I think I've said this before (then again how would I know, I have no memory at all these days), but my visits home have gotten a lot busier since we got engaged. During my visit home to Nebraska this past week, I visited my grandma, traveled to Central Nebraska to look at some sandhill cranes, had a wedding dress fitting, met with people to play with some wedding hair and makeup ideas, spent more time and money than I ever would have thought possible on wedding decoration stuff, and, unexpectedly, went to an Arlo Guthrie concert. I also went through most of the books and stuff that are still stored in my old room at my parents' house, sold some of them to Bluestem Books, but still have an awful lot to someday bring into our new home.
This week, I'm going to be packing for the big move! Yay!
I just discovered while cruising the Trixie Belden homepage that my beloved Trixie Belden series is going to be reissued! I'm so excited. Someday soon I'll have to explain why I like Trixie Belden so much. I guess I really should study some more right now though.
Only a few more days of school, a few more days of Hyde Park. Amazing. In honor of my last few days of classes, here are some books I like that have little or nothing to do with school.
Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy
I took a class on the philosophical bases of different approaches to historiography last year, and this book was recommended as a general introduction to western philosophy. I found it very reader-friendly and understandable, though I previously knew little to nothing about philosophy. Its chapters center around selected individual philosophers, and begin with biographical sketches of each. For me this approach enlivened what might have been a series of rather dry expositions of philosophical systems: Durant seems to genuinely like all of these people, he celebrates the good and quirky aspects of their personalities and thinking, and seems saddened when they seem to go wrong either morally or intellectually.
Some of Durant's choices of people to include were surprising to me. I was surprised that Voltaire and Bacon each got a chapter to themselves, since I have never thought of either of them as philosophers. On the other hand, Karl Marx is barely mentioned; and Marxist thought has had a tremendous influence on the social sciences (not to mention politically). The choices Durant made seem to reflect his own personality and socio-political place in the world, which was as interesting as anything else about the book.
Fernand Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean
Braudel was one of the founders of the Annales school of historiography, which reacted against the predominant "great men" approach which focused on the doings of kings and other prominent individuals. Braudel wants to show us the broad sweep of history, how broad social trends and geological/environmental constraints shape the individual event. The book’s 315 pages cover a vast swath of time, beginning in the Paleolithic and continuing into the 3rd century A.D. Though such broad-brush approaches to history are rather out of vogue now, for good reason, sometimes it is helpful to step back and see how all the different regions and time periods fit together. This book offers a history of the Mediterranean as a region, without the usual distinctions between Middle Eastern, Classical, and European; and describes how diverse people have acted and interacted within this landscape.
Jane Gardam, A Long Way From Verona
This is my favorite book. Its main character is a thirteen-year-old girl named Jessica Vye who is living in England during World War II. I think this book is kind of a feminine version of The Catcher in the Rye, in that both Holden and Jessica are reaching a crisis point: they sense that Something is Wrong, but can't figure out whether this disconnect is the fault of him/herself, or the rest of the world. Jessica finds herself entranced with things other people barely notice; she alternately loves being different and hates not fitting in, but can't change her personality to conform to what her peers and teachers want even when she tries. As in Catcher, we see the world entirely through Jessica's eyes, and even Jessica recognizes that this worldview is subject to sudden seismic shifts. Unlike Holden, Jessica has real problems along with her existential crisis: her town is being bombed almost nightly, while her family undergoes the deprivations of wartime England.
The reader has to pay close attention to this story: Gardam's subtle and frequently hilarious writing style might lead one to think that is just a nice book about the misadventures of a quirky teenager. We are never even told about the major event that provokes a crisis and turning point in Jessica's life; Jessica merely alludes to it in a couple of offhand sentences, and it's easy to miss. Instead of listening to a narrator tell us what is going on, we experience everything along with Jessica, and with her try to grasp and assimilate all of the tragic and bizarre new people, events, and feelings.
This book is about an existential crisis, but I think it rings true for anyone who has ever been a teenager: suddenly, the world appears alien and tragic, while at the same time one's own self is becoming mysterious and quixotic. The thing we all have to eventually do is to find a way to live in this sad and nonsensical world with the rather disappointing person we find ourselves to be. Jessica finally does this, she finds one tiny shred of faith to cling to; and though the war still rages and her family is still poor and nothing in her life has changed, as the book ends she is filled with hope and joy, "knowing that good things take place."
So I rented a couple of movies this weekend, Cube and The Maltese Falcon. Spoilers abound, but since I imagine everyone who might see this has already seen the movies I doubt that matters much.
I thought Cube was good, but not great. What struck me most about it was that combined so many really, really good elements with some pretty bad ones. The whole idea of the Cube, and the group of people each with special skills to help them get out, was very cool. It succeeded in being very suspenseful, and kept me nervous through the whole movie to see what would happen next. In addition, I always like movies that incorporate some sort of intellectual thing, in this case geometry. One piece of dialogue in particular stood out for me, between two of the characters: Dr. Holloway asked Worth how long he knew people were being put in the Cube, and he said he had known for a couple of months, to which she responded, "That's not long, considering your whole life." I thought this showed a real sensitivity on the part of somebody to the complexities of human nature. Cube turned a couple of movie stereotypes on their heads in very interesting ways: the strong character, the typical movie-hero type, was the one to crack up and ruin everyone's attempts to escape; while a character who is a pretty bad person, and is aware of it, turns out to be a hero. This isn't done in a facile way, though, since we remain aware of his shortcomings. I got the sense that we were exploring these characters, each of which had good and bad elements in their personality; and under the pressure of the situation either the good or the bad in each comes to the fore. No character is made out to be the big hero who saves the day, or even redeems him or herself in an unequivocal Hollywood fashion.
However, this interesting piece of dialogue and sensitive characterization contrasted sharply with some cringeworthy exchanges that completely snapped me out of the story, thinking "This is not a real person. No real person would ever say that." Actually, most of the dialogue was like that. I think the problem was with the script rather than the acting, I thought the actors were doing the best they could with what they had. Also, though I found some of the treatment of the characters to be interesting, long stretches of the movie were fairly boring in this regard.
This perplexing juxtapation of the fascinating and the humdrum was perpetuated in the handling of the movie's overall message. I admired the restraint of the moviemakers in not telling us where the cube was, who was behind it, and other backstory. The movie wasn't really about the cube, we weren't really supposed to believe in the cube, it was simply a way of conveying a message about the way the world works. Any attempt to situate the cube in the real world would have ruined the movie. Thus, I didn't have any trouble suspending my disbelief regarding the problematics of how the cube would actually work (though the idea of rooms that move without the people in them being aware that they are moving seems to crop up every once in a while in movies. This is a pet peeve of mine; if a room you were in moved, you would know it! You would feel it moving! But anyway). This restraint stands in stark contrast, however, to the fairly hamfisted way the movie's moral was drummed into our brains: if we couldn't figure it out ourselves, the character Worth actually spelled it out for us in so many words (too many words), then we went on to reiterate it a few more times. The moral was a good one. I took it to be that indifference, not hatred is the opposite of love, in the words of Elie Weisel. However, in addition to making this moral much too explicit instead of letting us figure it out, the movie didn't really have any layers of meaning beyond that. I rewatched the beginning of it to check out who we saw first, how they all met, and so forth; and tried to make something out of the characters' names (especially Worth and Leaven), but finally gave up--what you see is what you get in this movie.
It was a good movie, well above average, but the strange gap between the good stuff and the horrible parts was startling, as if the movie was created by two different people who had very different talent levels and ideas about what the movie should be. I would definitely recommend it, though.
I bought the book The Maltese Falcon for something to read while I was at summer debate camp (yes, I'm a dork), back in high school. I read it, and it didn't make any sense at all. It has about five million characters in it and I could never remember who any of them were supposed to be. I watched the movie some time after that, and though it has fewer characters I still didn't really get it. I rented it this weekend in hopes I could finally solve the mystery of What is this story supposed to be about? I think I got it this time. If I had to write out a plot summary it would probably still be kind of vague, but basically it's about this bird, everybody wants the bird, but it's not really the bird. Also, some people get killed, but none of them are important.
Excursus: In the movie Murder by Death, Truman Capote plays a rich man named Lionel Twain (ha ha) who summons several famous literary detectives to his mansion to solve a murder that has not yet been committed. In the course of the movie, Mr. Twain accuses several of the detectives of not having played fair with their readers. The accusation that he levels against Sam Diamond (the movie's spoof of Sam Spade, the detective in The Maltese Falcon) is that "you introduced characters in the last few pages that were never in the book before!" I was pleased that Neil Simon agreed with my assessment, I feel validated by that. Funnily enough, this movie also has rooms that move around without the characters knowing, or any type of dislocation of furniture or small movable objects. Aren't coincidences like that interesting? Is anyone still reading this? If so, please stop--you are only encouraging more long rambling posts like this :)
Imagine my horror when I went to check my own blog, and it was blank! I thought, I must get a message on there. Unfortunately I have nothing to report and only 8 minutes until I have to leave for class. So much pressure!
Okay, I feel better now. Guess I'll take my shaken nerves off to class.