I am still on the English mailing list from UW.  Often I find myself reading emails like this, making me wish I were back in school.  How I wish I could spend 20 hours of each week devouring and digesting this literary conversation!


ENGL 307: Critical Approaches to Tolkien: Cultural Studies and Fantasy Literature

J.R.R. TOLKIEN, in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings, insists and argues, "I should like to say something here with reference to the many opinions or guesses that I have received or have read concerning the motives and meanings of the tale. The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them...As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical" (xiv). This course will decidedly not believe the author's intentions, rather we will draw on the broad archive of Tolkien's novels, Peter Jackson's films, and scholarship as occasions to identify and explore the key concepts, moves, and terms of the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies.

CENTRAL QUESTIONS AND ENGAGEMENTS INCLUDE: What are the different critical practices and methodologies of cultural studies? How might we employ different cultural studies approaches and lenses to Tolkien, film adaptations, and fantasy literature more generally? Why study fantasy, how is this oft dismissed "genre" important, and what values, ideals, and norms does it have? In this course, we will look at and analyze Tolkien through the lenses of cultural studies and deploy literature as theories about and dramatizations of different social relationships and realities, to unpack and analyze the intersections of cultural formations like race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality, particularly in the US context. Ursula K. Le Guin in "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" argues, "For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy." This class will spend the quarter reading, watching, thinking, and writing about how and what these texts argue, reveal, narrate, hide, perpetuate, and complicate the world we live in. In other words, we will try to challenge Tolkien's denials above and to answer Le Guin's proposition about fantasy.

This morning I walked into work early.  Grabbed coffee, opened up the great interwebs and dived into a half a dozen different windows.  Load Orca card.  Order more posters.  Follow up with event coordinator.  Find contact info for press release.  Check DJC for RFQs.  Research Architecture in Horror Fiction for my work presentation tomorrow.  Contact property manager for work.  Has anyone asked Local 360 if they'd post up regarding the Special Hope Benefit, since they are catering?  Does OMG still want to donate to the auction? 

No joke - my mind is only running along 3 or 4 tracks right now - they are just very fast trains. 

The DeVotchka Pandora station is helping keep me calm, and the coffee keeping me fueled. 

I'm really in heaven.  These are the things I love.  Researching and writing about the intersections between architecture and literature - how the corruption of basic tenants of architecture can be used to create a sense of terror, casting shadows that become the primary character of a story and stir emotion in a reader decades after publication.  Analysis and writing - I miss this!!

Coordinating communications for a benefit I'm excited about, an organization I believe in, and an artist I support - I'm alive. 

Responding to all the other calls, emails, breaking down printers, running low toners, invoice questions and calendar scheduling with friends and the Beau.... they are pleasant kindle on a cold rainy day like today.  I like a clean desk with one project sitting on it and two black pens - but I like a dozen projects firing along in my mind and the freedom to switch from one to the other as creativity and innovation strikes.  This is where I'm happy in work.  And this morning, I have it all.  Surprisingly, we are only 3 hours deep.

And on top of all this, there are new hopes and goals I'm itching to stretch my fingers out to when a few of these current trains pull into station.

December is going to be like Christmas for lit nerds!  (oh wait.)

(see what I did there?)


Seriously though, The Great Gatsby and Les Miserables will be hitting theatres - two fantastic novels, discovering two of my favorite time periods!!

Gatsby has an incredible cast, one of my favorite directors, and the sound track sounds awesome if I can judge by this one song.  My first impression is Million Dollar Hotel + The Dark Knight + Classic Literature.  And I must say, I like it.



Then, it's the musical film version of Les Mis that all of our hopes are riding on.  Do us proud.  Please.

Oh December, how we are waiting for you in all our literary frenzies.  I think I'll go listen to Flapper Girl now.  I feel like diamonds and gin, red wine and cannons. (No sense? Kind of. But there's a few of you that are saying, That's exactly right. That's exactly how I feel too.  And to you, I raise my ebenezer.)

8/25

Often times I don't bother with writing reviews of the books I've finished and counted up here.  But I've been looking forward to commenting on my current read for several weeks now.  Esther first told me about A Moveable Feast at least a year ago.  I'd read two other collections of Hemingway's short stories and while I certainly learned a great deal from his style and his voice, I wasn't incredibly eager to dig in to more.  However, her experience with A Moveable Feast sounded so different from Men Without Women and In Our Time, I thought I'd give it a try. 

The formatting is something between a collection of short stories and a chapter in an autobiography, tracing Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley through the streets of Paris to the flats of Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot, and the Fitzgeralds.  Peeking in to the secret artistic community of writers and artists in the 1920s in Paris captured me in every way, and Hemingway's typically heartbreaking story telling and haunting descriptions left me aching for all that was built and eventually all that would be lost.  Friendship, community, hard work and love amidst the City of Lights - he praised what was faithful and beautiful and honest over what was rich and easy and cleaned up pretty.  And he did it in a way that no one but Hemingway could.  I couldn't be more grateful that Esther slipped this treasure into my hands.  And I don't think I could walk away from any other book as ready to feast on and starve for true art and community. 

"Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast." 

-W. Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet, 2.3 

. 

 ..."A picture's worth a thousand words; and a word is worth a thousand pictures."
I want to spend my life exploring the trail of pictures the words leave behind...
-Samara Surface

I found a box on my desk when I got home late Saturday night. I knew what it was and decided to save it for the next day. I have gone online to buy this book (and cyber stalk my favorite UCLA professor) several times. Finally, the week before taking off on vacation, I took the leap. I've read most of this journal, several of the articles (those written by Maniquis) multiple times over. This was in fact the primary source for my senior thesis. Robert Maniquis was the only scholar/ professor I could find applying the imagery of terror and violence to the cultural crisis of the French Revolution. My thesis dealt with the imagery of childbirth and it's power in times of cultural crisis. In France and England, the Romantics, affected by the Revolution, created birth imagery of terror with hinted abortions, horror, and sons murdered by their fathers. In the Apartheid in South Africa, Serote paralleled birth imagery with the war in the skies, heavens, blood, and graves. And in the end, it meant hope. Maybe none of this makes any sense, I'm doing my best to describe a 20 page essay in a few sentences. I bought the book because I know that regardless of grad school or marriage or the state I end up in, I'll be writing something more on this. It was that moment where I finally realized in school "This is why I'm here." Don't get me wrong, I've always known why I was at college, why I was in the Literature program, why I was training. And that was the first moment when the answer to those questions was actually touching the tip of my toes and my fingers tapping the keys made a bigger sound in my heart than in anyone's ears. I went to school because of a book I'm going to write, though I don't know exactly what it will say - but it surrounds the power of birth and birth imagery in literature during times of cultural crisis - such as now. When the Revolutionaries lost hope, they felt aborted by their fathers and they created pictures where they lost their children too. It was tied to terror, childbirth and generations was wrapped up in its very cultural core of disappointment and political suffering. When the South-African's began to fight back for their rights, their poets penned hope into the hearts of the people, hope through birth as a sort of war, as victory.

I didn't mean to pour all that out at you, I only meant to tell you all I'm excited to finally own this book, the only one I've read that touches on a specific passion in my heart. One I don't know how or where it will work itself out, so somehow owning this book feels like holding onto that spot where my toes touch calling.

Les Miserables - 25th Anniversary
August 25, 2011 matinee

I've seen the Musical four times now.  That is nothing compared to the 14 (?) times my parents have attended it, Kim close behind and Kristin just behind that.  Reaching the age that dad would take you to see Les Mis was a big benchmark in our family.  I remember singing along to Castle in the Clouds and Little People before we moved to the new house.  I had to be 3 or 4.  I loved them both.  I thought they were my songs.  I didn't even know what they were from until a few years later when it clicked.  Junior high and for the first time, I wouldn't be left at the neighbors while the family dressed up and headed to the show.  I remember the months leading up to it.  I'd fallen in love with Eponine, her deep rough voice that broke your heart in two, just as my sisters had fallen years before.  We'd lie in the living room and listen to the album through.  I've always been terrified since of becoming Eponine.

We'd read through the book in High School, and I'd see the performance several more times over the years.  But it wasn't until the opening scene yesterday that I realized just how much this story has impacted my family.  I see my dad in many ways in Jean Val Jean, I don't even know how to connect it or describe it, but I loved the man on stage yesterday all the more for it.  I cried as he said his goodbyes, wanted to beg him not to go.  I wondered if my love (near obsession) with the French Revolution, the British Radical Culture it affected, and the work of the Romantics that were sparked out of it is perhaps the fruit from this seed that grew up with me since my toddler years.  Is this why I love it?  Kristin said two days ago "You love Red & Black too, it gets you all worked up." And it's true.  When the song changes to Will you join in our crusade, who will be strong and stand with us. Somewhere beyond the barricades is there a life you long to see?  I tear up, and can't even explain what exactly, but something deep inside of me is wrenched, something that comes alive at the thought of the student-soldier, of ideals and battles, of passion and dreams and blood. Of things being real, and hope rising from hopelessness and barricades. 

And as I wondered all that, I began to laugh too (not out loud), I'd never even considered the political commentary of the film on the justice system and it's not only unconcern, but blatant refusal of change and return to society and hope.  I thought of Kristin.  That has to be part of why she loves this story, this Musical.  Or perhaps this Musical is part of why she is so passionate about justice, about the Eponine being heard, about the Jean Val Jeans being given a chance and the system being fought. 

I thought of how my dad hates to see people judged.  I thought of how he loves Fontine's song, and if he found that woman on the street, dying and wronged, and ashamed, he'd probably have done the exact same thing.  I thought of how my dad has loved and encouraged many girls who probably felt like their life resembled Fontines in that moment, in one sense or another.

Amazing how art can shape us, transform us, define our passions and awaken us to our callings. Amazing how the same Musical can bring about so many different responses, even in one family. 

As I said, this performance was different from previous, or rather, more different.  The revolving stage was gone (which I was kind of partial to, if for nothing else than Turning.), and pretty much they just brought new tricks and gadgets, a huge screen as the backdrop which was pretty cool, a new device for Javert's suicide, new moving stages for balconies/ tunnels/ houses/buildings.  It was all quite cool. 

One Day More was no longer song as the gate rotated, but instead the lovers chimed from opposite balconies, Val Jean and Eponine below... the gate still central but less obstructive.  Empty Chairs at Empty Tables was not in the bar, but instead an empty stage.  The candles were a new touch, and the synchronized movements were overwhelming in all the best ways to me.  I liked this change, even while I missed the old.  (My mom wanted the old back.)  Turning, I thought I'd miss the stage for (and did), but the simple action of the little girl doing a "Ring Around the Rosie" with the woman, in so turning, and also drawing on the true historical beginnings of the children's game....hit me in the gut like a punch.  The emotions of this performance were heightened not only by a greater emphasis on the acting (which my dad told me before the performance- they saw it twice this time around), but also by these very specific and bold changes to the choreography and set.  In some ways, they stripped it down.  In others, they hyped it up by technology.  I enjoyed it, but part of me worries that they made it more like all the other Broadway shows, and perhaps stripped away a bit of the "old" which everyone's been afraid to touch... but perhaps that fear was with good reason.  I've grown up thinking there are musicals, and then there is Les Mis. 

As for the individual performances themselves, this was the best TenerdeausFontine was my favorite.  I wished she'd been in every song, her voice was incredible, her acting was excellent! When she returned to the stage for the final song, I wanted to cheer immediately!  Eponine's voice was excellent, but her acting seeemed lacking.  It could also be that I just didn't enjoy how she chose to represent Eponine.  She only seemed angry, and perhaps desiring, but she didn't grab at all the emotion and empathy that I was ready to give to my favorite character.  Her face never showed the disappointment, frustration, heart-breaking I've always felt in her songs. And Cosette.  Let's be honest, she sort of gets the bum vocal part in the Musical.  No one says "Oh, Cossette's part is my favorite!" No, she's near operatic.  And while she did manage to salvage it, she sounded so pitchy in A Heart Full of Love that I felt uncomfortable.  She acted well enough, but I was so disappointed by her singing I almost didn't care.  A Heart Full of Love, and One Day More are some of my favorites, and I just couldn't enjoy them this time.  Hear's Marius pulling his part, but Cosette is jumping everywhere and I'm pretty sure she's not on the note she should be, and if she is, she's holding on to it with one hand and dangling, and Eponine is standing outside the gate reminding herself "He was never mine to keep" and echoing "standing here" but she looks more angry than devastated and I just can't connect to the scene the way I want to!

I shouldn't end with a negative... so, remember, I am dramatising it all myself.  The performance was incredible, and by the end Cosette had pulled it together I felt and Eponine sounded so lovely I'd forgiven her.  I'd enjoyed seeing this nee depiction of my favorite Musical, I loved the well-thought-out additions that heightened the themes.  There was a new character this time through, a man who appeared to be like a father to Gavroche, and when Gavroche was shot, you see this man's face, staring right at you center stage and you FEEL the loss amidst a life of numbness and you choke on a cry in your throat.   This cast was overall remarkable, some of my favorite performances will remain from this run I have no doubt.

(I didn't take any photos, except the one above.  You know how irked I am.)

I was having dinner with a dear wonderful friend (so amazed I can call you my friend, Linda) the other night. And it suddenly struck me anew why I love literature. There are those seasons in our lives where we can't really say what we are feeling. We can't put our finger on it for ourselves, let alone communicate it in a way as to bring another into the midst of it with us, no matter how much we might be longing for a friend to know and help share that burden or heartache. We don't know how to fix it or change it. In these times, it is rare that the right 'teaching' book can be found to help us navigate the season. It can happen, but I feel in these particular (and thankfully rare) seasons, it doesn't happen much. No. It is something more real and more deep in our being than any teaching can quite reach. We need a picture. We need a story, so well crafted in another world that it somehow reaches into the depths of our spirit and heart, and it tells us where we are. I'm amazed by the power of fiction and fantasy. In those seasons, we need the right story to be told us. And somehow, in the midst of being lost in this other world, we learn the lessons and hear just the right words we needed, but could have never known we needed. Those of you who have had this happen, you understand. Those of you who have not yet, I'm not sure I could find any persuasive and eloquent way to open this experience up to you. But I hope to one day write a book that meets you in just one of those seasons, and changes your world. For me right now, it is Alice in Wonderland. Who would have thought that this book of nonsense would speak so much wisdom to my heart? I sat alone in Starbucks, laughing and giggling, over the humor, over the brilliance, over the nonsense, over how much it was speaking to me. She is teaching me lessons I could have never learned from Francis Chan or Watchman Nee. She is teaching them to my heart.

Meghan posted one of her favorites of Shakespeare's sonnets (115- definitely one of the best!), and so I thought perhaps I would respond here by posting one of mine. This has always been one of my favorites, and I'm not even sure why. I remember the first time I read it. It was Father's Day actually, I believe I was in 5th grade, and we were wasting some time at Barnes & Noble in Lynnwood while waiting for our reservations. I remember I found a shakespeare sonnet book, sat down on the floor and started reading. I think I memorized half of this sonnet before getting back up. I love the final two lines.

Sonnet 5
Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel:
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there;
Sap check'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness every where:
Then, were not summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distill'd though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Several years later, Natalie (then, Johnson) moved in with us as an MC student, and she quickly encouraged my love for Shakespeare. That Christmas, she bought me Shakespeare's Sonnets... the same copy she had of them (which I had borrowed many times already).



Though Kristin often jokes about the influence of Natalie on me, I certainly am so grateful for the young woman who moved in while my older sister (and best friend) was suddenly gone (also in MCs), and gently encouraged my love and passion for literature. She would finish her homework early, to sit and read poetry with me and drink tea. She took me to play tennis. She listened to my middle-school-girl woes of mean boys and teasing. Years later, she sat with me at Starbucks on the Ave, passing me her Italian books, and some of the best advice I received about college. She's a dedicated, disciplined, sweet and incredibly intelligent woman. And it's with a smile that I realize that this young woman who I quickly loved and admired, graduated from the University of Washington, an English Lit major, with Italian as her foreign language, and went on to work in Marketing. See any funny resemblence?

I promise, I haven't been trying to follow in her footsteps, but I love that the Lord placed her in my home for a year, so she could water my literary heart with books, chats, and chai.

It's always a wonder when we look back and see the little occurances and the amazing people that helped guide us to where we are called to be, and who we are today.

*interestingly enough, all three of the ladies in the photo above have had quite an impact on my literary heart. :) And my heart in general.

I've never cared for France.

All I knew was they were push-overs politically, stuck up socially, too skinny physically (not to mention too hairy), too nasaly vocally, and they owned ugly dogs.

That may be a bit harsher version, but as I said, I've never cared for France. Until this year. Studying the beautiful architecture France has to boast of, I began to soften up a bit. And today, I think I actually just felt compassion. I didn't quite realize you could feel compassion for an entire country... but I think I've just experienced it. I love literature (you should all know this by now- unless you've never met me, and this is your first time stumbling across my blog). I especially love Les Miserables and A Tale of Two Cities. I also love the work of the French and English Romantics. (Byron and Keats are my two favorites.) For this reason, I've decided to expand my senior thesis to include an interrogation of the literature produced during this period as a response to the French Revolution. As I'm sitting here reading about France and considering the violence of the revolution, and then the occupation of the Nazis as well as their long history.... I suddenly felt compassion and grace for them as a country. Isn't it funny to realize that just as the wounds in a person's life affect their decisions, countenance and personality, so too the wounds in a country's history will affect theirs? France has been through a great deal of violence, and yes, politically I disagree with them, but suddenly I can see so much more. Pieces are beginning to come together, I can see (in a small measure) how their revolutions and tyrannies and 'Terrors' have provoked their art and literature, and therefore the ideas that have shaped them. I can see how their decisions today come from these painful times, and the attempts of their philosophers to make sense of it all, soothe the wounds, and break the bondage.

Suddenly, I care for France. I would like to go, not just for the beautiful structures that stand there, but for the history and emotions and passions that structure France.

Reason #1 I am sad to be graduating:

When will I ever again be in a room with 15 other people, who all laugh at a joke about TS Eliot's The Wasteland's overuse of footnotes.

English major jokes... I will miss spending time with other Lit nerds. The jokes I can never quite explain to my friends... :(

(Chris next to me, says, "Stop calling us NERDS- I barely even read books"... but that comment was followed by a discussion on the different spellings of "Bear/bare" I WIN. My blog, I win. ;)

Book Recommendation:

Perpetua

By Amy Rachel Peterson

I'm only about 100 pages in (and have book club tonight- whoops), but this book is ministering so deeply to me. Cami selected it for our book club and I couldn't be more grateful. Though fictionally fashioned, the book is a rendering of Via Perpetua's life based on her journals. I want to get my hands on her journals so badly now! At the age of twenty-two she was martyred in Carthage, along with 5 other Christians. I'm seeing Jesus anew in so many beautiful ways. I'm beginning to even thirst a little for persecution. The little things that I call suffering seem so petty, but at the same time, this book manages to convince you that it's not.

He must increase, but I must decrease. What a joy I have to be both Your bride and Your friend, who rejoices when You find the bride. Help me rejoice in all You have joy in, even if to me it is a painful act of suffering, of decreasing. If it brings You joy, let it bring me joy, I whispered in my heart. (Perpetua, 112)

Sometimes, she echoes the words in my own heart, for just two weeks ago I began repeating in my heart, "What brings You glory brings me joy." And more of the time, it reveals the huge lack in me. Last week at Bible Study we read the Beatitudes. I'm so grateful for the way of the Lord- for WHO He is. He always supplies a way. In the Beatitudes, He lists all these blessings of these astounding character qualities, that just get better and better. But which of those qualities can I really, undoubtably claim that I own? It's then that I can claim the first of them at least: I am poor in Spirit. And from there, He works in us to add the others... always a process, but thankfully He is faithful to complete the work He's begun. This is my peace (though I let myself lose it far too commonly).

(Here's a link to a biography of Saint Perpetua)