Category Archives: books

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Sometimes humility must come through humiliation

Luke 15:17-24 But when [the younger son] come to himself, he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!  I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son.  Make me like one of your hired servants.'”  And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.  And the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against haven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.”  But the father said to his servants, “Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet.  And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”  And they began to be merry.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis, chapter 7 (Eustace’s story about turning from a dragon back into a boy)*: “Then the lion said” – but I don’t know if it spoke – “You will have to let me undress you.” I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know – if you’ve ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Edmund.

“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off – just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt – and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on – and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again. You’d think me simply phoney if I told you how I felt about my own arms. I know they’ve no muscle and are pretty mouldy compared with Caspian’s, but I was so glad to see them.

“After a bit the lion took me out and dressed me – ”

“Dressed you. With his paws?”

“Well, I don’t exactly remember that bit. But he did somehow or other: in new clothes – the same I’ve got on now, as a matter of fact. And then suddenly I was back here. Which is what makes me think it must have been a dream.”

“No. It wasn’t a dream,” said Edmund.

“Why not?”

“Well, there are the clothes, for one thing. And you have been – well, un-dragoned, for another.”

“What do you think it was, then?” asked Eustace.

“I think you’ve seen Aslan,” said Edmund.

“Aslan!” said Eustace. “I’ve heard that name mentioned several times since we joined the Dawn Treader. And I felt – I don’t know what – I hated it. But I was hating everything then. And by the way, I’d like to apologize. I’m afraid I’ve been pretty beastly.”

“That’s all right,” said Edmund. “Between ourselves, you haven’t been as bad as I was on my first trip to Narnia. You were only an ass, but I was a traitor.”

“Well, don’t tell me about it, then,” said Eustace. “But who is Aslan? Do you know him?”

“Well – he knows me,” said Edmund. “He is the great Lion, the son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea, who saved me and saved Narnia. We’ve all seen him. Lucy sees him most often. And it may be Aslan’s country we are sailing to.”

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling, chapter 30 There was a scuffling and a great thump: Someone else had clambered out of the tunnel, overbalanced slightly, and fallen.  He pulled himself up on the nearest chair, looked around through lopsided horn-rimmed classes, and said, “Am I too late?  Has it started?  I only just found out, so I–I–”

Percy spluttered into silence.  Evidently he had not expected to run into most of his family.  There was a long moment of astonishment, broken by Fleur turning to Lupin and saying, in a wildly transparent attempt to break the tension, “So–‘ow eez leetle Teddy?”

Lupin blinked at her, startled.  The silence between the Weasleys seemed to be solidifying, like ice.

“I–oh yes–he’s fine!” Lupin said loudly.  “Yes, Tonks is with him–at her mother’s–”

Percy and the other Weasleys were still staring at one another, frozen.

“Here, I’ve got a picture!” Lupin shouted, pulling a photograph from inside his jacket and showing it to Fleur and Harry . . .

“I was a fool!” Percy roared, so loudly that Lupin nearly dropped his photograph.  “I was an idiot, I was a pompous part, I was a– a–”

“Ministry-loving, family-disowning, power-hungry moron,” said Fred.

Percy swallowed.

“Yes, I was!”

“Well, you can’t say fairer than that,” said Fred, holding out his hand to Percy.

Mrs. Weasley burst into tears.  She ran forward, pushed Fred aside, and pulled Percy into a strangling hug, while he patted her on the back, his eyes on his father.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Percy said.

Mr. Weasley blinked rather rapidly, then he too hurried to hug his son.

 

*The selection I really would have liked to include here is a passage from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that doesn’t actually exist: the talk that Aslan has with Edmund after rescuing him from the White Witch.  That talk takes place off-stage, and afterward Aslan simply says to the other children, “Here is your brother . . . and – there is no need to talk to him about what is past.”  The passage I’ve posted here isn’t quite what I wanted, but I thought of it because my sister posted a link on Facebook to a song by the Oh Hellos called “The Lament of Eustace Scrubb.”  And I do like this passage, because it features both of Narnia’s repentant sinners comparing notes about Aslan.

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The Author Who Loved

The title of this post is a pun on “The Author Who Lived,” the title of the doctoral dissertation I’m working right now, which in turn is a pun on Harry Potter’s famous nickname “The Boy Who Lived.”  (My dissertation is about Charles Dickens’s and J. K. Rowling’s unusual relationships with their audiences; you can read a piece of the proposal here.)  All I want to do right now is to share with you a quote I was delighted to come across in my Dickens research.  It was written late in Dickens’s career/life by the respected critic Charles Eliot Norton.  The first sentence could be interpreted as a snide back-handed compliment, but keep reading; it isn’t.  I know there are writers who would disagree with me, but I think Norton in this statement gives Dickens the greatest praise anyone could give a writer.  And perhaps the second-to-last sentence will remind you of someone else.

No one thinks first of Mr Dickens as a writer.  He is at once, through his books, a friend.  He belongs among the intimates of every pleasant-tempered and large-hearted person.  He is not so much the guest as the inmate of our homes.  He keeps holidays with us, he helps us to celebrate Christmas with heartier cheer, he shares at every New Year in our good wishes: for, indeed, it is not in his purely literary character that he has done most for us, it is as a man of the largest humanity, who has simply used literature as the means by which to bring himself into relation with his fellow-men, and to inspire them with something of his own sweetness, kindness, charity, and good-will.  He is the great magician of our time.  His wand is a book, but his power is in his own heart.  It is a rare piece of good fortune for us that we are the contemporaries of this benevolent genius.

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I want your sympathy.

I’m reading The Casual Vacancy, J. K. Rowling’s 2012 debut “adult” novel, with the intention of having read all of her published works before I really get started writing my dissertation.  (I’m going to wait another week or two to see if inter-library loan can get me The Cuckoo’s Calling before I give up and order it from Amazon.)  I had heard multiple versions of two different, but compatible, assessments of The Casual Vacancy: that it was “racy” (invariably that was the word used) and that it was depressing because the characters were hard to like.

I’ve just finished Part One and found both of these evaluations to be true.  But I’ve also found something I didn’t expect: The Casual Vacancy reminds me strongly of a George Eliot novel.  What tipped me off to the resemblance was the name “Fairbrother”–it’s the last name of the man who dies at the beginning of Rowling’s novel, setting the story in motion, and it’s awfully close to “Farebrother,” the surname of a character in Middlemarch.  But this is just one of many resemblances between The Casual Vacancy and the Eliot canon, especially Middlemarch; others include themes of small-town life (and the pettiness that often accompanies it), sharply accurate depictions of mismatched marriages, long descriptions of characters’ interior thoughts, discussions of the problems of urbanization, and a particular focus on characters moving up or down the English social class scale, which appears in Vacancy to be fascinatingly (and depressingly) little changed since the nineteenth century.

What I don’t see in The Casual Vacancy, at least not yet, is any attempt on the author’s part to help us identify with the characters, especially the ones we don’t like.  Eliot did this a lot, and she did it masterfully, though not very subtly, often using direct second-person commands (“Ask yourself whether you would. . .”), all in an effort to develop the quality of “sympathy” (a key term for Eliot) in her readers.  Sympathy here is not feeling sorry for someone, and it’s not a naive ignorance of anyone’s faults.  It’s the ability to put ourselves imaginatively into another character’s situation and come to the conclusion that we would probably be inclined to act in a very similar way.  The point here is not to make a moral judgment about what would be the right thing to do in the situation, although that would be a logical next step.  The point is to be honest about ourselves.  I think all good realist novelists want their readers to develop sympathy; they just aren’t all as deliberate about it as George Eliot.  I think J. K. Rowling wants that for her readers too; she just isn’t making it very easy in The Casual Vacancy.  But a hard-won sympathy is probably more lasting than the knee-jerk kind anyway.  I’ll reserve my final judgment until I finish the book.

Let me make two more quick points about sympathy in a shameless effort to drag Charles Dickens and Harry Potter into this post:

1. It often takes multiple readings of a book to develop sympathy for a particular character.  When I first read David Copperfield, I thought David’s “child-wife” Dora was an annoying little twit, but now that I’ve read it several times I can see that she is remarkably self-aware in her own way and that she has a better grasp of the flaw in their marriage than David, apparently the more analytic one, does.  You gotta watch out for those first-person narrators.  They think they know everything.  (KATNISS EVERDEEN)

2. One valid reason for writing fan fiction is to try to develop sympathy with an unlikable, “minor,” or even villainous character.  Possibly this may be why there’s a lot of Draco Malfoy fanfic.  Certainly, some of it is of the shallow sort (“He looked extremely sexy and vulnerable as he knelt there weeping onto his elegantly cut black suit”), but I would also imagine–I haven’t actually read any Draco fanfic–that there’s some good stuff that explores, for example, what growing up in Malfoy Manor as an only child with those parents would do to a kid psychologically.

I promise I didn’t intend to write a literary criticism post this week; my original intention was to post pictures of my cute decorations for the afternoon party I hosted yesterday.  But I forgot to take pictures, so this is what you get.  I hope you’ll give me some sympathy.

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“The last scud of day”

I think what stuns me the most about Walt Whitman’s poetry is how old it is chronologically, and how new (or young?) stylistically.  He wrote much of his audaciously hubristic, rhythmically unrhymed, New Agey but never fuzzy poetry before they had electric lights, before he saw the Civil War tear up America.  England was just warming up to the Victorian period, man.  This’ll blow your mind: the first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was published in 1855; that’s just five years after William Wordsworth died.  Wordsworth was the guy who called for poets to write in the language of the common man, and tried to follow his own advice.  Before Wordsworth, poets were pretty much still writing like John Milton.  Too bad Wordsworth couldn’t have lived a little longer to see Whitman do this:

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me,

he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barabaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,

It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,

It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift in in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

(from “Song of Myself,” 1855)

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Goat cheese biscuits

This post doesn’t have a clever title, partly because I couldn’t think of one, and partly because I figured the phrase “goat cheese biscuits” would sell itself.  This is a follow-up to my review of Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life around the Table by Shauna Niequist.  Last Saturday morning, a small contingent of our book club (only four of us could make it) gathered at the lovely home of one of our members, the same one who got us the free copies of the book, to share brunch and our thoughts on the book.  Maybe because what we were doing (eating) was for once related to the book topic, and maybe because we’d all read the book, we actually managed to carry on a sustained discussion about the book for, like, at least ten minutes.  (What normally happens in our book club is that somebody introduces a discussion, it peters out quickly, and we talk about other things until somebody awkwardly revives the topic of the book.  All this is fine with me; it’s a club, not a literature class.)

Each of us chose a recipe from the book and brought the result to share.  Although we didn’t know ahead of time what the others were bringing (well, I did; I got to cheat because I was the person who sent out all the emails about this particular meeting), the four dishes turned out to constitute a perfect, (mostly) healthy yet comforting meal for a quiet, overcast Saturday morning in the summer.  We ate Bacon-Wrapped Dates, Robin’s Super-Healthy Lentil Soup (I forget who Robin is, but she’s probably one of Shauna Niequist’s many friends), Goat Cheese Biscuits, and Gaia Cookies (named for a cafe, though you are perfectly free to imagine yourself as an earth goddess when you eat them).  The consensus was that all of these recipes were delicious, relatively simple to make, and versatile–for example, the dates would perform equally well as an appetizer at a fancy dinner, and the cookies could function as either a dessert or a breakfast.  You can see pictures of the food in this post by another book club member, whose blog is a lot more fun than mine.

I made the biscuits.  I think it would be ungracious of me to post the recipe here after receiving the book for free from the publisher, but you may be able to recreate it, or something like it, on your own, especially when I tell you that you’re basically taking biscuits and putting goat cheese in them.  I mean, it’s a little more complicated than that, but those are the essentials.  I thoroughly enjoyed preparing, eating, and sharing these biscuits.  My whole apartment smelled like butter while I was baking them (that’s another hint), which usually means something good is underway.  I do want to give you one modification and one piece of advice in order to enhance your goat cheese biscuit experience.

The modification: Niequist says that if you make golf-ball sized balls of dough, you’ll get about 12 biscuits.  I’m thinking Niequist isn’t a golfer (which surprises me; see my review), because I got 17.  Maybe she meant to say “baseballs.”  My point here is that you don’t need to skimp; make your biscuits a size that you would actually want to eat, and you won’t run out of dough.

The advice: Please reheat your biscuits before enjoying them.  They are okay at room temperature, but they are best when the cheeses (hint!) are melting.

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Housekeeping and hypotheticals

Get excited!  The long-promised Penelope Clearwater Revival has arrived.  You can expect two new things from my blog:

1. More frequent posts.  Now that I have more followers, and not all of you are people who know me and are willing to put up with my slacking, I feel I owe it to you to post on a more regular basis, perhaps weekly.  I can’t promise these will be long posts–after all, I’m supposed to be working on my dissertation as well–but that may be for the best.  (“Amen,” says the chorus.)

2. A better organizational scheme.  Yes, it’s true: I’ve had this blog since December 2011, and only just this past weekend did I start adding categories and tags.  I did this retroactively for all my posts, which was a fun exercise for me; I especially enjoyed seeing my most commonly used tags as calculated by WordPress.  (“Charles Dickens” was the winner by far, but there were some surprise runners-up.  Who knew I’d written so many posts about Moneyball?)  I’d love your feedback on this endeavor–if you notice a common theme among two or more posts that I haven’t seen, let me know so I can add a tag or possibly create a new category.

I hope these changes will enhance both your and my enjoyment of the blog.  So that this post won’t be completely boring, here are some fun “if” statements.  I’d love to hear how you’d complete the statements for yourself.

1. If I could write and illustrate a comic book series, it would be called . . . The Adventures of Sigyn, Intra-Yggdrasil Diplomat.  I’ve actually thought quite a bit about this.  Sigyn is a minor character in Norse mythology whom I discovered while reading Edith Hamilton.  She (Sigyn, not Edith) is Loki’s wife.  So I thought I could make a pretty fun comic series–and also send positive messages about world peace and women’s empowerment–out of the idea that Sigyn is going around trying to negotiate satisfying compromises between her husband’s world domination schemes and the contrary purposes of people like Odin and the Avengers.

2. If I wrote a screenplay, it would be called  . . . The Darlings.  I’ve thought even more about this one, and I might really write it someday.  The Darlings is about Wendy, John, and Michael after they’ve grown up.  To my knowledge, this particular Peter Pan variant hasn’t been done before. The basic premise: Michael doesn’t believe they really went to Neverland or that it’s even real (he was too little to form his own memories of the event); John knows it really happened but has only negative memories and doesn’t like to talk about it; Wendy has happy memories of Neverland and is still enamored with Peter Pan but has married a man who’s the opposite of Peter in pretty much every way.  Plus there’s a bunch of other stuff going on with careers, university studies, romance, and sibling rivalry.  Maybe I’ll write this when I’m finished with my PhD.

3. If I were on a roller derby team, my derby name would be . . . Tess of the Disturbervilles.  This is never going to happen, folks, so you can just use your imagination.

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Review: the three Fs (food, fun, and fellowship!) in a new light

I started this blog in order to review two new-release books provided to me by a friend who had connections with a publisher.  My reviews were positive overall, but not purely laudatory or harmlessly unopinionated, which may be why I haven’t been asked to review another book on my blog until now, a year and a half later.

My book club (which is a wonderful thing; you should join one for the fellowship and to be forced to read outside your literary comfort zone) is currently reading Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life around the Table, with Recipes by Shauna Niequist (Zondervan, 2013).  This book can best be described as a collection of short pieces of “life writing” (as they’re calling it these days), most of which are followed by a recipe.  One book club member hooked us up with free copies from the publisher with the understanding that we would each review the book (either on Amazon or on a personal blog) and cook a recipe from it.  I haven’t picked out a recipe yet; they nearly all look delightful, and only a few seem to be outside my cooking skill capacity.  But I can go ahead and tell you what I think of the book and just add a brief appendix later about the food.

Since I mentioned cooking skill capacity, I’ll begin by identifying one of the main messages of this book: You can and should cook, even if you don’t think you can.  As Niequist puts it, “start where you are” (40).  Generally, Niequist does a good job of conveying the persona of somebody who’s right there with you, still learning and expanding her repertoire.  Occasionally, however, this persona will show cracks, as in the chapter in which she whips up a “last-minute lunch party” that includes a perfectly-paired salad, appetizer, and dessert (213-217).  She’s the kind of person who just happens to have feta cheese and kalamata olives in her refrigerator on a normal day, but that probably has less to do with her cooking expertise than with the part of the country she’s from, just outside Chicago.  We find out toward the end of the book that she’s in a yacht club, and it isn’t surprising.  I also thought Niequist talked an awful lot about alcohol consumption for a pastor’s daughter, but again, that’s a cultural thing; I grew up in rural Pennsylvania’s mini-Bible belt, not outside a major American city.

Overall, however, I found Niequist’s stories remarkably relatable, because she writes about things nearly all American women can understand, regardless of regional or socioeconomic differences.  I particularly identified with the chapters on the intersections between appetite, femininity, and body image (there are several of these) and on the shame we experience when we feel our homes aren’t presentable (105-111); other women may find her struggles with infertility and miscarriage more compelling emotionally.  (The stories of these struggles comprise the closest thing this book has to a continuous narrative.)  The book’s thesis is that cooking, eating, and especially sharing food are ways by which we connect with and show love to others, and God shows love to us.  Niequist’s Christian faith is made explicit at several points and subtly informs the whole book, but readers of other faiths or no particular faith won’t feel alienated–thought they might be drawn by Niequist’s winsome testimony to read more books by Christians.

Niequist has a few annoying writing habits, most of which can probably be attributed to an effort to sound lyrical.  She overuses the word lovely, but that’s not such a bad word to overuse.  Instead of using a serial comma, she tends to pile up ands.  She also will occasionally take a simple declaration and turn it into a Pronouncement by adding an introductory clause such as “So this is what I’m going to do” (230) or “This is what I knew” (69) and then a colon.  I probably shouldn’t even tell you about these quirks because now you’ll be looking for them instead of enjoying Niequist’s literate yet friendly prose style.  But I work at a writing center, and I can’t stop myself.

I read this book in five days, but I could have finished it much faster.  A couple times I wanted to cry, and many times I wanted to cook, but alas, I didn’t have quinoa or goat cheese just sitting around my kitchen.  Trying out the recipes comes next.  Assuming the food is good (or that if it’s bad, the fault is all mine), I’m pleased to recommend Bread and Wine to you and your book club.

Next post: LeakyCon Portland 2013–the recap!

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Boycott Saturday

My recent post titles seem quite revolutionary: first we resisted the Oscars; now we’re–what? Boycotting everyone’s favorite day of the week? Not exactly. I don’t have a problem with the day itself, but with its name. Here’s why: Saturday is the only weekday named after a Roman deity (Saturn). English is a Germanic language, doggone it. We don’t need any of that Latin crap.

As a review, our other days are named after, respectively, the sun, the moon (note that these are good Anglo-Saxon words–we don’t say Solisday or Lunaday), Tyr (Norse god of war), Woden (the German version of the more familiar Norse god Odin All-Father), Thor (sexy god of thunder), and Freya (goddess of love and beauty and also dead people slain in battle). In other words, the English names of the first six days of the week make you want to go read the Elder Edda while listening to Led Zeppelin.

And then we get to Saturday, which is named after…the depressing Roman god of winter and old age and irony?  (To prove my point, if you don’t know what the word saturnine means, look it up; it’ll make you want to lie in bed all next Saturday, even if you don’t normally do that.)  That’s lame.  I think we need to have a good Northern name for the final day of our week.  I’m sitting here with a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.  She clearly favors the Greeks and Romans (Norse mythology gets 15 measly pages), but at least her cursory summary will help refresh my memory.  Here are some replacement names I would like to propose.

Baldersday.  I’m actually surprised there isn’t a day named after Balder.  He’s the Christ figure in Norse mythology.  Balder was killed with mistletoe, but according to Wikipedia the all-wise, “after Ragnarök [the Norse Armageddon; cf. Led Zeppelin]. . . he and his brother Höðr would be reconciled and rule the new earth together with Thor’s sons” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldr).  Baldersday would be a fitting name to mark the dying of the old week and the imminent rise of the new one, like the phoenix from the ashes.  But the phoenix is Greek, so never mind.

Valkyriesday.  Cue the Wagner music.  You know the Valkyries–they’re the “maidens” (Hamilton’s quaint word) who show up after battles and get to pick which warriors they want to take to Valhalla.  On second thought, this might not be a good choice.  The day formerly know as Saturday could become very dangerous.

Lokisday. Speaking of dangerous.  You saw what Loki tried to do to our planet in The Avengers.  He’s also the one who killed Balder with mistletoe.*  Loki is a shape-shifter and the closest thing Asgard has to a trickster deity (the Norse were a little too serious for an all-out joker), so at least we could say that the last day of the week would be…er…exciting, and a little more unpredictable than Valkyriesday.  On Valkyriesday, you would definitely die and might or might not get to go to Valhalla.  On Lokisday, you might die.  But you might not.

Heimdallsday. Heimdall is the guy Thor yelled at to “open the Bifrost,” remember?  (All I could think of during that scene was “Beam me up, Scottie.”)  But his name is way too unwieldy (that’s a good Anglo-Saxon word) for a day of the week, so forget it.

I haven’t suggested Freyrsday or Friggasday because those would be too similar to Friday. (Actually, according to Hamilton, some people think Friday was named after Frigga, Odin’s wife, rather than Freya; either way, it’s named after a goddess.  Go women!)  I hope it’s apparent that this is all tongue-in-cheek; I’m really not one of those would-be purifiers of the English language.  I just watched Thor over the weekend and am getting ready to teach a lesson on words derived from mythology in my Advanced Reading and Vocabulary Development class.  But seriously, think about it this coming Saturday.

*Actually, Loki didn’t do the dirty work himself; he got this blind guy named Hoder to throw the mistletoe at Balder.  Typical.

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A year with Penelope

My dear readers–as of yesterday, this blog is one year old!  In celebration of this milestone, I invite you to revisit some of our favorite (your favorite and my favorite) posts from the past year.

  • My most viewed post of all time: A review and listening guide of Mumford and Sons’ first album, Sigh No More.  Hmm…maybe I should do one for Babel.
  • Post that elicited the most interesting comment: After I jokingly suggested that Penelope Clearwater Revival would be a great name for a Southern-inflected wizard rock band, a commenter who’d Googled the phrase wrote to say that she had started recording music under that name!
  • Several readers’ favorite post: Some of my most loyal readers told me that they enjoyed this zany stream of consciousness about pandas, punctuation, and Coldplay more than any other post.
  • Facebook fun: My blog made a social network appearance when my mom shared this post about two of the loves of my life, Samwise Gamgee and Neville Longbottom, on her Facebook page.  Next time you see something you like on my blog, I’d love it if you shared it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or a personal website!
  • Christmas cheer: Now that advent has begun, you might like to check out some posts from last year on Harry Connick Jr.’s When My Heart Finds Christmas, Handel’s Messiah, and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

I’d like to thank you all for a wonderful year.  I wouldn’t keep this blog going if I didn’t know that you were out there reading it.  Please let me know what topics you’d like to see me address in the coming year!

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Victoriana

I just watched Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005), and I enjoyed it more than I have enjoyed the past few Tim Burton movies I’ve seen: Dark Shadows, Alice in Wonderland, and Sleepy Hollow (which, I realize, is not a recent film, but I saw it for the first time this year). Corpse Bride was better than those others for several reasons.
1. It’s short, which means it doesn’t have time for a ridiculously convoluted plot. It would have been even shorter without the songs, which I thought were unnecessary.
2. Instead of deriving from a single source (novel, short story, or soap opera), it instead is an homage to/parody of the Victorian marriage plot in general. This means that there is less opportunity for fans to accuse it of not being “like the original.”
3. It’s animated, which allows Tim Burton to indulge to full extent his fancy for caricature of the human form. Many characters have delightfully exaggerated noses, chins, or eyes, and the contrast between the tall, thin characters and the short, fat characters is reminiscent of some of Phiz’s illustrations to Dickens’ novels. (Check out this illustration in particular; I love it.)
I think Corpse Bride may have restored my faith in Tim Burton. You should do yourself a favor and watch it. If you hate it, you’ve only wasted about an hour and fifteen minutes.