Tomorrow, when the war begins

Tomorrow is February 11th.  That date may not mean much to us here, in the West, but it means a great deal to a whole hell of a lot of people on the other side of the world.  It was on that date in 1979 that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared the victory of his revolutionary Islamic movement in Iran.  It marked the foundation of an Islamic theocratic republic – in the overthrow of an established monarchy – and the ushering in of a regime that is even now the vexation of the civilized world.

The date has traditionally been one of great celebration and defiance in Iran, seeing the population (in a carefully controlled manner) pour into the streets to give jubilant voice to the spirit of a revolution that took place before many of them were born and which, even now, keeps them in a state of awkward poverty – both financial and intellectual – the needlessly hated children of an international community determined to move beyond the sort of thing their rulers so fiercely represent.  It is a monstrous place, and a monstrous reign, both fully worthy of the otherwise unfortunate “axis of evil” epithet bestowed upon that nation during the Bush administration.  It is a state that murders the victims of crimes rather than the perpetrators.  It is a state that does not care what its constituent people actually want.

There are two undercurrents of thought that bear particular concern on this particular anniversary, though.  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the dubious president of Iran, and the current Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s spiritual (and practical) ruler, have declared that, on the glorious 11th, a sort of mighty blow will be delivered in the form of some manner of act or revelation that will stun the arrogant West.  It is not very clear as to what this will actually be, but their country’s slowly-ramping-up nuclear program and the recent (and successful) testing of a long-range ballistic missile might provide a clue.  Will tomorrow see a nuclear test?  Will the sands of Iran’s vasty deserts be fused to glass by a new release of the fires of Hell?  Or will it be something more expressive and irrevocable even than that?  We don’t know.  Maybe it will be nothing.  Likely it will be something.

On the other hand, however, stand the people of Iran.  They stand against their rulers, and against the corruption of their supposed republic, and against the aggressive stupidity of their supposed representatives.  They are every bit as brilliant and determined and forthright as the men who speak for them on the world stage are idiotic and complacent and secretive.  They are young, and passionate, and – if they could only receive the help they deserve – strong enough to wreak mighty havoc on the brittle bones that stand around them.

When Adhmadinejad was “re-elected” late last year, the people of Iran showed the ferocity of their opposition in a widespread popular uprising that was, regrettably, quelled.  It was quelled because the entrenched powers are strong, and because the uprisers do not wish to stoop to their brutally violent level, and because the attention span of a potentially-helpful West is short.  They marched in the streets in rage and beauty, and they failed.  They failed, and were silenced, and were sent home.  Some of them were murdered for their troubles.

Starting tomorrow, it is likely that they’ll take up the quarrel one more time.  Enormous protests are scheduled, in defiance of the government’s orders, and it is possible that even as this stunning blow of the ruling classes is struck against the West, in whatever manner, a similar blow, from the aggregate of outraged fists, will be struck against the incomparable swine who so obstinately make it all necessary.

Tomorrow, the streets of Tehran, and Mashhad, and Ahvaz, and Isfahan, and countless other cities will be choked with people.  If we are lucky, they will be people in open revolt, determined to drive out the absurd monsters that are so wicked to their subjects and so irksome to the world.  If we are not, they will be people in complacent celebration of the regime that beggars them; the regime that, through its ostentation and idiocy and “stunning blows,” will soon enough send many of them to an early grave.

For western bombs, when they fall, will be stupidly indiscriminate; if we know anything, we know that.

Superman Returns

After a modest hiatus, comic master and friend-of-this-blog Brian Visaggio of Saint Superman has finally taken the wheel once more.  Be sure to check him out for the fulfillment of all your popish sci-fi needs.

TRIUMPH

National holiday declared as Science dredges up another of the world’s long-concealed secrets:

Researchers from the Department of Food Science & Technology at the University of California, have found beer is a rich source of silicon and may help prevent osteoporosis, as dietary silicon is a key ingredient for increasing bone mineral density.

These were the findings after researchers tested 100 commercial beers for silicon content and categorized the data according to beer style and source.

Excellent!  But wait:

[Researcher Charles] Bamforth told reporters that the results shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The study examined the beers but it did not look at bone mineral density or analyze patients’ data.

Well, alright :/

It would be fair to say that I’m well and truly tired of this kind of absurd reportage.  When the source cited in the article itself directly refutes the headline, it’s likely that the author’s approach is gravely flawed and perhaps without value.

The Cocktail Party

The Cocktail Party
T.S. Eliot
Faber; 1969 (1949).
91 p. First reading.

I don’t normally read much Eliot, or many plays, so this has been something of a departure for me on all fronts.  Not an unpleasant one, in the end, but a departure all the same.

It’s fascinating to me that something this short, and written in plain English, could nevertheless carry with it a threatening undercurrent of helplessness, chaos and confusion the likes of which Eliot could only previously express through recourse to multiple languages and madness incarnate in words.  That it has a theoretically Christian message is just icing on the bewildering cake.

The Cocktail Party starts out in a manner pretty much indistinguishable from the Edwardian parlour/manner dramas that is most assuredly is not.  A gang of slightly irritating upper-class folk sip cocktails at the foretold party and banter back and forth about relational problems and their sense of ennui.  My attention began to drift.  This is the kind of thing that Saki has completely ruined for me; I’ll never be able to take it seriously again after seeing how thoroughly he eviscerates it in every word he writes.  It’s a pity that sniper got him at Beaumont-Hamel, but the world is the world, and here we are in it.

Fortunately for all of us, The Cocktail Party takes a welcome turn with the introduction of the Unidentified Guest.  This mysterious stranger seems to know more than he lets on, and nobody can remember inviting him.  What’s more, when the time comes for one of the play’s protagonists (Edward Chamberlayne) to unburden himself of the real reason for his wife (Lavinia)’s absence (that is, she has left him), the Unidentified Guest delivers some penetrating and terrifying insights that leave Edward uncertain about his agency in his own life, let alone in that of others.

There are other characters, to be sure, and all play important roles as the play treads wearily towards its completely unexpected conclusion, but only Celia Coplestone, Edward’s one-time mistress, demands much in the way of elaboration here.  Her dalliance with Edward occurs even as she has become an object of fascination for their young and gormless friend, Peter Quilpe, and the degree to which everyone is leading everyone else on is fairly integral to the problems that they must all face in the end.  Only Celia comes to understand the true nature of those problems, though.  Alone of all the people who eventually approach the Unidentified Guest (later actually identified as Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, a noted doctor) for help, Celia understands that what motivates her desire for a change is a sense of sin.  She has transgressed against something she cannot properly articulate – her conventional agnostic upbringing has left her without the language to describe it – and the pain of it has grown unbearable even as it has become less and less explicable.

The help that Harcourt-Reilly and his associates finally gives to her and to the others is of a sort not lightly to be revealed, so I’ll leave it alone for the time being.  By the time the play concludes, anyway, several characters have made irrevocable choices, for good or ill, and for at least one of them the consequences are both dire and glorious.

It’s a fundamentally weird play, and I don’t really know what more to say about it that isn’t either a spoiler or hopelessly insufficient.  There’s a lot in here that can be said to be dialogue with Sartre, especially on the nature of Hell and its relation to other people, but it might be even more fruitful to keep Chesterton and Lewis in mind while reading/watching it.  In Harcourt-Reilly we find yet another face of Sunday, from The Man Who Was Thursday, or even of Innocent Smith in Manalive.  I don’t know how much Eliot might have had Chesterton’s works in mind when writing The Cocktail Party – if he was thinking about them or their governing ideas at all – but it would be difficult to ignore the possibility.

The influence of Lewis is both less and more likely.  It is less, that is, because Eliot didn’t have much to say about him, though they were contemporaries (and eventually met late in life, if I remember correctly – certainly after The Cocktail Party was written), and I’ve seen no evidence that he read any of Lewis’ works focusing on Christian ethics and philosophy.  I’d be shocked if he hadn’t read them, of course, given his interests, but I’ve never seen him mention them in his essays.  I’ll check the letters later.  Still, it’s somewhat more likely, too, because Eliot’s famous dissatisfaction with Chesterton in several venues leaves the gargantuan Catholic a somewhat implausible influence in comparison to Lewis’ happily Anglican Oxford don.  What’s more, there are many elements of The Cocktail Party that seem to be explicit recapitulations of ideas found in Lewis’ The Great Divorce, published only three years before Eliot’s play.  Indeed, The Cocktail Party is almost a dramatisation of the earlier work, in parts.  Celia laments the Hell she has been in – a Hell of her own devising, in which her selfishness and and shortsightedness have led to that crushing awareness of sin.  But Harcourt-Reilly reassures her; “it isn’t Hell until you become incapable of anything else.”  If he is not exactly one of Lewis’ Shining People, he at least faintly glows.

As a departure from what people tend to think of T.S. Eliot (that is, “long, difficult, despairing”), The Cocktail Party is mostly a success.  There’s nothing in it that is strictly unintelligible, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to understand.  It’s certainly worth your time, if you’ve some time to kill, but your life will be just fine without it, too.

A decent year

Steven Greydanus of Decent Films has posted his “year in review” for 2009, and he draws attention to a number of films passed over by the Academy but well worth seeing nevertheless.  Katyn and Bright Star, in particular, both demand attention.

Still, there are some gripes.  I think putting Crazy Heart in the top ten is a bit unwarranted, and the complete absence of Up in the Air and The Hurt Locker – unquestionably two of the year’s best (the latter is even tied with Avatar for Oscar nominations) – is keenly felt.  And I mean a complete absence; they’re not even listed as also-rans or unremarkable films or anything.

In any event, it’s his list, and if he just didn’t see them he can’t very well be expected to include them.  What’s there is good.

A tragedy unfolds

Those who live in Canada will not be surprised by the following.  As for those who don’t… well, just take a look.  Yes, we do have this kind of activist, and yes, this is their kind of rhetoric.

Basically, in the province of Quebec there are laws about how much English (not much) is allowed to be displayed in public, especially when it comes to signs for businesses and the like.  These laws have sometimes, in the past, been ruthlessly enforced.  Sometimes people don’t care.  Sometimes they do.  There’s no certainty.

Jean-Paul Perreault cares.  My word, does he ever.

There’s a popular chain of mattress stores in Canada called Sleep Country.  They have thirty-seven branches in Quebec; thirty-five of them operate under the French rejiggering, “Dormez-vous.”  However, there are two in Gatineau (just across the river from Ottawa, the country’s capital, located in Ontario) that operate under the usual English name.  Nobody has really cared about this very much.  People know what the stores are, and their provenance, and are probably just happy to get some good, reasonably-priced bedding.

Not so for Jean-Paul Perreault, though.  As the president of the French language advocacy group l’Impératif français, he is deeply concerned about the effect that this linguistic malfeasance is having upon the people he represents.

“In Gatineau and Hull, customers who want to buy a mattress are not welcomed by the banner Dormez-vous, but by the name Sleep Country, which has nothing to do with Quebec,” Perreault said.

Heaven forbid that a nationally-prominent chain that originated outside of the province – a chain of mattress stores, in fact – should “have nothing to do with Quebec.”

He goes on:

“More respected customers in Quebec City and Montreal are well-served by the same retailer, which has the French sign Dormez-vous and welcomes its clients on the French website www. dormezvous.com.”

“More respected customers” is an odd choice of phrase.  One might even detect some condescension on his part, n’est-ce pas?

But Perreault, personally, has no stake in this.  Far from it.  What matters is the effect this is having on the inhabitants of Gatineau and Hull.  And so:

Perreault said the company’s website promises its customers a good night’s sleep, but he says on a “mattress hostile to French from Sleep Country they will have nightmares and insomnia.”

Good grief.

Crazy Heart (2009)

This review will probably be a bit shorter than usual.  While there is much in Crazy Heart that is laudable, and even interesting (and in at least one case excellent), it is not a film about which I care enough in any given direction to write about it at length.  Nevertheless, I had mentioned that it was on my “to-do” list, so here we go.

In many senses a recapitulation of last year’s The Wrestler but with country music rather than wrestling, Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart gives us a terrific performance from Jeff Bridges, competent performances from everyone else, a fine story, some fine music, and a raft of other fine features all likely to see the viewer leave the theatre saying “it was fine.”  7/10

Finally

After what seems like years of being “forthcoming,” the long-awaited Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, edited by Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward (the latter of Planet Narnia fame), finally has a cover and a release date.  The cover is below; the release date is September.

The table of contents, for those interested in just what we’ll be getting, here:

1. Introduction – Robert MacSwain

Part I. Scholar:

2. Literary critic – John V. Fleming
3. Literary theorist – Stephen Logan
4. Intellectual historian – Dennis Danielson
5. Classicist – Mark Edwards

Part II. Thinker:
6. On naturalism – Charles Taliaferro
7. On theology – Paul S. Fiddes
8. On Scripture – Kevin J. Vanhoozer
9. On moral knowledge – Gilbert Meilaender
10. On discernment – J. P. Cassidy
11. On love – Caroline J. Simon
12. On gender – Ann Loades
13. On power – Judith Tonning
14. On violence – Stanley Hauerwas
15. On suffering – Michael Ward

Part III. Writer:
16. The Pilgrim’s Regress and Surprised by Joy – David Jasper
17. The Ransom Trilogy – T. A. Shippey
18. The Great Divorce – Jerry L. Walls
19. The Chronicles of Narnia – Alan Jacobs
20. Till We Have Faces – Peter J. Schakel
21. Poet – Malcolm Guite

I don’t want to wait, but I guess I’ll have to.

Oscar noms released

You can check out the full list here.

Some surprising and gratifying stuff, this year, even if it seems like pandering in some cases.  The increasing of the number of “best picture” nominees to ten, rather than the traditional five, ensures that a lot of popular, fan-favourite films will be nominated for the award, but – unless there’s been some change in how these things are decided – it doesn’t seem any more likely that Up or District 9 will win “best picture” than it ever was.  I guess actually being nominated is a step in the right direction, but still…

Now, I’m not going to make any firm predictions about this thing until I’ve seen a few more of the productions and performances that were nominated.  Crazy Heart and An Education are still on my to-do list, and I never bothered to see The Blind Side or Precious because neither of them interested me in the slightest.  Still, it’s a rare film that sees Sandra Bullock nominated for a “best actress” statue, so I’ll probably check it out even apart from the “best picture” nomination.

That said, based on what I currently know, here are preliminary ideations – not predictions to which you can hold me in the event that anything should be on the line – about how things will shake out.  I’ve left out some categories (mostly technical) because I really don’t know what to say about them just yet, or maybe ever.

Best Picture
Should win: Up or The Hurt Locker
Will win: Avatar

Best Actor
Should win:  Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) or George Clooney (Up in the Air); I haven’t seen Crazy Heart yet, so I don’t know about Jeff Bridges
Will win:  George Clooney

Best Actress
Should win: I really don’t know.  Need to see more.
Will win: There’s a lot of buzz about Sandra Bullock, but Meryl Streep is also on deck.

Best Supporting Actor
Should win: Christopher Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)
Will win: Same as above

Best Supporting Actress
Should win: Not entirely sure.
Will win: Likely Mo’Nique (Prescious), but it’s hard to say.

Best Director
Should win: Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) or Jason Reitman (Up in the Air)
Will win: Too close to call.  There’s a real narrative push to get James Cameron (Avatar) up there again, but I don’t think he deserves it.

Best Foreign Film
Should win: The White Ribbon
Will win: See above

Best Adapted Screenplay
Should win: District 9 or Up in the Air
Will win: Up in the Air

Best Original Screenplay
Should win: Inglourious Basterds
Will win: The Hurt Locker

Best Animated Feature Film
Should win: Up
Will win: Up (note, however, that this is one of the few years in which there are not only five nominees for “best animated feature,” but five really good ones.  It’s also worth noting that, inasmuch as I am completely in the bag for Up – bought and paid for, no chance of it being otherwise – in any other year I would be delighted to see either Coraline or The Fantastic Mr. Fox take home the prize.  Both were excellent.)

Best Original Score
Should win: The Fantastic Mr. Fox or Up
Will win: Avatar, unfortunately.

I’m not sure about “best original song” yet either, so we’ll see about that later.

Finally, the complete absence of Duncan Jones’ Moon from this list is a disgrace.  Just… terrible.

Okay, I lied

Instead of coming home and posting things on the internet I instead went out with friends for a good few hours of increasingly drunken karaoke-ing.  How do you like me now, gentlemen