novels, comets, movies
Some thirty-three years ago, the Voyager 1 spacecraft attempted to photograph all of the known planets in our solar system in a single "family portrait." But it couldn't see all of them. Some planets were too small, or too close to the Sun. The Earth, as is now well-known, turned up as a mere smudge … Continue reading Satan’s Pale Blue Dot
I recently read John Steinbeck's "East of Eden", a novel so rich, and long, that one blog post couldn't begin to uncover even 2% of it. But below I've quoted passages from the novel that I'll talk about both in themselves and in relation to certain texts: the Bible, principally Genesis and Job; Miguel de … Continue reading East of Eden
My blog is new, so I've never picked out favorite books for a year, but here we go. My ten faves for 2021, fiction and nonfiction, out of the 66 books I read: 1. New Testament -- the recent translation by David Bentley Hart 2. Notre Dame de Paris Translated by Alban Krailsheimer 3. Lonesome … Continue reading Favorite books of 2021 (and 2020)
I recently saw an adaptation of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" set in the modern day. It's a French-language film, a black comedy/satire known as Quasimodo d’El Paris. It's set in 1999 or thereabouts in an unnamed place, in a city called El Paris. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy8KIUCGSAA&list=PLGuUJt6IB8_ET1gFct-hHQO62Dkqx90Lm&index=23 It is strange and over-the-top, but funny and charming. It … Continue reading Quasimodo d’El Paris
In my blog posts I've compared similar passages across different novels, and I've got several passages from "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" that I want to link to other novels: "Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom Sawyer," "The Lord of the Rings," "Matilda," and one nonfiction book, Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot." Compare this declaration by King … Continue reading Esmeralda, cosmologist
Of the many conversations between Huck and Jim on their floating raft, one of my favorites is their discussion of how the stars came to be. Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a … Continue reading Huck and Jim, cosmologists
September 27, 2021 I’ve finished “Huckleberry Finn,” and I want to go straight to the controversial ending, in which Tom Sawyer reappears. It’s painful to read of all that Jim is subjected to, all because Don Quixote – excuse me, Tom Sawyer – feels the need to stage a dramatic rescue of the kind that … Continue reading Finishing Huckleberry Finn
September 23, 2021 I’ve taken years to read "The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn", because of its darn reputation. The back cover of my 1985 Penguin edition quotes Hemingway’s famous line, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”. Further down we read that “Of all the contenders for the title … Continue reading Starting Huckleberry Finn
It's a common trope in fiction: a final confrontation between the central hero of a story and its central villain. It's an important trope in Westerns, both on the page and screen -- Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" is just one famous example. And we see it in works of fiction that are too many to count: … Continue reading Hero, meet your villain; or, never mind
About 10 years ago I saw the television adaptation of Larry McMurtry's novel, "Streets of Laredo," his sequel to "Lonesome Dove." I had recently become a father, and that may have colored my judgment a bit, but I found "Laredo" to be, among many things, most memorably a story about parenthood. Motherhood, in this case. … Continue reading Streets of Laredo