Author: gretaham

teacher, writer, baker, biker (the pedal kind), hiker, swimmer, reader, movie buff, cat owner

Moment of Joy

O Fortuna from Orff’s Carmina Burana is a joyful song. Here it is paired with a scene from Excalibur. On a mythic level, it exemplifies the sympathetic link between the king and the land (James Frazer would be so proud) as the land comes back to life with the renewal of King Arthur:

Books/Movies/TV Shows I Wouldn’t Revisit and Why

It’s the Long and Short Review’s Wednesday Weekly Blog Challenge. The prompt is what entertainment (Books, movies, TV ) wouldn’t you return to. This one is easy for me. I do enjoy both the deep and shallow ends of the entertainment pool.  So I’m not embarassed to say back in the day, I quite enjoyed flicks like Independence Day and True Lies. Indeed, I remember the last summer of my PhD (I had an August dissertation defense date), the university movie theater had a late night showing of Independence Day on July 4th. I worked all day in the library with that as the carrot at the end of the day. I went to the show and realized I might’ve been the only woman in the audience. That was a weird moment. But I enjoyed it. However, Since the terrorist attacks of 9-11, I haven’t been able to rewatch such movies. The blowing up of monuments and skyscrapers no longer has an entertainment value for me. Too much watching of the actual thing on CNN in the aftermath. 

Amnesia for character development

I finished watching the Dead Boy Detectives. Quite enjoyed it (if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I’m a Neil Gaiman fan). There were lots of fun bits. I want to know more about Kashina, whom the Night Nurse met in the sea monster. I actually liked the Night Nurse, even though her character was drawn to be unlikable.

But the story line I liked most was about the Dead Boys’ living psychic sidekick, Crystal Palace. Not having read The Dead Boy Detectives comics  nor watched the Max Doom Patrol series (in which both the eponymous dead boy detectives and Crystal appear), she was new to me. *** Spoilers below***

A depiction of the interior of the character’s namesake structure as a spoiler buffer.

As the result of a demon possession, when we meet Crystal she has lost almost all her memories. She only remembers part of her name and nothing of her background. The demon has stolen her memories. What really intrigued me was the end of the amnesia plot line. Towards the end. Crystal, who has become a decent human being under the influence of her new friends, gets her memories back and realizes she wasn’t just slightly unlikeable (which she had a vague memory about) but a truly horrendous human being (give people night terrors or make them walk into traffic bad). She also learns about her dysfunctional family and how that had contributed to her toxic personality.

I really liked how the writing played with the potential of the amnesia in character development. Take a slightly blank slate character seeking for their identity. Build up their personality through their new experiences and social circle. even while desperate to remember their past.  In a nod to be careful what you wish for, have them regain their memories (or at least some of them) only to realize their pre-amnesia personality was very different – and one they now despise – and must live with. Kudos to the writers.

Mythological art

WaPo had a fun little article on the re-identification of a myth in a 17th century French painting – a story involving Queen Elizabeth the II and a soviet spy. 

by Nicholas Poussin

While the painting is currently identified in the Museum as “The Birth of Venus” (based on the identification by the man who was the spy), the argument is that it is actually the marriage of Poseidon (left) and Amphitrite (center). And the symbolic significance of depicting this:

“The marriage and journey of Neptune and Amphitrite across the sea,” writes art historian Troy Thomas, “symbolize the transition from this life to the next.” Poussin painted a celebration of marriage that also expresses, he continues, the “fragility of human existence and, with death, immortality and eternal joy.”

 

Lemon cupcakes with blueberry cream cheese frosting

I had some lemons I wanted to use up and decided to make cupcakes for the departmental meeting. While I had another recipe I frequently use and it’s quite popular, it called for sour cream and made about 24 cupcakes. Sometimes it’s nicer to just have a smaller batch. So I decided to try this New York Times recipe which only made a dozen. I like lemon cupcakes with a berry frosting. I prefer strawberry, but what I had on hand was blueberry. The trick to berry frosting is to use some freeze dried fruit. Otherwise, by the time you get enough flavor from the berries, your frosting is watered down. Take the berries and turn them into powder and a food processor and then mix them in with the powdered sugar. I usually do add some fresh as well, but the color and flavor comes mostly from the freeze dried. I just adapted the cream cheese frosting recipe that came with the cupcake recipe and added the blueberries. You can see what a vivid color the berries give the frosting.

The nice thing about taking them to work is I got to bake and I only ate one cupcake and the rest just disappeared to compliments.

Villains I’d Root For Instead of the Protagonists

Another Wednesday Weekly Blog Challenge from Long and Short Reviews. So tempting to choose an anti-hero, who’s “a villain” but also the protagonist. I’m currently enjoying the Dead Boys Detectives from the Neil Gaiman‘s Sandman Universe (which he says he’s “not particularly” interested in creating as a cinematic universe though seems on the slippery slope to do so), so Lucifer comes to mind. 

It was a great series – classic detective/cop buddy show, if one of them was the literal devil. Great comedic edge.

But to choose Lucifer seems like cheating. And rooting for Hector over Achilles in The Iliad doesn’t seem to fit either, because Hector isn’t really a villain (and I’m not convinced Achilles’ is the protagonist).

I know there’s been occasions where I’ve thought the heroes so incompetent that I am a little rooting for them to just get taken out by the villains, but usually those stories are bad enough that I don’t remember them even if I did stick around to finish them.

Now I’m trying to think of stories were the heroes are upholding the social norms we are supposed to root for but I don’t actually do so, so I’d root for the villain. Again, I’m sure I’ve read such, but can’t think of any off hand.

Ugh. I think I’m going to go back to my cheating first thought and stick with the Devil, Lucifer from the Sandman Universe. And Crawley and Adam the Anti-Christ fit in there too. 

Following one’s passions

It’s always fun when something intersects with both my passions for the ancient Mediterranean and writing. Over on WriterUnboxed, Kristin South wrote this nice little piece on episodic passions that gives a great background to the decipherment of hieroglyphs and the roles therein of Champollion (who was monofocused in his passions) and Thomas Young (who was more wide-ranging in his passions) and brings it back around to writing. I enjoyed it greatly (and learned somethings new).

Art, Morality, and (Dis)Comfort

A great OpEd from the NYTimes. Jen Silverman (the author of the OpEd and a playwright/novelist) identifies “a peculiar American illness: namely, that we have a profound and dangerous inclination to confuse art with moral instruction, and vice versa.” Silverman goes on to say:

When I work with younger writers, I am frequently amazed by how quickly peer feedback sessions turn into a process of identifying which characters did or said insensitive things. Sometimes the writers rush to defend the character, but often they apologize shamefacedly for their own blind spot, and the discussion swerves into how to fix the morals of the piece. The suggestion that the values of a character can be neither the values of the writer nor the entire point of the piece seems more and more surprising — and apt to trigger discomfort.

In my own teaching, I’ve run into this confusion of character voice with authorial voice.  But the bigger point, that great writing/art is not just a morality tale. I’m reminded of Les liaisons dangereuses which suddenly had a heyday with three movie adaptations, Dangerous Liaisons(1988), Valmont (1989), and later the teen adaptation Cruel Intentions(1999). My impression is that Dangerous Liaisons made the bigger splash, but I preferred Valmont precisely because it wasn’t a neat, little morality play were the bad people got their comeuppance. It had a more complex, perhaps less comfortable ending.

I’ve never been a fan of the comfortable. The comfort zone is not a zone of growth. That’s not to say the comfort zone doesn’t have its very important place (give me a good book, good cup of tea, cat in the lap, and fire in the fireplace). But it’s not the place to spend one’s entire life.

Silverman sums it up beautifully:

But what art offers us is crucial precisely because it is not a bland backdrop or a platform for simple directives. Our books, plays, films and TV shows can do the most for us when they don’t serve as moral instruction manuals but allow us to glimpse our own hidden capacities, the slippery social contracts inside which we function, and the contradictions we all contain.

We need more narratives that tell us the truth about how complex our world is. We need stories that help us name and accept paradoxes, not ones that erase or ignore them.

…the more we cultivate audiences who believe that the job of art is to instruct instead of investigate, to judge instead of question, to seek easy clarity instead of holding multiple uncertainties, the more we will find ourselves inside a culture defined by rigidity, knee-jerk judgments and incuriosity.

Aliveness, Flourishing, and Languishing

I read this article in the WaPo the other day on Aliveness. Well, it was actually a book review of On Giving Up by Adam Philips. It ended up being a fascinating intersection of literature and psychoanalysis. It started with a quote from a young James Joyce:

At the start of 1900, 10 days into the new century, a 17-year-old James Joyce delivered a lecture to the Literary and Historical Society at University College Dublin. His topic: “Drama and Life.” His conclusion: that ordinary experience is sufficient to yield up the stuff of literature: “I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama.” It’s a striking phrase, “the deadest among the living.” We know, I think, instinctively what it means, though Joyce provides a gloss, too — “the most commonplace” — and we’ll come back to that. But it asks us to think of aliveness as something more than a biological state.

The literary references continue throughout. The review contains a wide ranging look at the essays within the book and is worth a read. But to draw on one more quote from the review:

Put another way, one way to stave off the deadness of the commonplace is by countering the urge to assimilate people, opinions, experiences into commonplaces in the first place — to be attuned to detail, alert to specificity, curious about difference.

I like that. In a way, it recalls the opening Joyce quote. When we’re alert to the details and differences and curious, suddenly we realize the drama in what could have been glossed over as commonplace.

Joyce is speaking about writing and this is all applicable to that craft, but of course Philips is really concerns with how we live. This combination of alterness, awareness, and curiosity  – engagement at its heart, what the article calls aliveness, seems akin to  flourishing, in the technical sense of “a combination of physical, emotional and mental well-being,” “experience engagement and joy in their lives… characterized by a sense of connectedness to life, relationships, and career.” vs. languishing: “disconnected and disillusioned,” “joyless blah feeling.” To thrive, to flourish, to be alive beyond the biological sense requires us to seek out the details and differences and be curious, not just left things pass us by in a blur of commonplaceness.