Yet again, brave soldiers wander the wastes of the internet to save us from time-wasting hacks like the Bard.
i just read this book. everybody like always talks about how great it is and everything. but i don't think so. like, it's been done before, right?? soooo cliched. omg.
This fearless scholar is obviously referring to selections from The Palace of Pleasure by William Painter, which was in turn inspired by Arthur Brooke's 1562 translation of The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. He or she also likely refers to the Roman myth of Pyramus and Thisbe.
Of course, the author isn't referring to West Side Story or anything else written after 1595; I mean, OMG!!?1!*? Such a lack of historical perspective is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo beneath the prowess of the scholar responsible for the divine prose seen above.
This guy had the best titles EVER.
My favorite is "Black Legion of Callisto."
Also, what a hell of a name for a metal band...
My parents are readers. This isn't so much a compliment as a diagnosis. Had it existed 20 years ago, they probably would have qualified for an episode of Hoarders, and they didn't stop collecting 20 years ago. Before they moved houses, the shelves for paperbacks were stacked four deep vertically, with two layers stacked horizontally on top of that -- on each shelf, on all 20-plus shelves in the house. Don't even get me started on the hardbacks. During my childhood, literary avalanches were known to occur and cause real-world suffocations. Rest in peace, Timmy; you were the brother I never knew.
The folks have since moved into a defunct survivalist's would-be compound out in the woods. To give you a taste of this estate's decor, let me just say that the previous owner went through the trouble of climate-controlling his THREE gun-safes (complete with a dedicated back-up generator), but he chose to "install" his hot tub on the raised deck by balancing it atop cinderblocks stacked six feet high. Not being quite so insane, mom and dad decided to turn the guy's panic room (no, I'm not joking) into their personal library. Last weekend, I was tapped to help build it.
Let me put aside the back-breaking work of assembling bookshelf after bookshelf. Let's leave out the Herculean task of creating order out of four decades worth of haphazard collecting. What struck me most wasn't the amount of books my parents had, the amount of certain genres they had. My mom has been reading housewife mysteries and thrillers for years now, never really stepping outside the genre unless Michael Crichton or J.K. Rowling came calling. She certainly had quite a few books to put up, but I could at least picture someone reading a comparable amount. But my dad...well, christ. My father owns nearly everything written by the major pulp writers in history. This is not an exaggeration. His collection is curator-esque in its completeness.
Now, I knew these were my father's reading proclivities, but most of this stuff had been buried out of sight for my entire life. It was...jarring to see how much my dad loves this stuff. I mean, imagine your significant other likes to hulu-hoop, and you know this; it's just one of those endearing little quirks. Then, while investigating a discrepancy on the credit card bill, you discover that your loved one is maintaining a series of storage units, each of them filled to the brim with hulu-hoops of all shapes and sizes. It was a staggering realization: the combined vertigo of underestimated passion and an otherwise unpredictable normalcy.
In two days, my hands passed over the collective history of sci-fi/fantasy subculture and the bygone days of pay-by-the-word fiction. The stories weren't so much written on paper anymore as the ink was allowed to lie on the bloated, green mold that had eaten its way underneath. I worried each title would crumble in my hands; one even did, but it turns out that dad had two copies of Casca the Damned, for some reason.
Thinking back on it, I now understand my lifetime obsession with comic books, tabletop roleplaying, the sci-fi channel, and every other form of crap art. Dad never foisted these things upon me; we couldn't have dug out those old pulps if we'd tried. I was always allowed -- nay, encouraged -- to read books of my own choosing, yet I always picked the grandchildren of the pulps like they were my long lost siblings.
Is my reading just a phenotype for some inherited cultural gene, like myopia and flat feet? Did I mutate in the nerd radiation leaking from row three of the overstocked bookshelves? Did the speculative fiction that secretly insulated my childhood alter my growth like some environmental spill, my self-identity not so much learned as breathed in via the asbestos snow of decaying, low-grade paper stock?
As an English teacher, I'm constantly justifying the importance of books -- and the act of reading itself -- for a generation that seems all too eager to dance on the grave of print media. Does the fact that my personality is so completely shaped by books I've never read help or hurt that arguement? Either way, how do I express it in a way a teenager can understand? After all, I didn't know the infection was taking root until I was already terminal.
I know I'm new to the whole blog thing, but even a noob like myself knows that waiting a month between posts defeats the purpose of the exercise. I've disappointed my legions of fans and followers. The nameless hordes grown ravenous for morsels of wisdom in my absence, and for that I apologize.
In my defense, if form followed function, my previous laptop would look something like the picture above. The old warhorse came down with a massive virus, prompting me into a 3 a.m. panic of password changing before someone stole my identity with that key-logger (not sure why you'd want to be a chubby, midwestern man-boy, but shame on you all the same, Mr. Hacker). I decided to send her out to pasture. I got 5 years of college and a couple of unpublished novels out of her so, you know...that'll do pig; that'll do.
Next day, after the sales attendant asked why I was crying, I handed him my credit card and pointed a shaky finger at the mac-book. I'm not disappointed with the product. Granted, I'm now taking up residence in a tent display at Bass Pro Shop (shhhhhh, don't tell anyone!), but this certainly is one fine machine. It feels a bit childish to do anything on it thus far; its capabilities warrant more serious endeavors than googling myself and playing Peggle. However, until I can get an audience at the White House, load my fancy 3d projections into the war room, and say "No, Mr. President. The asteroid will strike in two hours...IN NEW YORK!" I guess I'll just have to be content with useless blogging.
Then again, the processor on this thing is fast enough to play Starcraft 2.
Maybe I won't be posting for a while, after all...
Above you will find the trailer for Zardoz. Go ahead; I'll wait....
Yes, that was Sean Connery in a speedo. Yes, he wears it for the entire film. Yes, Zardoz is a giant floating stone head that pukes guns so that other, all-too-hairy men can pillage what appears to be the Scottish Highlands. And yes, if you were to come over and watch a movie with me right now, this would be my choice...or something very similar.
In the past, people have questioned my unflinching dedication to crap movies. Just the other day, my friend D. was flabbergasted by my insistence that The Roomis the single best theater experience devised in the last 20 years. It only got worse when he heard my other recommendations (which included El Topo,Deathbed: The Bed That Eats People, The Impossible Kid, The Happening...). We had a passionate debate on the subject, and I reprint my thoughts here in the interest of expanding some horizons.
Let's pretend you and I are having a science fiction film festival (haha...dweeb); I have to rate the quality of the movies we could watch in order to decide which to screen.
So here's the thing: it is not as if I don't realize that Zardoz is terrible, or think that any of the other drek that might replace it constitutes superior film-making. We can both agree that this movie is total crap. In fact, no matter what order I put those first six movies in, or what movies I even include on the list, 99 times out of 100 any sane person in the world is going to put Zardoz last based on the trailer alone.
And I propose that is why we absolutely MUST watch Zardoz.
We don't live in a world of singular production anymore; we aren't viewing a freakin' Matisse painting. Everything(at least in Western culture) is mass-produced and ubiqutously disseminated. So I guess if you'd never seen any science fiction movie ever before, certainly we'd start off on Blade Runner. If you'd never seen a MOVIE before, I'd put in some Chaplin or Arsenic and Old Laceor Throne of Blood. But the thing is, you probably wouldn't be coming to science fiction movie night if either of those were the case.
Great art, in the modern world especially, works on man's capacity for wonder; it rises above the Avatars of the world by sticking in our minds after the entertainment has past. But we, in our mass culture, are surrounded on all sides by entertaining films, and if we try, we could watch nothing but fantastically-crafted cinema for the rest of our lives; there are enough of them out there.
By and large, that's what we should do. And when the fantastic begins to seem mundane, we make our own films and innovate, and the medium moves forward. However, maybe we aren't out to change the world that particular night. Maybe we don't even know each other that well, or our aesthetic organs digest in vastly different ways. Maybe we just want to have fun experiencing that elevator ride away from the mundane.
Zardoz does just that, only this elevator goes down, and we can all agree on how far (i.e. to the very bottom). For anyone who understands good film, or good anything, movies like Zardoz can produce the same sublime wonder as finally crafted work. Only with Zardoz, we aren't quietly delving into our own psyches to ask these probing questions. No, with Zardoz, we can ask those questions collectively as an audience.
AS A COMMUNITY, we ask why in God's name the costume department went with red speedos? What poor bastard paid to see this crap? Or worse, make it? Does Sean Connery wake up in cold sweats, haunted by what the floating stone head could have done to his career? Didn't a single person on the set have any taste?
Zardoz and its ilk bring people together like only terrible art can; it unites us with the only boundless human emotion: scorn. All the ingredients of a great movie will still be there, just negatively defined. Instead of merely recognizing the tenants of good art, we can appreciate and long for them, as it should be.
So if you come over to my house for movie night, bring me some Direct-To-Video crap I've never heard of on a bootlegged DVD. We'll be better friends for it. Popcorn is on me.
For all those educators out there, this TED talk proposes a solid solution to the "Spec. Ed. first" problem we keep reading about: use the science and tech. available to make the diagnosis, not the behavior. Interesting...
Remember Wishbone? What? You don't! It won a Peabody Award!
I'll help you out. Wishbone aired on PBS after Arthur (a show about a sexually-closeted young Ardavark, near as I could tell) and before all that other crap on PBS nobody ever watches. The title character was a Jack Russell Terrier, who had apparently received a classical education somewhere along the way, and his young master, a teenage boy named Joe. Every episode had a parallel narrative, one that took place in the "real" world and one that took place in Wishbone's imagination. Joe would get into some sort of trouble, then Wishbone would imagine himself as a character with a similar dilemma in classical literature. When Wishbone was remembering these canonical works (how did his little claws turn the pages?), he would be able to speak, the rest of the cast refused to acknowledge he was a dog, and they put him in period costume. Christ, I love PBS sometimes.
So Joe would get falsely accused of cheating on a test in school or something and Wishbone would spend the rest of the episode playing Sydney Carnet from a Tale of Two Cities (the little-doggie guillotine they built for him was adorable!). Every episode was a different book: a different, really-weird book. I mean, they did friggin' Faust, but somehow overlooked White Fang....
Wishbone obviously came from noble impulses, but those impulses just as obviously went unfulfilled. Sure, my friends and I watched it religiously to laugh at a dog dressed as Sancho Panza, but we didn't sprint to a library afterward. I'd bet money no child has ever said, "Mommy! PLEEEEEAAAAASSSSSSSEEEEEE by me a copy of Candide! The doggie was so cute as Dr. Pangloss!"
But the problem was in execution, not concept.
I propose fusing the classical focus of Wishbone with the plot device of Quantum Leap. The show will be called "Are You Still Bored?" and will focus on a maniacal high school English teacher and his victim...er, student. When little Timmy misbehaves in class, the teacher hits a button on his magic fiction time machine. Timmy is suddenly transported to the "magical" world of literature, where he can spend the rest of the episode reveling in the joys of necrophilia as Quasimodo, or gouging out his eyes as Oedipus, or strangling his wife to death in Othello.
In fact, let's just keep the focus on Timmy. We'll spend an entire season of bouncing him around literature's greatest atrocities with his English teacher occasionally popping in to mock him with informative lectures (maybe he could even smoke a cigar like Dean Stockwell). And finally, in the season finale, we'll return the broken shell of a man that was once Timmy to the halls of high school, his haunted eyes telling the story of a hundred horrific deaths and an awareness of what human flesh tastes like. However, everyone else will have learned some valuable lessons, and they'll be motivated (by FEAR) to learn more about the world of Literature.
Season Two: Cindy Lou is caught texting in class.
I work cheap and the pilot is already written. Contact my agent.
