went to see BEOWULF today as it was screening in both a 3D version and a regular version. we were given special 3D glasses made of sturdy plastic and with either plastic or ground glass lenses. in short, these were not the flimsy paper 3D glasses of yesteryear, but spectacles studded with anti-theft devices and carefully distributed–then collected afterward.
so, how was it? “life-like”?
the Unreliable Narrator loves stories–customized to his specifications. i’ve become his enabler, his amenuensis, for stories he tells such as Owl and the Magic Carpet (“it can fly without no wings”) and Owl and the Magic Frog, in which said frog makes a rather belated third-act appearance. i’m delighted by this new development in his imagination. HB and i race to set down his tales on paper. later, we’ll type and print, and have the Unreliable Narrator make some drawings to go with them.
i’ve also written about TTE fanfic which the Unreliable Narrator commissions me to write. it’s a way for my to culture-jam a world he likes but i have reservations about, and rig it with my own more contemporary values. (i know there’s a story involving thomas and percy and a chinese dragon, but i’ve never read it.) i present herewith:
marjane satrapi, a frenchwoman who’s based in paris but is of persian (iranian) background, wrote a beautiful series of illustrated novels called PERSEPOLIS and PERSEPOLIS 2. they tell the story of her childhood as the shah of iran fled to america and the ayatollahs came to power in the 1970s and ’80s. it’s hard to believe that the zealots on the fringes can come to sway an entire society, but then again, look at the ascendancy of the “moral majority” in this country and how far right we’ve skewed: i mean, how can anyone question the legitimacy of evolution? so who’s to say we don’t have our own mullahs issuing fatwas against abortion providers, and so on?
in any case, marjane satrapi has gone on to direct an animated film based on her illustrated novels. i’m KEENLY interested how she got the opportunity to do that, as i have a graphic novel that needs an illustrator and i think would make a great live action film.
The Unreliable Narrator Loves Words
so he has memorized the name of the “honorable number one son” of this bullshitty ching-ching china story which i loathe, but which amuses him.
i have to admit it’s quite a feat to memorize all the syllables of the nonsense name “Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sarembo Chari Bari Ruchi Pip Peri Pembo.” i’ve read the story to the UN umpteen million times and i still can’t recall it easily.
must be my mental block from the story’s orientalist crap that’s clouding my brain.
so, should i quietly “lose” the book behind the sofa in his classroom where it’ll grow all dusty and quickly replace it with some wonderful books from this place? i’m sorely tempted.
Posted in asian america, dept of peace, kidstuff, page
“Pursue Your Passion to Its Lair”
i’ve always admired arundhati roy, author of The God of Small Things. in the intervening ten years since that booker-winning novel, she’s written much more non-fiction. i guess the times and her passions dictated it. now it sounds like she’s working on a new novel. i can hardly wait!
in the meantime, an anonymous new zealand documentary filmmaker has made a 64-minute film that brings together her words, images of the global military-industrial complex, and other representations of power and powerlessness that roy critiques. it’s totally free (google stream here) and relies on word-of-mouth to get out there. so take a look already.
books like these, while necessary and true, nevertheless make me want to SCREAM.
just think, we could’ve avoided several thousand people dying, billions thrown away, and destabilizing a nation even further beyond its chaotic status quo under hussein if we HADN’T gone down this misguided road. i think shrub et al need to pay for their crimes. because they are crimes.
Blind into Baghdad
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone
Posted in dept of peace, page, rant
oh hey. this is my high school profiled in this book. it’s interesting because i think walt whitman‘s rankings among outstanding public high schools in the metro DC area have slipped. actually i think the suburban maryland public high schools in the outer ‘burbs, like walter johnson, have lapped whitman in all the metrics by which overachieving high schools are measured.
i remember i was in washington state filming not a week ago when i first heard that israel had started shelling lebanon.* the news was like a stone sliding into absolutely still water, with a soft plunk. quiet, you think, but still a violent enough disturbance to make the paramecium dance furiously below surface. quiet enough to make you shudder.
maybe that’s why people persist in having children in our miserable age: because we need the hope. once i heard kazuo ishiguro speak about the writing of his book WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS, about the japanese occupation of shanghai from a confused young japanese boy’s point of view (he later becomes a detective who returns to shanghai and tries to piece his childhood together), and he said something then which seemed cryptic to me but has since gained clarity:
ishiguro said, “i wanted to re-create the zone of safety, of innocence that adults feel compelled to make in order to cocoon a child from the world.”
at the time i understood it as meeting the child’s need. but now i see so clearly that it’s equally if not more about meeting the adult’s aching need–for innocence.
it’s hard to raise children when a deep, small part of you is convinced we’re really in the shit now.
*anthony bourdain continues to amaze and surprise me. his dispatch from beirut made me very very sad.
* * * * * * *
bedtime rituals in our house are lengthy. what a luxury it is that CN often takes 2 hours or more to unwind. i hope all these nights of slow unraveling of wakedness into sleep is something he can store in a bottle for later, when inevitable uneasy or short nights come.
after bath, little massage of skin lotion and pulling on of jammies, teeth brushing, and an acrobatic tumble into bed, we read.
i should say, i read. i’m like sheherazhade, commanded to read nearly a thousand and one stories for what seems like nearly as many nights (and more, i hope). luckily i serve a benevolent dictator.
recently i’ve been reading to him out of Poetry Speaks to Children, edited by Elise Paschen. we skip around a lot. i think he chooses the poems as much based on the pictures that accompany them as the way the poem sounds when i read it.
anyway, he commits them all to memory scarily fast and easy. (i should back up a bit and say i wasn’t pleased he was beginning to memorize and ask questions about traditional nursery rhymes–about boys who throw kittens down the well, bubonic plague-ridden people and the efforts to stay plague-free, and other medieval monstrosities turned into folk rhymes for tots. so i thought contemporary poems would be more reasonable in sensibility and subject matter.) when i was only halfway through reading his favorite, “Rabbit,” he quickly repeated the rest of the poem from memory and exclaimed, “i read it!”
well, who was i to argue against his majesty? close enough.
at any rate, as we finished the book (all toddler books end with someone falling asleep, dontcha know) and snuggled down together, he said a great many things.
“will you buy something for me?”
“yes, what is it?”
“will you buy me some ‘quash? not yucky ‘quash but yummy ‘quash?” [squash--he drops the beginning esses of words]
“okay. what else?”
“and some corn?”
“oh, because you like corn on the cob.”
“yes. and a yummy lamby that i can eat and grow taller?”
“a white chocolate lamby?” [that he nursed from easter til about june, gobbling ears--limbs--tail--back of the head, when i secretly threw it away believing the hollowed out shell, a face attached to a torso, to be more bacteria than candy and ready to collapse a la House of Wax style]
“yes. it will help me grow tall, just like daddy. so i can reach up…”
“reach up in the kitchen?”
“yes, and get things down. a lamby will help me grow tall.”
“okay honeypie. i can’t promise it’ll be in the shape of a lamby, but tomorrow when mama’s at the store, i’ll buy you a treat. okay?”
“okay.”
his eyes are almost closed. he burrows into my side and puts his hand on my stomach.
just when i think he’s asleep, he says in the deliberative way toddlers speak, as if they’re testing with a wedge and hammer the fit of each word into the sentence:
“when i grow up, i’m going to buy you some earrings.”
“oh, thank you, my dearest! how sweet of you to think of your mama like that. now go to sleep.”
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