I link and ramble
I guess all the old LJ comment mail queues have come unstuck, and I'm getting email from before Thanksgiving. I'm glad it didn't disappear into the ether, but it's also really annoying.
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The New Yorker has reposted Brokeback Mountain in time for the film release. I hadn't read the story before (in general, I'm not much of a short ( Read more... )
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The New Yorker has reposted Brokeback Mountain in time for the film release. I hadn't read the story before (in general, I'm not much of a short ( Read more... )
Comments 22
Don't worry about it. You'll never hear a thing about them again.
Why is Jack being such a ditz? He's not that interested in science, but he's not a stupid man.
Er, yeah. Brace yourself, because it's all downhill on the ditz slope from here, frankly.
Waitaminute--is Daniel sitting out the entire series finale with appendicitis? It seems like an odd choice for the writers to leave one team member out of what looks to be a cliffhanger episode.
Michael Shanks actually got appendicitis during the filming of Crystal Skull, and had to be written out of Nemesis at the last minute. So it wasn't so much intentional.
You don't need subtitles to know that the Russian sub guys are screwed.
Supposedly the conversation actually goes something like this:
SUB GUY #1: Hey, what's that?
SUB GUY #2: It sounds like one of those bug things from the last episode!
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That's not encouraging. One of my huge pet peeves is warping characters to achieve cheap humor.
Real-life appendicitis makes sense. I was wondering if there was some behind-the-scenes reason for the lack of Daniel.
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That's a very understandable desire, especially given that a big commercial film is much more likely than not to mangle most of the elements we hold dear about the books. I think Peter Jackson made me either more optimistic about these kinds of adaptations, but we'll see. The brouhaha just makes me tired, though.
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I mean, normally I am all about the spelling, but really. Priorities.
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I've been frustrated by a lot of the conflict that's arisen around the Narnia movie, too. And you articulated it very well; for me, it's not an either/or proposition, and I think it's as much of a mistake to say that the books can't be appreciated without coming from a Christian viewpoint as it is to say that the Christian viewpoint is all there is to the books. (I'm not sure that said what I meant it to say... did that make sense?) I was raised Catholic, and at the time I first read those books I was still young enough not to have questioned anything about my faith, so I certainly didn't have a moment of betrayal like laurashapiro described, and I can see how that would affect your experience. But, like you, I had NO IDEA for years that the books were a Christian allegory; I loved them because I loved the stories, the idea of escaping to another world (which Laura articulated in a much lovelier way). And when I did finally make that connection--or had it made for ( ... )
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This makes perfect sense. I think the root of my frustration is the vague feeling that I'm being told how to read the text--one that was very important to me as a kid--and I resent that. As you say, there are certain principles that are universal, that speak to us as humans rather than (or on top of being) devotees of X religion, so I also get resentful when a small group of religious people try to appropriate those principles as their exclusive domain.
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I also meant to say, before I got distracted by the Narnia stuff, that I read Brokeback Mountain for the first time yesterday, and found it extremely powerful. I don't think I've ever read anything by Proulx before, but I was so impressed at how she managed to convey so much from such a limited perspective and with such limited language. It was fascinating. Though, as usual, your much more eloquent analysis makes me feel utterly inadequate, because when I finished the story I was pretty much like, "Wow. That's incredibly sad." And that was the extent of my profundity.
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That also bugs me.
Proulx is a terrific writer. I really liked Accordion Crimes, which is a really interesting take on the American experience. The novel follows an accordion through as it passes in ownership over time from an Italian immigrant to a Mexican-American living on the border in Texas to a Polish-American couple in Chicago, and explores the forgotten eddies and broken lives that made a big part of the country's forward march. I also think Postcards is really interesting because the protagonist commits an act of horrific, unforgivable violence in the first part and then goes on to live out his life, not exactly atoning, but trying to live with himself, and like many of Proulx's characters, he's not particularly self-reflective, so his coping is mostly externally manifested. The Shipping News is quieter, but also beautifully written. It's good stuff--if you're looking ( ... )
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I'm very interested in how the books will come across to me as an adult versus my childhood memories of them.
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