In A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Present warns Scrooge, “I see a vacant seat . . . in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”
The dystopian imagination of our modern Jeremiahs observes today’s shadows and projects them into the future. George Orwell, foreseeing an omnipresent bureaucracy, gave us 1984; Aldous Huxley, foreseeing life stripped of meaning through medication, gave us Brave New World. The movie WALL*E is also a dystopian fantasy, and perhaps the strongest influence on it is another dystopian view of the future, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. [Here be spoilers] Read the rest of this entry »
Hubbard posted this at 9:37 AM EDT on Monday, July 7th, 2008 as Philosophy, Belles Lettres, Film Rants
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When asked how the human race should communicate to aliens, biologist Lewis Thomas said, “I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging, of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.”
When the Voyager spacecraft carried music representative of the earth, Bach was the most represented artist. One of the selections was Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major. Interestingly, the Brandenburg Concerto was originally part of a job application on Bach’s part. From Wiki [emphasis added]:
Bach’s best-known orchestral works are the Brandenburg concertos, so named because he submitted them in the hope of gaining employment from Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg-Schwedt in 1721; his application was unsuccessful.
Perhaps the finest concertos in all music, and Bach was turned down. Today’s job applicants, take note: some of your interviewers may be almost as clueless as Margrave Ludwig.
Hubbard posted this at 2:32 PM EDT on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Belles Lettres
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Flashman, by George MacDonald Fraser
A hero possessing Hector’s bravery, Sydney Carton’s loyalty, and Frederick Wentworth’s constancy would have virtues nearly equal the vices of Harry Flashman, Fraser’s anti-hero and a man who gives cads and cowards everywhere a bad name.
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Tom posted this at 10:47 PM EDT on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 as Belles Lettres
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Forgive the length of this post but, inspired by Amber, I am taking the 50-Book Challenge this year. I encourage a liberal interpretation of the scope and subject of this post in the comment thread.
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Tom posted this at 1:36 AM EDT on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 as Belles Lettres
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The waiter has a post up about sex that relies somewhat on your imagination:
“Ha!” Chimo says in the teasing sing song voice of a grade-schooler who knows the meaning of a sexual term before his playmates do. “You don’t know what a deluxe blowjob is.”
I’m going to be forty in a few weeks. I was getting hummers while Chimo still was crapping in his pants. I seriously doubt he knows something about oral sex that I don’t. But to humor him, I ask. “Okay, explain it.”
Chimo gives me his descriptive explanation. I won’t get into it here. Suffice to say it’s sophomoric — and sort of disgusting.
For a certain breed of humor, especially when the joke relies on creative (or disgusting) sex, letting the reader use his imagination is important, since whatever the reader imagines is apt to be more wild than anything the dedicated jokester can come up with. For example, here’s one of my favorite Catholic priest jokes:
The day after her wedding, Mary came home to her mother. Her mother couldn’t quite get what went wrong on the wedding night, and only knew that it had something to do with sex. Begging her daughter to reconsider, she took the daughter to see the village priest. The priest asked what had happened, and the daughter whispered into his ear. He turned pale, and said, “You were right to leave! For that, God destroyed Sodom.”
The mother was discouraged, but she decided to get a second opinion, and they went to see the bishop. The daughter whispered into the bishop’s ear what her husband had requested, and his beard went whiter. “Absolutely not! For that, God destroyed Gomorrah!”
Desperate, the mother decided that the third try would be the charm, so she took her daughter to see the cardinal. The daughter whispered into the cardinal’s ear what was requested on the wedding night, and the cardinal grinned and said, “Nothing wrong with that. Just try it and have fun.”
“But what about my priest and the bishop?” asked the thunderstruck daughter.
The cardinal replied, “What do those small town guys know about big city sex?”
[Incidentally, I’ve noticed a few different reactions—one nice, one intellectual, and one normal (that is to say, mine)—to this joke: (1) that the cardinal has heard more confessions and therefore knows more about sex than his underlings; (2) that the cardinal has a past like St. Augustine, who once prayed, “Lord, grant me chastity and continence—but not yet; (3) geez, that cardinal is a slut.]
Alas, it appears that the power of imagination is waning. After dozens of comments asking what a deluxe bj is, the urban dictionary now has a definition.
Hubbard posted this at 4:56 PM EDT on Monday, March 31st, 2008 as Humor, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Belles Lettres
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The New York Times has an interesting article about Christopher Nolan and The Dark Knight that dovetails our debates a few weeks ago nicely.
His Caped Crusader, Christian Bale (who also starred in Mr. Nolan’s entr’acte between the Batman films, “The Prestige”), recalls how “people would kind of laugh” when they heard that he and Mr. Nolan were taking Batman seriously. But when they finally saw the film, the same people “would say, ‘What a surprise,’ “ Mr. Bale said. “I believe that even the most popcornlike movie can be done incredibly well, and can have something that you really have to work at. That was what attracted me to doing it the first time, because I felt I’d never seen that done, and I didn’t understand why.”
It’s enough to make a marketing executive cringe, that the word “dense” pops up in conversations with Mr. Nolan and his actors. But it’s true: “The Dark Knight,” which will be released on July 18, is jammed with characters, plot and action. It picks up where “Batman Begins” left off, with Mr. Oldman’s police lieutenant, Jim Gordon, warning about the perils of escalation: that Batman’s extreme measures could invite a like response from the criminal element. And sure enough, a deadly new villain, the Joker, emerges to wreak havoc.
In a political context this would politely be called an “unintended consequence.” (Gotham as Baghdad, anyone?) Mr. Nolan doesn’t deny the overtones. “As we looked through the comics, there was this fascinating idea that Batman’s presence in Gotham actually attracts criminals to Gotham, attracts lunacy,” he said. “When you’re dealing with questionable notions like people taking the law into their own hands, you have to really ask, where does that lead? That’s what makes the character so dark, because he expresses a vengeful desire.”
That dig into the Iraq War is a bit stretched but it’s a good read.
Tom posted this at 2:14 PM EDT on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 as Belles Lettres
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