations in that series or other audio dramatizations I might enjoy, let me know, and I will start looking elsewhere.)  I’m remembering how much I love this story.  The title of my post is pretty obvious to anyone who’s even shallowly considered the Christian implications of C. S. Lewis’s classic.  Duh, of course Edmund represents the sinner who is redeemed by Christ’s (Aslan’s) sacrificial death.

But this time, I’ve been thinking about why it’s so easy for me to identify with this rather unpleasant little English boy from a time before I was born.  I’ve always liked Edmund most of the four siblings–Lucy is basically just cute; Peter is too heroic, and Susan (I hate to say it) is pretty boring.  But that doesn’t explain why I’m so overcome at that point when Aslan comes out of the tent with Edmund and says, “Here is your brother.  There is no need to talk to him about what is past.”  Certainly, I’m moved by the truth behind the scene, but allegory, true as it may be, can often be cold and dry.

I think the reason I identify with Edmund, and why most people, if honest with themselves, probably do too, is that his sins are so mundane.  He is not trying to take over the world; he is not flagrantly cruel; he does not craft audacious lies or tempt with the voice of Satan.  Those are the White Witch’s sins.  Edmund’s sins are a child’s sins: He is jealous of his older brother, pettily mean to his little sister, and generally cross with all of his siblings.  He does tell a few lies, but not the kind that could hurt anyone (so he thinks).  He wants people to recognize that he’s important.  And yeah, he loves sweets a bit too much.

These are a child’s sins, but adults don’t grow out of them.  All of these have been my sins, some of them often.  So that’s why this story means so much to me.  Jesus doesn’t just save flamboyantly evil sinners; he also saves sinners who are cranky, greedy, cowardly, and prideful despite not having very much to be proud about.

For more on unpleasant English boys (in Narnia and at Hogwarts), see my post Sometimes humility must come through humiliation.

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I am not fast.

A brief explanation to the people I’ve been road-running with (that is, in the wake of) recently.

My running style can best be understood if you keep in mind that I am basically a hobbit.  I’m about 5’2″ and (this is a nice and fairly accurate way of putting it) solidly built.  I like to walk barefoot and can be quiet and light on my feet, but never graceful like an elf.  I enjoy and am quite good at hiking long distances, like to the Old Forest on the borders of the Shire.  I can carry my dearest (emaciated) friend up the side of Mount Doom, no problem.  But if you expect me to be fast, there we encounter a problem, unless you intend to give me a piggyback ride as Boromir did for Merry and Pippin.

Speed is not my skill.  Endurance is.  I’m well aware that endurance is not glamorous.  It is hard to depict in literature or film, and boring to read or watch.  For me, though, it’s something to be quietly proud of.  I take pride in the fact that during the Virginia Ten-Miler, I keep running steadily up Farm Basket Hill when most of the runners around me, some of them generally faster than I, are slowing down to walk.

Apparently I also have endurance in other areas of my life.  My chiropractor says I have a high pain tolerance, which is kind of an ugly cousin to endurance.  The first time I had a phone conversation with my dissertation chair, whom I’d never met in person, he said he thought I had grit, another close relative of endurance.  I’d like to believe it was the steely note of determination in my voice, but I think he was probably just bluffing.  Still, he must have been right, because I finished my dissertation (relatively quickly, I think, considering some of the logistical difficulties I encountered), and anyone who completes a doctoral dissertation must have grit.

I composed this post in my head during a recent run when I was feeling really bad about the fact that the second-slowest runner was so far ahead I couldn’t even see him.  I’ve framed it as an explanation to my fellow runners, but I think it’s actually just validation for me.  And I’m sharing it on my blog because there may be some other hobbits out there who need to look at their boring endurance trait from a new perspective.  Keep trudging, my friends.

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movie marathon: the Statue of Liberty and immigration

Remember when I suggested (implicitly) that you should watch The Godfather Part III alongside Thor: The Dark World because of all the juicy family drama?  Well, now I’m suggesting that you watch The Godfather Part II alongside An American Tail (yes, 80’s kids, that’s the first Fievel movie).  Despite the radically different audiences to which these two films were marketed, the similarity is actually pretty obvious: both follow the adventures of a European boy (or young male mouse) who arrives in New York Harbor during America’s golden age of immigration.  If you watch them together, you’ll see all kinds of connections.  Here’s a disclaimer: I’m writing this post as a movie fan, not a historian.  I’m getting some relevant details from Wikipedia and drawing my own conclusions.  If you want a thorough and thoughtful history of American immigration, don’t read this.  If you want an idea for a movie marathon that will involve your mind and your heart, keep reading.

1. An American Tail (1986).  The Mousekewitz family leaves Russia, fleeing violence,* and sails to America in the crowded third-class hold of a ship.  Their young son, Fievel, falls overboard and washes up in New York Harbor, alone and afraid.  During his brief stint as a street urchin, Fievel runs afoul of a nasty underground (literally) crime boss, attends a political rally, and has some cross-cultural immigrant experiences when he visits an Irish wake and makes friends with an Italian teen.  After participating in a successful plot to break the crime boss’s hold on the community, he is reunited with his family.

Oh, also–the Mousekewitzes are mice fleeing cat violence, Fievel is fished out of the harbor by pigeons, the crime boss is a cat, and Fievel also makes friends with a harmless (vegetarian, tender-hearted, and silly) cat during his underground adventures.  That Italian “teen” is a mouse, and so is pretty much everyone else in the movie.

But none of this detracts from the seriousness of the story.  An American Tail is still an excellent film about family, fear, injustice, resilience, and American diversity.  The animation is timeless, the story is taut and exciting, and the music, scored by James Horner (whom we miss), is emotionally pitch-perfect.  Some of the songs have become classics.  Even if you’ve never seen this movie, you’d probably recognize the sad split-screen scene in which Fievel and his sister both sing “Somewhere Out There” against the background of an enormous full moon.  And “There Are No Cats in America,” the rousing number sung in the hold of the ship, is basically the rodent version of Bruce Springsteen’s “American Land”–both are deliriously hopeful songs of immigrant dreams that America could never fulfill.

Much of this movie’s action takes place against the heavily symbolic backdrop of the Statue of Liberty, whose construction is completed during the course of the story.  In An American Tail, the Statue represents hope.  It’s there, to a nest in Liberty’s torch, that Fievel is first taken by the pigeons, and it’s there that the head pigeon (who is French, to represent the Statue’s designers) tells him, in song, to “never say never.”  The Statue is one of the last images we see in the film as well.  The overall tone of An American Tail is celebratory of the opportunities that American affords, yet it isn’t blindly so.  The irony of “There Are No Cats in America” sounds a cautionary note: no country can fulfill the wildest dreams of the desperate.

Fievel and Henri the pigeon fly past the Statue of Liberty www.tradingcarddb.com

Fievel and Henri the pigeon fly past the Statue of Liberty
http://www.tradingcarddb.com

2. The Godfather Part II (1974).  By the time the silent 9-year-old Vito Andolini arrives at Ellis Island (alone, like Fievel) in 1901, escaping a vendetta in his hometown of Corleone, Sicily, the Statue of Liberty has been finished for 15 years.  An immigration official misreads Vito’s identification tag and writes down his name as “Vito Corleone,” and the rest is history–movie history, anyway.

I’m not going to summarize The Godfather Part II for you.  It’s 200 minutes long.  (An American Tail is only 80.)  It has two major plot lines, and both of them sprawl over giant swaths of time and space.  For the purposes of this post, I’ll say that among all the film’s many themes (such as family, fear, injustice–actually, they’re really similar to An American Tail‘s themes), immigration–specifically, what we mean when we say that America is a melting pot–is a big one.  And that’s not only true in the young Vito, 1920’s-NYC plot line, but also in the plot line that takes place in 1958, after both the Corleone family and America have gotten a lot bigger and a lot more complicated.

I’ll give you one example: listen to the vitriolic ugliness of Senator Geary’s bigoted comments in the privacy of Michael Corleone’s study at the beginning of the movie, and then listen to the senator’s awkwardly well-rehearsed speech about his “Italian-American friends” in the hearing scene near the end.  Official tolerance masks private hatred in the hypocrisy (as Michael rightly calls it) of relations between politics and crime.

The Statue of Liberty isn’t a major symbol in The Godfather Part II, but young Vito and his fellow passengers take a slow, lingering look at it while they are still aboard the ship.  (Three-hour movies can afford a lot of slow, lingering looks.)  Some of the fellow passengers seem enraptured by the promise of America, but the young boy’s face is inscrutable.  There’s another shot a few minutes later in which Vito’s face is juxtaposed with a reflection of the Statue.  Again, he doesn’t appear to have any grand hopes.  For him, arriving in America simply means that he isn’t dead yet.

young Vito and Lady Liberty

young Vito and Lady Liberty

So, here’s the plan: block off five hours of your life, get your hands on these two films, and prepare to laugh, cry, and think.  After that, you might want to watch Fievel Goes West (a challenging exploration of the meaning of Manifest Destiny…well, sort of) and The Godfather (which opens with the line, “I believe in America”).  Stay tuned for more movie marathon recommendations!

*The violent event at the beginning of the film appears to be a cross between an attack by Cossack marauders and an anti-Jewish pogrom.  There are overtones of both.

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Jesus’ 30th birthday

Here’s an interesting fact: The English Romantic poet John Keats died when he was 25 years old, but not before he’d written some of the greatest odes in the English language.  I sometimes share this fact with my students, with a mild joke to the effect that they’d better get busy over the next few years.  Although I’m not trying to make my students feel like they’ve wasted their lives up to this point, I sometimes feel that way myself when I look at what I’ve accomplished and compare it with the accomplishments of luminaries in various fields.  The disparity is particularly striking when I compare myself with people, like Keats, who died very young.  Heath Ledger, for example, was only 28 when he passed away back in 2008, and he’d delivered a few stunning, even epoch-making performances in the few years prior.  [Did his Dark Knight tour de force usher in the dominance of the mischief/chaos-making villain in present film?  I think so, but that’s another blog post.]  And then, if you went to Christian school like me, you also have some big-name servants of God (I hesitate to call them rock-star martyrs) with whom to compare yourself, like David Brainerd, who died at 29 after wearing out his health in service to the Native Americans back in the 18th century.  It’s hard not to look at people like that and think, “Basically, I’ve accomplished nothing so far.”

I’m going to turn 30 next month.  So I took notice this morning when I read Luke 3:23a: “Now Jesus Himself began His ministry at about thirty years of age.”  Until that point, Jesus had been living in obscurity, probably working alongside his adoptive father Joseph in the “secular” profession of carpentry.  During that time, we can assume that his heavenly Father was quietly preparing him for those crucial–and short–three years of ministry that would follow.  God the Father didn’t look down at Jesus on his 30th birthday and say, “You’ve been messing around building tables long enough; now it’s time to do some real Kingdom work.”  In fact, because we know that Jesus was sinless and that his whole life was directed toward a mission, we can confidently say that the tables were not a waste of time.  Backed by Colossians 3:23, we can go so far as to say that they were an act of worship to his Father.  Building tables was part of what Jesus was born to do and part of how he readied himself for the history-shattering events to come later.

It may be helpful to ask from time to time, “Have I accomplished anything that’s made an impact?”  It’s a tricky question, though, because our actions have effects that we don’t see and that we can’t control.  I think it’s more useful to ask, “What kind of person am I becoming?”  That, with God’s help, we can control.  So as my birthday approaches, I’m trying to tell myself that it’s okay that I haven’t written a poem to rival “Ode to a Nightingale.”  Here’s what I should really be asking myself: Am I loving?  Am I joyful?  Am I thankful?  And am I ready for whatever big things may come later?