Mythology as we read in books and as we create it
However modern our means of transportation are, my imagination needs very little help to feel as if I've entered the 19th century when travelling by train. It's a very design train, a double decker, with power plugs for laptopped people (sounds funny, doesn't it), but I don't think the essential feeling of travelling ever changes if only you let it in. The boundaries between reality and imagination become a tiny bit more fluid, it is easier to let go of reality and enter that shady world in between your waking subconscious and fantasy. Who knows what could happen. You depart from a certain fixed point at a certain fixed time, and arrive at similarly exact coordinates, but everything in between is less demarcated. As if you're floating between here and there, not quite as defined.
And your modern train needs not much help at all to travel back in time during that two hour journey. (to cross Belgium from west to east you don't need any more time) I like to work creatively when going somewhere, and ideas stream in like water in my shed during a heavy downpour, but to work with them is much more difficult. Too many things swarming around your mind is not a good thing, just you try to pick one out to focus on... they're all fighting for equal attention.
Anyway, I've seen Valkyrie yesterday and if you can get over Tom Cruise and over the language issue (which I had a hard time doing) it is a good film! With language issue I mean that the Germans are speaking American, British, and everything in between. Except German. Seeing Tom Cruise as Stauffenberg makes this very hard, as the Hollywood hero tends to take over more than once. But don't get me wrong, I was impressed at a proper level. And I had ice cream. Which was great as well.
More film news from my small corner of planet earth in me learning that Coraline opens at my birthday in Belgium, which would be a wonderful birthday gift if only it wasn't that unhumanly far away. I am most grumpy about that on this otherwise wonderful Friday morning. Then, I want to go and see Brendan and the Secret of Kells next week, as well as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Let me promote the first one to you: here is the film blog by director Tom Moore, and here is the official website. The animations are based on medieval manuscripts and are as such just as authentic as the story, which is unsurprisingly very much infused with the epic Irish mythology as we know it from the Book of Kells itself (which you can see in Trinity College, and I have not done so myself but was told by several people that it is smaller than one would expect. Of course, an object with as rich a history as this one cannot but take on unrealistic proportions before our mind's eye.) It is a small film, probably not venturing outside of Europe, but it deserves every bit of attention it gets and much more as it is such a beautiful production. That is why I shamelessly wish to promote it and encourage each and everyone of you to see it and say how wonderful it is. Which is also why I will make this black and white blog a bit more colourful with this image:
Let me move back to my train with which I begun. I'm one of the laptopped people I mentioned, and it is an ideal moment to do some things you otherwise never do because internet is so very distracting. So here is my question of the... week is not it, nor is it month... Here is my question which sometimes appears at irregular intervals. How do you prefer to work on a text, whether it is personal of academic in nature and everything else that flies somewhere in or around that spectrum. Here is my own answer: iWork '09 has a wonderful new option called full screen, which disables any possible distractions and just gives you your sheet of people, surrounded by pretty black. I love it.
Time to move to some things that really beg to be done now!
And your modern train needs not much help at all to travel back in time during that two hour journey. (to cross Belgium from west to east you don't need any more time) I like to work creatively when going somewhere, and ideas stream in like water in my shed during a heavy downpour, but to work with them is much more difficult. Too many things swarming around your mind is not a good thing, just you try to pick one out to focus on... they're all fighting for equal attention.
Anyway, I've seen Valkyrie yesterday and if you can get over Tom Cruise and over the language issue (which I had a hard time doing) it is a good film! With language issue I mean that the Germans are speaking American, British, and everything in between. Except German. Seeing Tom Cruise as Stauffenberg makes this very hard, as the Hollywood hero tends to take over more than once. But don't get me wrong, I was impressed at a proper level. And I had ice cream. Which was great as well.
More film news from my small corner of planet earth in me learning that Coraline opens at my birthday in Belgium, which would be a wonderful birthday gift if only it wasn't that unhumanly far away. I am most grumpy about that on this otherwise wonderful Friday morning. Then, I want to go and see Brendan and the Secret of Kells next week, as well as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Let me promote the first one to you: here is the film blog by director Tom Moore, and here is the official website. The animations are based on medieval manuscripts and are as such just as authentic as the story, which is unsurprisingly very much infused with the epic Irish mythology as we know it from the Book of Kells itself (which you can see in Trinity College, and I have not done so myself but was told by several people that it is smaller than one would expect. Of course, an object with as rich a history as this one cannot but take on unrealistic proportions before our mind's eye.) It is a small film, probably not venturing outside of Europe, but it deserves every bit of attention it gets and much more as it is such a beautiful production. That is why I shamelessly wish to promote it and encourage each and everyone of you to see it and say how wonderful it is. Which is also why I will make this black and white blog a bit more colourful with this image:
Let me move back to my train with which I begun. I'm one of the laptopped people I mentioned, and it is an ideal moment to do some things you otherwise never do because internet is so very distracting. So here is my question of the... week is not it, nor is it month... Here is my question which sometimes appears at irregular intervals. How do you prefer to work on a text, whether it is personal of academic in nature and everything else that flies somewhere in or around that spectrum. Here is my own answer: iWork '09 has a wonderful new option called full screen, which disables any possible distractions and just gives you your sheet of people, surrounded by pretty black. I love it.
Time to move to some things that really beg to be done now!