Star Wars

Ok, this might necessitate a longer posting than this, but it has to be said at some point. So, I found out today there's going to be an animated Star Wars feature film out in August. This seems like a shameless cash-in on the few die hard fan base that actually enjoyed the prequels. I'd like to pretend that Lucas didn't sully his reputation with these annoying films. Maybe a study in contrasts would be needed. The first trilogy, let's call it the "real" Star Wars, this is before the digitized re-release in the 90's, was mostly about mythology and was heavy on characterization. Sure, there was cool fanboy action stuff, but this also served the story. There were new surprises every film and new worlds to explore. Everything since seems like cliches and formulaic re-tread, while the spirituality and mythology has been replaced with a kind of scientific mumbo jumbo (midi-chlorian count). The heavy dose of mysticism and mythology of the first films, the archetypal spiritual quest of the hero's journey, has given way to, well, crap. We get lame duck characters in lame duck stories having banal conversations (that's my word for the month, it seems). Hell, Timothy Zahn's books were more original, more compelling. Lucas, it seems, got in his own way, and didn't have anyone to tell him how crappy his scripts were, not to mention the directing. He could have had the pick of the Hollywood litter to write scripts, direct, whatever, but instead he chose to write and direct himself. Too many yes men? Did anyone suggest handing the project over to someone who had written a script in the last twenty years? Either way, bad decision. Now we're stuck with a few special effects in digital surround sound. Wasn't it Lucas himself who said "a special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing?" Hmm. Should've listened.

Eco's Head Revisited

As you may or may not be able to tell, I've been on a mild Umberto Eco kick lately and would like eventually to get around to reading his work. A kind of constructivist postmodernism (?) as the link below suggests, as a response to Derrida/Foucault/Lyotard's deconstructivism. At the same time, I'm reading Dostoevsky's "Demons," seeing some clear parallels between Dost. and Eco, in terms of their response to prevailing "liberal" thought of the time (the term is somewhat misplaced for Eco's contemporaries), pointing toward hope in the face of meaninglessness. Anyhoo, can't wait to jump into this fairly thorough page, based on Cambridge lectures on Eco.

A good word

for American culture in general is "banal." We are drowning in end of Empire banality. I miss thorough conversation of some depth where a position is advanced and discussed. Does that happen anymore outside of classrooms around here? Maybe it's a German thing. But I remember quite a few satisfying conversations, like 5 course meal conversations that lasted for hours and fed the soul. Wither art thou gone, thou conversation, thou? I guess every now and then I get to hang out with Rob and Eric, so it's not like I've been sent to Siberia or anything, although, on occasion, it gets to feeling that way, relationally speaking. Also, want to give a small shout out to Donald Capps, whom I had never heard of, until I leaned back in my chair in the bowels of Fuller library, which actually has a name, Mcsomething or other, which escapes me at the moment. Anyhoo, I came across a book of his where he analyzes Denise Levertov and other poets from a therapist's perspective. He's got a slew of other titles and it's kind of good just knowing he's out there, taking her easy for all us sinners.

Wherefore I Know Not...

I have of late, like some Danish prince, lost much of my mirth. This has to do with several things. First, the school year has been taxing, and I have been short of exercise, the kind of things that will release stress and provide a sense of balance. Second, I have lost connection with a life of the mind. Forget culture, forget elegant arguments of re-enlivening the imagination as a force to counter the spiritual malaise of the modern world. I can barely find the time and space to read in a disciplined way. Who usually bears the brunt of this is my wife. I feel confined by duties of job and "family." I feel confined by a city where there are two hour parking limits for every overcrowded, overlit, excessively loud coffee shop, while at home, the internet, the neighbors, the television, and a pile of laundry provide too much distraction. There is no respite save for a 25 minute swath I have tried to carve out of my morning for silence and breathing. The sweltering 100 plus conditions scorch the landscape and the ground is as as parched and inhospitable as my own soul. There is little in a given week to look forward to, except for the droning, infantilizing, sentimental and melodramatic voices of popular culture, entertaining and stupefying as they may be. To follow up on von Balthasar, there is even much beauty around me, but it is beauty devoid of truth. There is nothing behind the mask. In a given day, we visited the pompous new cathedral of capitalism, the new Vatican of the self, the consumeristic chapel called Americana. How appropriate that what passes for "Americana" is essentially a large parking structure and pseudo-luxurious, immersive shopping experience. Taking their cues from Disneyland's pseudo-nostalgic Mainstreet USA, developers have planned immersive shopping experiences in overpriced stores strung together below "luxury apartments" encircling a manicured turf area, and in the center a kind of golden man, coming up out of the water, his hand extended to chase a fish(?) Apparently, this is a golden replica of the spirit of American youth, memorialized for those soldiers who lost their lives on D Day. We've now placed it. embossed with gold, at the center of our billion dollar, corporate sponsored brandscape. "Americana on Brand" is the all too ironic title for this new cash cow, the success of which, according to the LA Times, "defies the current economic downturn." We have branded Americana like so many Norman Rockwell prints in the bargain bin at the mall. This high-end shopping experience feeds our inner version of the American Dream, the need to seem glamorous, not even buying any of the high-end brands available, just grabbing a Starbucks and a movie: preferably Iron Man, that latest and most attrative, aesthetically pleasing, that superficially beautiful Hollywood opiate du jour, and being in close proximity to it, which seemed to suffice for the large crowd of ethnic minorities and after church crowd, still salivating from the scent of American pie on display, the promise of self transcendance, of transformation. Somehow, I don't quite think this is what Emerson or Thoreau had in mind. On the way home, we stopped at McDonald's, and I greedily scarfed down a cheeseburger. To have human needs in America means to participate in the very structures of dehumanization by default, by association. I fill my gas tank with the blood of Iraqis, of American servicemen and women. I eat the flesh of cows slaughtered in sterile, inhumane factories. I couldn't wait to get back to Europe for some rest, when I remembered looking out from Mars Hill next to the Akropolis looking out over the city of Athens, that bastion of reason, and seeing a towering, larger-than-life figure standing out amongst the architecture, that new unknown god of the pantheon, maybe the one Paul really had in mind, Ronald McDonald. I went to see Shane Claiborne discuss "new monasticism" and intentional urban Christian communities to revive the neglected places of the Empire. It's encouraging to see a committed person of conviction living out their beliefs in a constructive way. The worship experience, however, seemed to mirror our culture and was less palatable to me: more melodrama, more sentiment, more hyperbole. Crowds whipped up into frenzied groupthink. (I did have an eerie moment of inverse self-recognition when a plain-looking European man got up and wondered how this pacifist understood the Armageddon: would Jesus simply negotiate his way out of it, or would he fight and conquer, as saith the Book of Revelation? Claiborne skirted around the juicy millenialism debate and gave instead a picture of a grace filled Christ as he understands him. The questioner stood unmoving and unmoved during worship, arms folded...he wasn't buying it. Could all these people really not understand the importance of standing up to fight during Armageddon? They just didn't get it. I was standing one row back, in a similar posture, for different reasons). We get home to Ty and the gang for a season finale of the uplifting "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition:" more melodrama, more sentiment, more hyperbole, and the excessive use of the term "hero." What is it with this country and the myth of the hero figure. We're so constantly ready to elevate others and ourselves to hero status, and then bask in the satisfaction of the humility that is uncomfortable with the title. It's all prescripted: you're such a hero, no I'm just a regular guy who feels responsibility toward his fellow man, wow, you're so humble. And we all love a humble hero. Aaaaand cut. Print. Now this is not to say that there isn't positive, constructive things going on through such shows, but it is distorted, trivialized by its excessive sentimentality, its perpetuation of the perverse American manifest destiny myth, its design, at least in part, to increase Sears' and Ford's bottom line, there's Americana for you. We rounded off the night with a two hour season finale of "Desperate Housewives." It's not quite Dostoevsky, hell it's not even Kerouac, but after so much soul-corroding Western bile, who really cares? Or maybe I can relate, as a desperate house husband.

Moral Storytelling

Ok, ok, so I ranted against the mindless summer movie season, and all my posts since have been about movies. So sue me. I did meditate, clean, and cook today if it makes anyone feel better. Ahem. Anyway. There are two main fantasy worlds a kid is allowed to read if they grow up in a conservative Christian home. Most stuff involving wizardry, sorcery, magic, and such is off limits, whether the ultimate lesson of the story is moral or not. Harry Potter would have probably been off limits in my house, because there is no clear association between Rowling and the organized church. Enter Lewis and Tolkien. Most Christian kids are allowed to read Lord of the RIngs and Narnia, but not much else in the way of fantasy literature. Too prone to the occult, the satanic, and the always vaguely defined "New Age" mentality, or what have you. This presents some interesting dilemmas. For one, Narnia represents clear allegory of Christian myths. It's pretty straightforward, saccharine Christian fare with a clear moral lesson, and what might pass for a "spiritual realm" in Narnia. While Gandalf is also clearly a Christ figure, he's not quite the Christ stand-in that is Aslan. Lord of the Rings, therefore, presents a different myth, and while there are clear Christian themes of sacrificial love, etc. the world itself is not superficially Christian, but really pre-Christian. None of the characters prays or acknowledges a supreme being of good, and Gandalf, finally is too grumpy to be a Christ stand-in, and he smokes, on top of that. But the differences don't end there. The drama in any good story is the moral dilemma faced by the character, and consequences of choices, and then dealing with those consequences. In this sense, LOTR is a far more grown-up story as it presents a greater depth of drama and moral choice. This has made the recent LOTR films far easier to enjoy for grown-ups than the simple childish morality of the Narnia franchise. Rolling Stone's Peter Travers notes "There's no reason to criticize Narnia for being Lord of the Rings-lite. That's the point." Roger Ebert, who clearly grew up in a different home than me, has the following astute insights:

Character is not destiny in the "Narnia" pictures. Destiny is. Which creates some moral and dramatic dilemmas for the viewer. With all the dramatis personae Lewis has crammed into his filagreed fantasies, few of the players have the opportunity to leave much of an impression, or acquire significance, beyond what the tale demands of them. (Who's that badger again?) They do what is asked of them -- in the story and by the story. And once we realize that even the leads are predestined to play their parts in fulfilling prophecies, and that all they have to do to meet the requirements is to abide by (or guess) whatever certain mystical authority figures want them to do, the tension deflates a bit.
The moral options, as set forth in the movies so far, are fairly clear-cut: believe the beautiful lion and the friendly beavers; don't trust the sepulchral ice queen bearing Turkish Delight or the hideous dark demons extolling the forces of hate. What could be simpler? A child could do it. And what kind of lesson does that communicate to the child who can? That it's easy to tell right from wrong? Not a wise maxim.
What responsibilities do the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve (how does that work?) bear for their own decisions, and the consequences of their actions, if everything can eventually be set right by some deus ex machina -- the healing properties of supernatural potions, or the corrective powers of magic lion's breath? What becomes of free will, of meaning itself?

This leaves me wondering about the many people I know who grew up in Christian homes and have a tenuous relationship with Christianity or have left the faith altogether. Or even if they remain Christians, genuine or nominal, their lives didn't quite turn out as squeaky clean as their parents would have had for them. They were immersed in a simplified moralistic myth, in which "it is easy to tell right from wrong" and if it isn't "Jesus/Aslan will show up and get you out of the bind."

Gregory Wolfe of Image Journal fame has some words of discernment in this regard, essentially painting Lewis and Tolkien as part of a greater project of Romanticism, and that a sole literary diet of Tolkien and Lewis tends to a kind of infantilism. Hear hear. Although, for my tastes, Wolfe places too much emphasis on the work of Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor and T.S. Eliot, but at least he presents a well-argued, erudite reason.

I also came across some interesting blogs regarding this discussion:
first, Gregory Wolfe's exquisite editorials Agree or disagree with him, this is territory worth mining.

Also, a blog from some lads at Regent in Vancouver. Judging by their insights, I should have gone to Regent instead of Fuller.

And finally, another blog with links and entries aplenty that taps into a similar vein. I kid myself that I would have sounded something like either of these blogs if I had stayed in academia. Instead, I let my mind atrophy in the sun-drenched sidewalks promising fame and the self-promotion projects of even the Christian marginalia here in Tinseltown, and plan mediocre lessons on grammar for the terminally uninterested. O me, o life.

Upcoming Movies Expounded Upon

Speaking of upcoming flicks, we've been bombarded recently by Speed Racer commercials, which opens just a week after Iron Man. Looks like some nice special effects, can't say much about the story. Remember when the Matrix came out, and all we pretty much knew about it was the tag line "What is the Matrix?" An example of undersaturation, so to speak. And then the movie was pretty spectacular and groundbreaking, with a kind of subtle hype around it. Well here, we know what we're in for pretty much, even though it looks cool and all. Maybe the Wachowskis or whoever they have marketing this one should have gone for the subtler approach again instead of beating us over the head with it and the inevitable corporate tie-ins. And, at the risk of sounding hypocritical by continuing to write about films after ranting in the previous post, I definitely enjoyed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly last week (check out Max von Sydow in French! who knew?). And I started I'm Not There last night, which was so allusive and interwoven and suggestive of myth in general and the Dylan myth in particular, definitely worthwhile. Heath Ledger takes a turn as one of "the Dylans" and does a credible job, as he mostly did.

I Wonder If...

I wonder if we'll all be bombarded by movie trailers and commercials in the next few months. I wonder how much vapid, self-referential, indulgent humor will be in them? I do not wonder how the box office take will stack up to the same time last year. I do wonder how much of that take will go to organized crime. I wonder if corporate magazines will have their movie reviewer bless us with their Summer Movie Picks, prioritizing our tastes for us. I wonder if we'll give each film an entire evening's worth of thought and conversation, eagerly awaiting our next escapist fix. I wonder about the value of popular culture. I wonder about $6 boxes of popcorn. I wonder what we value in film, what we want to get from it, what values we take into it, what values we come out with. I wonder if we learn anything applicable, or just some generic, fuzzy, already held values. I wonder if anything offered up for mass consumption challenges us to grow, individually and collectively. I wonder if we actually want to.

Writing and Ambition: In Which I Realize I'm Not Rilke

So I've decided part of my literary inertia is related to a literary schizophrenia (bear with me). While I am something of a Renaissance Man, a sometime teacher, and all around muckamuck, I have some sort of literary ambition. To date these have resulted in roughly 5 poems published for student publications and one poem accepted in a literary journal of small note. I have yet to finish a respectable short story, and have been planning a novel for some time, which I plan to start this summer. Now, I have also recorded music and one song has been picked up by a television show, apparently the best way to earn some cash if your band is not on the Vans Warped Tour (or maybe even if it is), but somehow this raging success hasn't quelled my literary ambitions. One of my problems is certainly lack of focus. I recently finished reading a novel, (see previous posts), have begun another one (Updike's "Terrorist," which is slow going so far, not as easy to get into, and frequently puts the word "diss" in the mouths of contemporary teen characters, a term that went out of use sometime in the last decade, but which the boomer generation still uses when they want to sound "relevant"). But this opens up new questions regarding the relationship between reading and writing. This must be a question every writer has to answer for themselves. Is it helpful to read a lot while trying to write? Is it helpful to read selectively? To read widely? Does it affect tone and style drastically? With my sponge-like personality, this is an almost definite "yes." I suppose the dictum "novels aren't written, they're re-written" must come into play here, with tonal wrinkles getting ironed out in the third and fourth drafts, roughly. I have also dipped into Billy Collins, Li-Young Lee, begun (again) Northrop Frye's study on William Blake called "Fearful Symmetry" and set aside two books by a former professor to read, which I couldn't find this morning precisely because I had "set them aside" to read today. And yet this "sode reading" takes up roughly all of my free time alongside grading student work, laundry, and catching the occasional Lakers game. Now, I would also like to improve on the guitar, perhaps record a demo of original material, learn the piano, etc. In addition to which my impatience suggests to me I should have all this done by the end of the month, instead of by the time I'm forty, which is the more likely scenario. I often like to think to myself "wait until Summer," during which I certainly will have more time, but, it must also be said, results in a reduced sense of urgency, seeing as I won't be waking up at 6 am every day, with a jolt of coffee to allow me to keep pace with the 9th grade student's energy level. I also don't mind the occasional blog entry to keep the juiced flowing. Then I think, hm, my clearest writing seems to get done when I am in shape, which I certainly am not, so I put frequent exercise on the agenda as well. In addition to which I will be going to an IB conference in late June and to Frankfurt through much of August. You see the problem. I am pulled in too many directions in a three day span, let alone the time it would take to fashion a coherent narrative of considerable length (a paraphrase of EM Forster's definition of the novel). And yet, a kernel of hope remains. Can I prioritize well enough, in terms of reading (research for the novel before random forays into side reading...although this could yield unexpected results). Part of writing, or producing any kind of substantial piece of art, must be the ability of exclusion, of blocking out that which is not essential. Ah, to be Rilke, and utterly crap on all that is not our art (see marriage to Clara...which sounds dangerously close to "Karla," phonetically speaking, that is, eh heh, heh eeehhh).

Preaching to the Choir: America and Ideologizing

Listening to NPR on the drive home, they were doing a piece on Grand Theft Auto IV, the new installment of the controversial video game line. Whatever negative elements exist in the game (or in video games as a whole), one aspect of the game is its skewering of contemporary culture (even as it is itself seen as asocial evil, how postmodern.) Anyway, what struck me was the short sound byte they played from the video game itself, when the avatar gets into a car, the player can select a faux radio station, one of them being an NPR spoof. The background music was sort of an angelic choir and a sepia voiced announcer saying "Preaching to the choir...you're listening to NPL" or some such. But this idea of preaching to choir. As we live in a consumer society, we tend to seek out venues of entertainment and community that reinforce our values and preconceived notions. This is certainly true in my own life, although I tend to project that quality onto others. Another spoof television station in the video game is the Weasel News Channel, pandering to a conservative audience. One of the values I learned through some of those old literature classes was a kind of resolution, or at least potential resolution to this polarization, which is brought to the fore in times like presidential elections, when reds demonize the amoral blues and blues make fun of uneducated reds. Thankfully, the dialogue seems a little more intelligent in this election cycle, but not by that much. How do we avoid this polarization within ourselves? How do we acknowledge our need to expand, to see others' points of view without somehow losing track of our own. For myself, I am particularly sponge-like and tend to absorb whatever I am immersed in. This would seem to be a kind of immature approach to the world, in which we can only stand to be around likeminded people for fear of losing our values. This may have something to do with how I was raised (for this is the deepest education, it seems), but I also had a "formal education" in which a sort of rewiring took place. But, it seems, this rewiring has to be practiced continuously, or the old patterns will simply reemerge. This can be especially daunting in a city like LA, where there are all kinds of pocket communities with their own particular take. Sometimes I sneer at the complacency and what I take to be the false assuredness of all kinds of fundamentalists, be they conservative or liberal, but have I not myself succumbed to a kind of comfortable complacency? How do you fight that? How do you walk that middle road of openness. Encounter with text is certainly one way of this expansion. I was humbled to read a bit of the debate between Anglican Bishop Rowan Williams and novelist Philip Pullman, during which Williams had the following quote:

What you learn, I think, after absorbing a really serious piece of fiction, is not a message. Your world has expanded, your world has enlarged at the end of it, and the more a writer focuses on message, the less expansion there'll be. I think that's why sometimes the most successful, "Christian" fiction is written by people who are not trying hard to be Christian about it. A bit of a paradox, but I'm thinking of Flannery O'Connor, the American writer, my favorite example here. She's somebody who, quite deliberately, doesn't set out to make the points that you might expect her to be making, but wants to build a world in which certain things may become plausible, or tangible, palpable, but not to get a message across.

As an English teacher in the ninth and tenth grade, I am repeatedly trying to "teach texts," but I am so concerned with basic things like comprehension, vocabulary, spelling, structuring a basic essay, coaxing students to actually care about their grade and their future, that I tend to speed through class discussions, teasing out whatever the main message seems to be, in a fairly didactic way, not allowing the fiction to breathe. And I am left wondering, to what extent am I failing as a teacher of literature, and to what extent am I bound by circumstance? I am left thinking the fault is not the kids but myself. I haven't done a good enough job of challenging myself to live a mythologically inflected life. I've come down on one side of a spectrum and I filter the truth down to what lines up with what I already believe and I try to reproduce that in others. I'm on a search to educate myself on how to move toward a middle way, but here again I feel caught in a human bind. The choice of exposure to something, even something new, different, other, is ipso facto a choice to exclude billion other things. You see the problem we find ourselves in. Even a decision to be open is itself extremely limited. I suppose instead the question is how to cultivate an open heart and open mind. How to experience, or at least open ourselves up to, the daily resurrection?

Red Lion and Golden Compass

Sooo, a friend of mine, from Oxford no less, highly recommended the His Dark Materials trilogy (which includes The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Something Else) a while back. I have fond memories of children's fantasy lit. Tolkien, Lewis, L'engle, what have you, and I gave some feint interest and shrugged and went on with my life. Then, I bought a book by an old professor and friend, Doug Thorpe, who for me represents a worldview, a time and place of searching, and some proximity to truth. In the book, he has an essay that recounts a camping trip with his wife and daughter during which they discuss the books, the symbolism, its relevance, and I was slightly more intrigued. I didn't want to settle for the movie experience, so sure enough I read the thing, right after re-reading the Hobbit. I had some awkward experiences reading the Hobbit, including shortness of breath, for reasons difficult to describe. I had some memory not only of the story, but in the way I read it the first time, that is, as an 11 year old or so. I had vivid memories of not visualizing the scenes for long stretches and penetrating no further than the printed page, and being bored. Now, going back into a state of childhood ignorance even for a few seconds at a time, just that sense memory, touched some kind of primal fear. On top of that, I'm sure this is the experience of many of my High School students and I feel I have my own mountain to climb. At moments like these I simply want to curl up in a fetal position with some hot cocoa and listen to the rain patter on the roof, but I live in LA, so there is no rain, nothing to till the dry dusty soil, or the dry dusty soul. But anyway, another point to be made is that the reading level of much of the Hobbit is roughly 3rd or 4th grade, spot on for my 11 year old self, but sort of disappointing now. Two many real world referents for a fantasy (the names of the trolls, for example), and a kind of latent classism in the portrayal of the villains. The tone of the whole book is excessively childish until the Riddles in the Dark chapter, when Tolkien finds his voice, which doesn't really come into fine focus until toward the end of the book, where we begin to get lush, detailed descriptions. In more ways than one, this really provides the set up for the Lord of the Rings, not just in terms of story and mythology, which doesn't even quite line up, but in terms of Tolkien teaching himself how to write and finding his voice. Phillip Pullman, by contrast, is an accomplished modern author, who knows how to weave a story together. As much as the story follows the hero's journey formula almost self-consciously, there's good stuff here. Pullman, an English professor in England, posits a kind of poetic worldview, in which symbols and their interpretation lead to truth. Lyra's process may be a kind of divination, and so have parallels to, say, shamanism, but it also parallels the process of close reading. In literary criticism, you let the interrelating symbols of a given text suggest an underlying meaning. The compass also has gears and levers, suggesting that, for Pullman, science can be put to use in service of truth (unlike, say, Tolkien, a sort of Luddite) I haven't finished the series of course, but there is some hint of gnosticism, certainly an anti-organized, oppressive religion message, God does appear, but he is apparently "an aged, spent force" to quote Thorpe. Pullman has received flak for his religious views and the movie was heavily edited to mitigate the criticism, or was it? On a figurative level, the Magisterium still resembles a state church. Yet many of the practices for which they are criticized are hardly modern, such as castrating children to sing for God in the choir, such as abducting children in medieval times. Certainly the church has perpetrated acts of evil over the centuries. I do believe Pullman does the Church some disservice in highlighting a few abominable practices and pretending this encapsulates the church as an institution. One easy counterexample is Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams praising the work. The desire of the establishment to suppress "dust" and Lyra's intuition that it is a good thing, suggest it is itself embodied physical human experience, sensuality, for some, that which makes us essentially human. This is, if anything, a deeply humanist voice. And even if it were blatantly anti-Christian, why silence and suppress, why not engage and respond? This suggests, as Roger Ebert points out, an insecure faith. Why do we treat new movie releases as if they wield some all-persuasive power? If we develop critical skills, we can engage it, taking the good, leaving the bad?
Anyhoo, I'll have to wrap this up later.
links to consider
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=16-08-042-f
http://www.powells.com/authors/pullman.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21595083/
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s510312.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/03/17/bodark17.xml