My Very Own Exploitation Flick?

Or, The Ex-Exploitation Flick

It occurred to me that it would be boring to talk about every genre in terms of my own worldview, so I’ll probably tackle them as lenses to other worldviews instead. However, I think it might be worth considering what my exploitation flick would look like, rather than talking about what someone else’s exploitation flick would like, because there are a few problems I have with the genre which would impact or limit its use. Thinking about this will let me dig a bit more into the genre than I otherwise would dig and it will give me a reason to talk about finding genres which wouldn’t work for someone’s worldview.

I wrote extensively about exploitation flicks before and I don’t want to engage in that too much. In fact, I’m going to do something pretty bad and ignore the historical and political specificity of the assorted subgenres for this post and focus instead on four more top-level characteristics:

1. displaying an abundance of stereotypes or common place trope about the subject matter, such that collecting these references marks a specific identity;
2. a penchant for taboo violations, such as a sacrilege, body horror, cannibalism, etc.;
3. enthusiastic/gratuitous nudity and sex, with a pretty unapologetic heterosexual male perspective; and
4. enthusiastic/gratuitous violence, with a pretty unapologetic pleasure in gore and explosions over, for instance, choreography of fighting;

Recall, too, that these subgenres are mostly used to celebrate the identity in question, either by indulging in it (the first trait) or making it attractive (the third and fourth traits).

Let’s get started.

The connection between collection and identity has come up in a class I’m taking about social media. A few weeks ago we discussed how people constitute their identities in social media contexts. An example I brought up, in connection with Jorge Luis Borges’s “Afterword” to Museums (of course), is how sharing seemingly non-autobiographical content can constitute a kind of identity. Think of Tumblr, and particularly what are called reblog tumblrs, where a person does not produce their own content but rather shares things they like, sometimes with commentary appended or in the tags but sometimes without any addition at all. Though they technically only collect and co-locate content they found, and therefore do not reveal any information about their offline life, they still create a kind of identity—reputation? presence? role in the media ecology?—by creating that collection. Lots of people, or lots of the people I know, do this sort of thing on their Facebook or in their real-life conversations. I’m well-known for spouting out facts about animals and, more recently, for my Weekly Wonders tumblr. And I have other interests or obsessions which different people know to varying degrees.

So if a person were making an exploitation flick in order to celebrate or valourize Christian-H-ness, there are a number of things they might use to mark the film as having that identity, probably as plot points or as passing references, but maybe as background, too. I could make a list, but I think that you either know me well enough that I don’t need to or you don’t know me well enough to care. Either way, I won’t bore you with the list. Feel free to compile one in the comments if that’s something you’re into.

Still, I don’t know what to do with this observation that a collection can constitute a sort of identity (except in a library science context, in which I think there’s at least one obvious direction to go with that). If I think of anything, I’ll come back to it.

Violating taboos is one I have a harder time with. For the most part, I don’t like violating taboos; when I violate a taboo it’s usually because I don’t think of it as a taboo, and when I think of something as a taboo I usually don’t violate it. It is difficult for me to think about a taboo I’d want to violate that I’d also want to depict as a taboo violation. I’m all for violating gender norms, but I basically don’t want there to be gender norms, so I’m not at all interested in their violation as violation. I’m also all for having a variety of body types in film—and I don’t just mean different levels of body fat, but also people with amputations and people born with unusual anatomy, etc. We’ll get back to this topic, but I guess I wouldn’t want to see the movie treat this as breaking a taboo, either, even if that’s technically what is; I want the camera to normalize people with unusual anatomy, and that seems at odds with taboo violation.

The only thing I can think of is breaking museum exhibits or destroying art. I don’t generally like either, but I can imagine instances in which I’d support or at least be sympathetic to either. For instance, in some cultures, specific objects are made specifically to be broken or to be allowed to degrade over time, but then museums preserve the objects, violating those cultures’ values. So breaking into a museum and destroying the object might be 1) appropriate within the object’s original culture, even if a taboo violation in the museum’s culture, and 2) a political act against colonialism. I can think of other such examples. This would be a taboo violation for me, since I tend to treat art and artifacts as being set aside, almost sacred, but it would also be a taboo violation which possibly agrees with my explicit values, too, given highly specific circumstances.

Nudity is also a difficult one. There seem to be three “functions” for nudity in exploitation flicks, which don’t all align with one another: the film’s apparent reasons for using nudity aren’t necessarily the same as what the film actually achieves with its nudity, nor does it match what I, personally, get out of it. So, respectively, 1) for the apparent audience, the presentation of nudity in exploitation flicks seems intended to shock and excite/arouse, in order to celebrate the relevant identity; 2) the usually female nudity in exploitation flicks rhetorically erases women’s agency, turning women into bodies, plot points, trophies, etc.; 3) regarding my personal engagement, nudity in exploitation flicks mostly improves my understanding of human anatomy, though of course the lack of diversity in the bodies shown limits this function. On the grounds of #2 I am uncomfortable with #1 and, besides, the way these movies depict nudity isn’t all that appealing to me; #1, meanwhile, limits #3, because it means that only certain kinds of bodies are shown. This means that if a person were to make a Christian-H-ploitation flick, conventional exploitation flick nudity wouldn’t work. It would misrepresent, rather than confirm and celebrate, my norms and identity.

There might be two solutions: 1) use nudity, but use it differently, or 2) find something to substitute for nudity. These aren’t mutually exclusive. For instance, you could have nudity in order to showcase human anatomy and show how human bodies work, but not do so in an erotic way; choose a wide variety of body types and highlight how those bodies move and function rather than focusing on their naughty bits. (For instance: have three people in gym showers, facing the wall, with the camera on them from behind; one of them is elderly, one of them is heavyset, and one of them—who will be a main character?—is missing an arm.) And then you could also show people in ways intended to make them physically attractive that don’t rely on nudity. There’s a wide range of outfits that I consider to be very attractive beyond “naked” or “swimsuit,” like floor-length sleeveless dresses and scarves over sweaters over dark skirts and checked shirts tucked into blue jeans. By splitting functions 1 and 3, you can achieve both without committing function 2.

(If you’ve noticed that we’re quite a distance from exploitation flicks now, don’t worry; I’m going to talk about that.)

The last element I mentioned is violence. I’m quite non-violent in real life, and I feel almost like pacifism is a moral obligation, though I’m not quite there. At the same time, I have no objections to violence in films. I find a lot of fight sequences boring (Transformers is by far the worst offender but certainly not the only one), but I’m always down for a well-done fight scene. So, on the one hand, violence would certainly reflect my media choices, but on the other hand it might be a violation of my values.

There might be three possible fixes: first, we could ensure that the violence always has consequences and isn’t undertaken frivolously; second, there could be a lot of simulated violence, but little actual violence (for instance, water fights, martial arts training, play fighting, LARPing, or video games); and third, there could be violence against inanimate objects. I stole that last idea from Yojimbo, in which the most elaborate and impressive “fight scene” involves the protagonist trashing a room to make it look like a fight happened there when it didn’t. (Someone could trash a museum?)

But, when I combine all of these transformations, what I don’t get is an exploitation flick. There might be a lot of stylistic things we could do to give it similar visuals (see Grindhouse for some ideas), but its heart is elsewhere. Exploitation flicks rely on an unembarrassed celebration of things which we usually feel uncomfortable celebrating: sex, violence, blasphemy, etc. For the most part, I have no interest in doing that. So while I might still get a lot out of the question, “What would my exploitation flick look like?”, in terms of both understanding myself and understanding exploitation flicks better, I have to conclude that the simplest answer would be, “Well, it wouldn’t be an exploitation flick anymore.”

What about you? Does it sound like exploitation flicks would work for you? Are there other genres that wouldn’t?

13 of 2013

I've been clutched by the desire to write a year-in-review post and, being who I am, I'm listing media. (I'm departing from just books because I've started watching more tv shows and movies.)

TV Shows

1. Supernatural

I could have listed Game of Thrones or Andromeda, if I were simply choosing based on whether I had watched and enjoyed them; I think I've seen the first season of Game of Thrones three times now, and it remains one of the most compelling fantasy TV shows--or even fantasy movies--that I've seen so far, and while my enjoyment of Andromeda was more mixed, I thoroughly enjoyed both the overall idea of the show--a diplomatic version of the Pax Romana--and the characters Andromeda/Rommie and Trance Gemini (as characters and as thought experiments). But I've got to choose Supernatural. I might even mention Once Upon a Time, which was compelling at least in its repeated undercutting of the "happily ever after" idea and its surprising second season twist on Sleeping Beauty.

I have an appetite that only The X-Files has come close to really satisfying. I started to watch Supernatural in a half-hearted attempt to appease that appetite, and found that it was something worth watching all on its own. Those first few seasons were atmospheric in the particularly wonderful way of being their own atmosphere: the mix of classic rock, staticy radios, dive bars, abandoned buildings, and strangely filmic ghosts worked well together to make a feel which was distinct. That atmosphere faded out as the series went on, and Supernatural did become an inferior show, but I'd still say that other show it became was also worth watching, at least some of the time, because of its secondary characters. I, like everyone else, I think, got frustrated with the show's habit of killing off it's most interesting characters, sometimes even permanently, but I suppose the good thing about the Senecan death rate is that it prompted them to make more wonderful characters. The best summary I heard was this: "For a show that hated women, it had some of the best female characters."

Books (fiction)

2. The Golem and the Jinni

I've written about this already (link). But it really was wonderful--for me.

3. The Homeward Bounders, by Diana Wynne Jones

I've written about this one, too (link). It took me a while to work into it, and it struck me as bizarre that Diana Wynne Jones has two books with Middle Eastern (and fairly Orientalist) young girls who are the avatars/manifestations of divine beings and, therefore, have magical powers. (cf The Lives of Christopher Chant.) I liked both characters, though, and Homeward Bounders wound up being pretty excellent.

4. Paper Towns, by John Green

Paper Towns is one of those books for which I made bad decisions regarding bedtimes and schoolwork. I wouldn't say it's so fantastic as some people say it is, but its fairly transparent themes are ones that I think are important: our repeated failure to imagine other people as complexly as they deserve, the sorts of selfish motives which bungle our empathy, the foolishness of the idea that love can fix certain problems, the way some people's brokenness is close enough to hurt us but still too far from us to fix, the importance (or, anyway, omnipresence) of artistic creation. If you pick it up and start feeling uneasy about how much it looks like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl story, be assured that it doesn't end up that way. John Green has joked that the alternate title is The Patriarchal Lie of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Must Be Stabbed in the Heart and Killed.

5. The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy

When I'm at my least charitable, I want to use this book as a litmus test to see if someone is worth my time or not: if someone finds the book annoying, they have failed it. The novel is an extended observation of an insufferable man's death, in which the man becomes more insufferable as he is in pain. But, for me, anyway, my irritation about this man came out the other side as compassion for him, and that seems to be the whole exercise of the book; that, and a commentary of the social norms of dying. Even the mere observation that something so un-social as dying has its norms is an observation that makes the book worth reading, in my opinion.

This quotation stuck with me: The awful, terrible act of dying was, he could see, reduced to those around him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident (as if someone entered a drawing-room diffusing an unpleasant odour) and this was done by that very decorum which he had served all his life long. He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position.

6. The Collected Fictions of Jorge Louis Borges

I presume I have written enough about this (link).

Books (non-fiction)

7. Why Marx Was Right, by Terry Eagleton

I've written about this one already, too (link). I'll note, though, that the reason on this list was not that I enjoyed the book terribly much, nor that I couldn't put it down, nor that I found its main thesis compelling (the first two are untrue, and the third is true in a very limited and qualified sense). The reason it's on this list is because I've found its secondary (or even tertiary) ideas fruitful. The post I've written enumerates the most interesting and summarizable of those ideas.

8. The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, by Andrew Solomon

This encyclopedic treatment of depression is well worth reading for anyone who has depression; I don't think it especially pulled me out of depression, but it helped me understand depression, whatever that is worth. I suppose that other people who seek to understand depression would also find it helpful. This tome is simultaneously thorough and engaging, which may make up for its length.

One distressing thing about it: parts of the book led me to believe that there was something worth my time that I could wrest from my depression, something like a combination of compassion, empathy, and perspective, a sort of moral capability that was hard to develop otherwise. And then it told me that many people with depression fail to get this benefit, that they become morally cramped people, that the moral capability is something you still have to work for. That was disheartening; part of realizing that I'm not as good and moral as I'd like to be is wanting to be a better person, a generally good impulse, and it's distressing when that impulse is frustrated.

9. The Dynamic of Faith, by Paul Tillich

Since I just finished this book last week, it may be too soon to put it on the list. (That's why I haven't put Home on it, even though I found it tremendously good. Eve Tushnet's review of it is worth reading [link].) Further, I wasn't entirely convinced by Tillich's argument; too much of it derives from how he's chosen to define words, without any argument about why we should understand those words this way. But I think I can tentatively justify it's inclusion for a few reasons: in Tillich's "Protestant Principle," I found an articulation of why, precisely, I am compelled by Protestantism for which I myself hadn't been able to find the words; I found answers to particular questions about what faith is which might be useful in those arguments that sometimes happen about whether or not atheists have faith, what systems count as religions, etc.; and I was actually engaged enough by a book of theology that I overcame my cynicism about it. Maybe it'll be a gateway book; maybe from here I'll go on to somebody like Barth.

Movies

10. The Beasts of the Southern Wild

This is an absolutely wonderful movie. You'll encounter reviews of it saying that it romanticizes poverty; don't listen to them. The answer to that charge is either, "No, it really doesn't," or "Yes, and it ought to, and it must"; I'm not yet sure which it is. The film is about a little girl named Mudpuppy who lives in The Bathtub, the swamplands on the water side of a giant levee. For the first third of the film I was mainly in horror about what I perceived as the poor parenting Mudpuppy was receiving; by the second half of the film I found myself desperately in love with the screwed-up and misguided adults around her. (The transition time was maybe the most startling.) These are a people who can't trust the system trying to help them because that system has betrayed them so many times before, and as much as I understand the officials representing that system, I can't fault the people of the Bathtub for refusing that help, either.

But the movie is also about the mythology of childhood--not that childhood has become sort of a myth in North America, though that is also true, but the way certain children make myths out of their lives, are reliant on the strange and screwed-up and ignorant people around them for the resources they need to express their moral feelings. And in that sense, the on-going metaphors of the film--the flood, which is real, and the monstrous Aurochs, which Mudpuppy believes/imagines are stampeding towards them from the Antarctic--are very compelling.

A friend of mine said of the movie, "I learned so much about strength from an eight-year old."

11. The Fingersmith

I don't know what to say about this (or whether it ought to go here or go under TV Shows, since it's one of those two-part BBC mini-series). But I still feel like The Fingersmith edges out Catching Fire, which I almost put here, so I suppose I must account for it.

I can't really even say what it is I liked about it: I almost never go in for the whole "the character you thought was innocent was actually jaded/compromised in an unexpected way, and the character you thought was compromised was innocent in an unexpected way" schtick, maybe because the idea of innocence seems so weird to me, but here it worked surprisingly well. Perhaps it was the theme of reconciliation that caught my interest, and the compelling way that people hurt those they love for selfish and cowardly purposes. Who will you hurt in order to escape a life that is killing you morally? What harm will you do to save your soul--and, of course, can you save your soul by doing harm? I don't think The Fingersmith even begins to answer those questions, but at least it asks them.

It does becomes dangerously close to have the standard sorts of problems that depictions of same-sex relationships tend to have--the "love that can never be" theme, etc.--but I think that it does manage to dodge a few of them and it manages to hobble on despite the rest.

Short Fiction-ish

12. "A Collection of things I like in order", by Sunny Chan

I often think that including things written by people I know is cheating, but I'll do it anyway. I have almost nothing to say at all about this piece, except that it's fantastic and a must-read and all of that good stuff. If you've ever thought that there's nothing poetic about academia, then let this put that error to rest. (link)

Music

13. Postmodern Jukebox

What's this, you say? Christian is putting music on a list like this? I almost thought he had no ears, he's so indifferent to music. Not so!, I say. I just don't talk about it much because I haven't the vocabulary.

There's something super-catchy about Postmodern Jukebox's songs. They do covers of pop-songs in the musical styles of the past (or the gauche present): a jazz "Thrift Shop," a "Just (Tap) Dance," a swing (?) "Gentleman." And, since the lead singer is female, their bluegrass cover of the terribly misogynistic "Blurred Lines" comes off in her voice as inspired by a common misreading Adrienne Rich.

I may not listen to Postmodern Jukebox as much as I listen to some other groups, but I'm nonetheless excited about what they do.

"That was never a comedy for me."

I have very little introduction for this video. Dustin Hoffman talks about his role in Tootsie and how it changed his way of seeing women.

"Dustin Hoffman Breaks Down Crying Explaining Something That Every Woman Sadly Already Experienced"

This Exploitation Might Not Be the Kind You're Thinking of

National Identity and a Pageantry of Stereotypes

When discussing his motivation for making the movie Desperado (2010), director Robert Rodriguez said he was interested in giving people a similar experience to one he had watching John Woo's The Killer:

Rodriguez says that when he got to Hollywood to make Desperado he wasn't trying to make a Latin film but a film that was entertaining just like when he saw John Woo's, The Killer and he thought, "Damn I want to be Chinese." With Desperado he liked the idea of people watching it, who would say, "Wow I want to be Mexican." [sic] (source)

Recently I've been thinking about the relationship between identity/community and the sort of quilt of stereotypes that define exploitation flicks like Rodriguez's later Mexploitation flick Machete (2010), as Rodriguez's quote exemplifies.

(I'm drawing my knowledge of exploitation flicks from these sources: Wikipedia's page on the genre; TVTropes's page on the genre; my own viewings of Coffy (1973), Undercover Brother (2002) (which is really am affectionate parody of Blaxploitation rather than an example of it, despite the fact that Blaxploitation was self-parodying from the outset), Kill Bill I & II (2003, 2004), the Grindhouse movies Planet Terror and Deathproof (2007), and Machete; and conversations with friends on these and other exploitation flicks. Take my interpretations with the grain of salt designed for opinions based on insufficient evidence.)

Exploitation flicks are often described as containing some kind of exploitation (a gimmick to draw in audiences) rather than high-quality plot, acting, or cinematography, but since things like action sequences, romance, horror, and comedy count as exploitation, this definition reduces the term to something as vague and unhelpful as "genre movie." Sometimes definitions insist that two particular exploitations--graphic violence and nudity--must be present, which does narrow the definition considerably but still includes everything shown on HBO (Game of Thrones, I'm looking at you). To narrow the definition so that it actually approaches common use, I would say that an exploitation flick must 1. use at least one of graphic violence and nudity/explicit sex to draw audiences; 2. promise some other material that will play on specific conventions and/or stereotypes and violates a contemporary taboo, such as religion/sacrilege, racism/racial identity, Nazism, or cannibalism; and 3. be notably or seemingly low-budget (though not necessarily poor quality). Often the element in the second qualification places the film in a particular subgenre: among the subgenres, Blaxploitation (which draws heavily on stereotypes of and societal problems for black Americans), nunsploitation (which often shows nuns exhibiting sexual behaviour we don't expect of nuns), and kung-fu movies are perhaps the most well known.

Exploitation flicks tend to incorporate as many stereotypes and associations connected with their chosen theme as they possibly can. For instance, Machete, which I will use as my example throughout, is mainly about illegally-immigrated Mexican Americans ("We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us!") and it has redneck border patrols, cockroaches, taco stands, semi-mythical revolutionaries, high Catholicism, street fighting rings, chop-shops and pimped-out cars, corrupt Federales, bandannas, and people brandishing rickshaws, hoes, and shovels. Plot devices include Mexican immigrants using publicly subsidized health care, Mexican characters getting construction work, Mexican characters infiltrating houses by doing yard work ("You ever notice how you let a Mexican into your house just because he's got gardening tools?"), and American-raised Mexican-Americans struggling to balance American and Mexican identities. It is almost as though the script writers made a list of all possible stereotypes that Americans have of Mexicans, strung them into some kind of order, and wrote a plot around that. Most of these stereotypes are presented as blatantly as possible. Subtlety is not highly valued.

Given the genre's focus, exploitation flicks usually privilege a pageantry of associations over the linear logic of tight plot. There is something carnivalesque and anti-systematic about them (though, of course, it is not necessarily the case that they don't have some kind of deep order). Part of this might come from the fact that the exploitation flick's very name implies an emphasis on immediate experience--pleasure, outrage, shock, tittilation, excitement--over a more considered or analytic engagement. It assumes that an exuberant display of taboo topics will be pleasurable to its intended audience, perhaps in part because of the imagined or documented outrage of a putatively unintended audience of social censors (but of course this unintended audience is really intended if their outrage is a real source of pleasure). However, there's something more to this than just the pageantry and the pleasure of taboo. These films use the play of stereotype and the overabundance of flavour to explore, if not always articulate, a certain kind of collective identity. In my flagship example, Machete, this is especially obvious; Rodriguez has said that he wanted to make his national/ethnic identity attractive, so Machete must display something that is recognizably Mexican, even if Mexican-ness is not clearly articulated in the film. (Of course it couldn't be; it, like any national identity, is imaginary.)

This leaves me with five directions for further questioning.

1. There must be a considerable difference between an emic (insider's perspective) and an etic (outsider's perspective) exploitation flick. Were Machete an etic film rather than an emic film, we would be quite right to consider it an act of appropriation at best, derogatory patronizing at worst. As much as I'm tempted to subscribe to the death of the author, it is clear that an author-figure (or author function) of some kind is still hugely important to an interpretation of a text. If an exploitation flick plays with the identity of a community, how much changes depending on whose community it is?

2. Exploitation flicks play on a confusion of identity or affiliation as well as an exuberant expression of one. I am not Mexican; it is unclear what affiliation I am supposed to have with this film (or it would be if Rodriguez hadn't helpfully told us that we're supposed to want to be Mexican). In etic exploitation films, we're often encouraged not to affiliate with the thematic group; from what I can tell, hixploitation films do not want you to want to be a hick. But more often than not it's unclear: what does Coffy think of race in America? The associative rather than linear focus makes it hard to pin down.

3. Identity must be somehow related to association. I might want to say that my identity as an academic, for instance, is based on a set of values or a set of practices, but if you were to make a gradsploitation flick the salient features would be much less logically coherent ones: all-nighters, useless erudition, endless arguments, grading papers, probably some seductive co-eds (which have nothing to do with my life as a grad student but would be conventional in such a film), etc. Is this a good way of imagining identity, "good" meaning either "accurate" or "admirable"? What does this tell us about how to strengthen our communities? Or does it say something very bad about the communities in question? Is it just a clumsy genre? Of course we should remember that in the case of things like Blaxploitation and Mexploitation, which focus on minority communities, there's a jocular reclaiming element to the stereotyping. The pleasure may come from claiming certain identifiers that were thrust upon them. These films might be excellent examples of the post-modern sense of irony, in that they balance self-conscious parody with sincerity.

4. If an exploitation film is the vehicle for making Mexican identity desirable, this might suggest that violence and nudity make identities desirable, which I find disconcerting. There's a lot in our culture to suggest this is true, but it's worth thinking about why. There are some obvious answers: violence implies that the protagonists are strong and capable while sexuality implies that the protagonists are desired by those who are desirable and desire those who are desirable (and thus have ideal normative sexualities). I'm sure this has something to do with masculinity et al., which makes me suspicious. But I'm also suspicious of those who would ban exploitation flicks as a prudish reaction to violence and nudity/sex; I suspect that filmmakers can use both exploitations to make intelligent and valuable commentaries, even if they have not ordinarily done so.

5. This is probably a coincidence, but to what extent does the term exploitation, which as an industry term does not refer to oppressive practices, relate to exploitation in the sense of oppressive practices? Exploitation in the latter sense has played a role in the history of black Americans, Mexican Americans, etc.; it might be argued that the nudity in these films is an exploitation of women; the violence in these films might reflect the violence needed to enforce the exploitation of oppressed populations. It is probably a coincidence, but it does seem a terrible irony that the method by which filmmakers "exploit" an audience entails or reflects the presumed audience's own exploitative practices. (It also gives a certain linguistic legitimacy to the Marxploitation flick, a genre I made up.)

Other People's Epics

If you're here regarding Leah's Turing Test, you almost certainly want to take a look at this post about choosing the best genre for your beliefs as well as this one. It's the one she gets her question from. Don't worry: it's much shorter.

One of my recurrent pastimes is to imagine what another person's epic might look like.

As far as genres go, the epic is one of my favourites to think about. No individual epic counts among my favourite books (though, you know, Paradise Lost is pretty great). The reason I like thinking about them is that, at least in the English tradition, they have become a kind of formal game, thanks to the humanists of early modern England. (Note to readers: "early modern" is the new PC term for "Renaissance;" in England the early modern period spans the 1500s and 1600s, but it got started earlier in Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, etc.). Let's dive into a bit of history, shall we?

In early modern Europe, there was this group of artists and scholars called the humanists (who are different from the existing group of people who call themselves humanists). They believed in lots of things which were revolutionary for the time, like the idea that people's talents were formed through education rather than inheritance, and that the arts were crucial to intellectual and moral education. They were also pretty keen on the Classics, especially the newly-rediscovered Aristotle. (Or, at least, newly rediscovered in Europe; in Baghdad Aristotle was well-known.) Emulation (mimesis) and variation-on-a-theme/pattern were central to their pedagogy. Thus they emulated the ancient Greek and Roman writers.* One of the genres they embraced was the epic. In the Greco-Roman tradition, famous examples are Homer's Odyssey and Iliad and Ovid's Metamorphoses, though many humanists (most notably Edmund Spenser) patterned their careers on Virgil's. Dante was the first early modern poet to write a successful epic--The Divine Comedy--and Spenser introduced the form to the English language much later in The Faerie Queene.

The humanists liked classifying and defining poetic genres, and we have them to thank for a lot of the very rigid forms, like sonnets. So when they wrote epics, they codified conventions that their Classical predecessors included somewhat more haphazardly. For instance, early modern epics are usually divided into twelve books, because that's what Virgil did. Some of these conventions have become part of a formal definition for epics as you'd read in a dictionary of literary terms: they must include a katabasis (a descent to the underworld); they must include divine intervention of some kind; they are broad in scope, covering the known world, both geographically and intellectually (they almost always include references to recent scientific discoveries and inventions, reference to historical events, literary allusion, and so on); the protagonist must be aristocratic and must embody the virtues held in high esteem by the audience/author; it must begin in media res; it must describe an event that is of great historical or mythological importance to the community in which the epic was written. However, other traits became just as conventional, and just as necessary, in early modern Europe (or England, anyway). A professor I once had said that any poet who wanted to be somebody had to include in their epic a description of the dawn which beat out Homer's rosy-fingered dawn (or at least beat out their contemporaries' descriptions). Other necessities were a half-snake half-woman creature, a talking tree, catalogues of objects, and ekphrasis (a description of a work of art); all of these were drawn from Homer, Virgil, or Ovid. EDIT 24 July 2013: Another crucial convention is the digression. Epics almost always have long asides--sometimes these are flashbacks (pairing with the convention of in media res), sometimes these are history lessons, sometimes these are even premonitions of what is to come (oracles and prophecies are also epic conventions), but often the digressions are bits of plot that wander off from the main goal. Characters might get lost, or separated from their companions, or get kidnapped or imprisoned. They may have dalliances with seductresses or get distracted by red herrings. The coarse of a true epic never does run smooth. /EDIT

Early modern epics were almost always in verse, usually in heroic couplets. (A common way of organizing them was twelve Books divided into cantos, which were themselves divided into stanzas, which were themselves in couplets...but not all epics were like this.) In fact, strict definitions often insist that epics are written in verse, but many people allow for prose epics, and I'd argue that prose epics are still being written. Paradise Lost was the last great verse epic, as Milton himself declared; after this, most verse epics were mock epics. The Dunciad is perhaps the most famous of the mock epics, but I did once know someone who was working on a mock epic detailing the colonization of Trinidad.

(History lesson over)

Looking over the list of requirements, it should be clear that epics of this kind** are especially well suited to expressing their author's ideology. Of course all texts contain ideology, but epics do so very explicitly. The topic must be formative to the community and the protagonist must be exemplary of the community's values. The presence of the Underworld and the gods means that the religious and mythic sensibilities of the group are involved. The scope means that the epic gives a shape of the physical and intellectual world of the community. Epics are often nationalist. Thus Spencer was deliberately writing an English epic. Sometimes, however, epics are more religious than nationalist; Milton, who thought that England's climate made English culture tepid and generally worthless, avoided the national epic and instead wrote a Christian epic. But whatever group they represent, they do it explicitly and obviously. This makes them very good places to examine a particular worldview. Bakhtin (who I've mentioned before) says that epics have a single viewpoint; they are monoglossic, one-voiced. And as much as I've been talking about early modern epics, I think more contemporary epics exist: The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and lots of other fantasy obviously fit most of the criteria (Tolkien was writing a saga, not an epic, but the two are similar and it seems clear that he was incorporating early modern epic conventions, too; while the Narniad did not start as an epic for Lewis, it seems clear to me that, by The Magician's Nephew, or maybe even The Silver Chair, he knew that he was writing one). But I also think that Wade Davis' nonfictional/historical/semi-autobiographical One River is an ethnobotanical epic. I don't think for a second that Davis intended to make it an epic, but it actually fulfills every single requirement, right down to the snake-lady and the description of the dawn. (Also, The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are film epics if you let Will's father-become-part-of-the-ship count as a talking tree--Ovid's and Spenser's talking trees were usually people turned into trees. I don't know what worldview the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are showcasing, though. That's something to puzzle out.)

What makes the epic so amusing to me, then, is that as a genre the epic is almost like a fill-in-the-blanks for ideology. You have all these empty fields which you fill in with content; once you've filled in the fields, you have an epic. What's interesting, of course, is to see how the different features change based on what worldview is slotted in. For instance, in Paradise Lost, the katabasis is Satan's flight into Hell after losing the War in Heaven. In The Faerie Queene, the talking tree is a man who was seduced by a witch (who signified the Catholic Church) and was turned into a tree when he discovered who she was, but in The Lord of the Rings, written by an environmentalist, the talking trees were Ents, early eco-warriors. In The Faerie Queene the hero is a gentleman-knight; in Lord of the Rings he is a hobbit, an analogue for the simple rural men-at-arms in WWI's trenches; in One River the hero is a revolutionary ethnobotanist who has what Davis calls a taxonomic eye, the innate ability to identify taxonomy at a glance. Good epics of course are not really just highly stylized Mad Libs; a skilled epic poet or writer will make creative use of the genre's constraints rather than be a slave to them. So what I like to do is imagine what different kinds of epics would look like. What would an environmentalist epic look like? (Probably a lot like The Lord of the Rings.) What would a Canadian epic look like? What would an Anglican, or Catholic, or Mormon, or Muslim epic look like? What would a librarian's epic hero's virtues be, or an engineer's, or a home-maker's? What would be the Underworld in a Dutch-Canadian epic, an Asian-Canadian epic, an Inuit epic?

I also think about the sorts of world-views that make me uncomfortable. What would an Islamaphobic epic look like? A homophobic epic? A white supremist epic? An anti-feminist epic? This is less fun, but it might be a helpful exercise.

Ultimately, though, I realize that The Faerie Queene is not just an English epic; Spenser wrote it as a handbook on courtly behaviour. It is an English Anglican aristocratic humanist epic. Milton wanted to write a definitive Christian epic, but Paradise Lost is in fact an Arminian Copernican materialist Christian epic. Or, even more accurately, The Faerie Queene is Spenser's epic; Paradise Lost is Milton's. So as fun as it is to figure out what a feminist's epic would be, I really need to be thinking what a specific person's epic would be. What is my epic? What is, say, Stephen Harper's epic or David Suzuki's epic? What is your epic?

I wish people still wrote epics, because while imagining other people's epics is fun, being surprised to find out how another person used the snake-lady is even more fun. We must watch how we imagine other people's stories, because when we do so we run a terrible risk of reducing them. For this reason I would prefer to read them rather than imagine them, but since most people don't write epics, all I've got is the imagining.

---

*If all of this stuff about humanism sounds vaguely familiar and not especially noteworthy, it's because much of our culture is descended from humanism. It was radical at the time: the neo-Platonic monastic tradition was the real force in education and art prior to humanism's advent, along with a sense (among aristocrats) that high culture was exclusively aristocratic. To our eyes, the monastics come off as seeming rather silly (for instance, they believed that the names of objects were intrinsic to the object, while humanists believed that names were socially assigned to objects), but it's important to remember that in most circles the monastic tradition was taken as obviously true until the humanists showed up.
If you're thinking that it looks more familiar than just a vague permeation of our culture and instead sounds a lot like the ideas of the Inklings, or of W. H. Auden, or of T. S. Eliot, then you'd be correct; these writers are known as Christian humanists because of their affinity with Shakespeare, Sydney, Spenser, Wyatt, Marlowe, et al. Christian humanism is a lot bigger than neo-classicism, of course.

**I say "epics of this kind" because in a more anthropological or comparative-literature sense, the Greco-Roman and early modern European traditions of epics weren't the only ones. Lots of people count sagas and  puranas as epics; there's a whole system of designation between oral or primary epics and literate or secondary epics which includes lots of things that don't fit here. However, I'm focusing on the tradition I'm familiar with, that one epitomized by Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene.

Disguising Subversion with Love Stories

Romantic Subplot in The Hunger Games

Note: This is not part of my meta-ethics series. I just decided that I did not want to postpone publishing it until that series is done.

As I indicated before, I have recently seen The Hunger Games (movie, not book). One of the things that I found very surprising about this movie was just how subversive it is. Most supposedly subversive movies are either not very subversive at all (Avatar) or do a terrible, muddled job of subversion (V for Vendetta, oh my goodness). At least on the first viewing, The Hunger Games is much smarter than most of Hollywood's supposedly subversive movies, and it even takes a few potshots at conventional Hollywood storytelling--after all, it is about the use of media to suppress underprivileged populations. One of the most impressive instances was the movie's deliberate indication that the romantic subplot distracts from more important political questions.

(Here be spoilers.)

Combatants in the Hunger Games desperately need sponsors to help outfit them as the event proceeds, so the characters must be very deliberate about their public appearances. During the interviews before the Games themselves, Peeta says that he has a crush on Katniss. Katniss is angry that he would use her to further his own publicity, but their trainer Abernathy tells her that it has helped her publicity as well: it has made her desirable. Besides being a shout-out to Girard, this episode indicates that romantic feelings, whether or not they are genuine, are part of the proceedings. Instead of somehow transcending time and place, like we have pretended since Petrarch, love is subject to the society, culture, and ideology the lovers inhabit. Peeta's admission of love, even if it's true, is also an attempt at survival that is endorsed by the media spectacle and becomes part of the narrative that Flickerman, the interviewer and master of ceremonies, helps create. (Of course, he is probably working from a script, too.)

Abernathy latches onto this narrative device. What I find interesting is that another narrative device--Katniss' voluntary substitution of herself for her younger sister--is eclipsed by the romance narrative, at least as far as the publicity is concerned. I say publicity rather than public for a reason: Katniss' adoption of Rue as a surrogate sister certainly get the attention of Rue's district. What Abernathy knows--and likely what the Capital's propogandists rely on--is the fact that the romance narrative will provide explanations for potentially subversive behaviour, explanations that mitigate the subversiveness of it. So when Katniss and Peeta defy the authorities by attempting double-suicide rather than monomachy (and thereby trying to answer Peeta's question about dying in a way that shows the authorities that they do not own him), Abernathy is quick to use the romantic subplot to explain away this behaviour. He says that the pair "showed them up" and that there would be consequences: "This is serious. And not just for you. They don't take these things lightly." So Katniss and Peeta must act as though their behaviour was not about the power or authority, was not in fact directed at the Capital or about anything that might also concern the people of the poor Districts. In order to prevent the Capital from reinforcing that power with violence, they must act (cynically) like their actions are born of the sort of love that transcends time and place. Frankly, I was not sure whether to be impressed by this realization, or disappointed that Katniss decided to play along with the love narrative which disguised her more subversive motives. How much complicity should characters accept in order to survive long enough to fight that power?

One of the interesting things about seeing this as a movie but not reading the book is that I had no way of gauging the not-especially-expressive Katniss's emotions. I could not tell whether she actually reciprocated Peeta's attraction or romantic feelings. (I understand that in the book it is clear she does reciprocate somewhat, but that's second-hand). In this state of ignorance, the romantic subplot seemed even more surreal, even more a ploy to survive the Capital. Certainly her sacrifices for Peeta were not much different from her sacrifices for Rue, for whom she would feel no romantic love. How the other movies treat her relationship with Peeta is now of almost no consequence: the idea that romantic subplot distract from real political subversion in the Hunger Games, and also The Hunger Games, and also, by extension, if you're willing to think it, most popular culture, is already in place. I cannot be sure how strong this effect would be in first person narration.

I want to clarify a few things: I don't think that genuine, non-cynical romantic subplots (or main plots) are necessarily bad. But I would, for a lot of reasons, like to see much more fiction that treat such relationships with more sophistication and more awareness of the problems they can produce, and I would like to see more fiction that does not treat romantic subplots as particularly important. I think The Hunger Games does a good job of showing some of those problems.

How Do You Follow Parody?

I very lately watched The Hunger Games for the first time. I have never read the book, so my comments are limited to the movie.
Early in The Hunger Games, Katniss parodies the Hunger Games' official language by mocking, "May the odds be ever in your favor." (Parenthetically, I'm a little weirded out by the way American movies sometimes use English accents and Anglophilia to make characters seem villainous. But that's beside the point.) The interesting thing is that we, the audience, get this parodic treatment before we ever hear the Games officials using that phrase. When we hear the phrase for the first time, not only are we primed to think that it is a mark of oppression, but we are also aware that the characters are willing to undermine their authority (in the safety of remote hills).
This scene reminds me of a passage in Stephen Greenblatt's "Invisible Bullets," which draws connections between Shakespeare's Henry IV (1 & 2) and V and Thomas Harriot's account of English colonization in America. Greenblatt describes how Falstaff's antics parody King Henry IV's rhetoric before the king speaks. Falstaff announces that he is called about at all hours because he is an important man (when it is really because he is a scoundrel); in the next scene, the king is struck with insomnia and laments that great men cannot sleep while small men slumber. Greenblatt writes, "As so often, Falstaff parodies this ideology, or rather--and more significantly--presents it as humbug before it makes its appearance as official truth." The results are perhaps subtler in 2 Henry IV than in The Hunger Games: "Its effect is not (as with more straightforward parodies) to ridicule the claims of high seriousness but rather to mark them as slightly suspect and to encourage guarded skepticism." As a result, the king's rhetoric "reverberates hollowness as well as poignancy." I would say that in The Hunger Games the result is of the more straightforward variety.
In either case, it seems that what Greenblatt calls anticipatory parody is more effective than reactive parody. For those of us who are parodists, that's something to keep in mind. But in thinking about this I have a further question: what do you do when your own project or rhetoric has been parodied in anticipation? How do you speak when your speech has already been mocked? How do you follow an act that already undermines your own?

Another Account of My Absence

G'day, all.

Welcome, if you're here from Unequally Yoked, where the guest post I wrote is now up. To be honest, I'm fairly sure I've made an embarassment of myself, but I suppose we'll have to wait and see what the response is. If you look through some recent posts, you'll see I've provided further positioning about religion in preparation for your arrival. I hope it's helpful or enlightening.

That guest post has reminded me that I haven't done a 7 Quick Takes in a little while, and those spare regular readers I have might be as interested in what's happening in my life more than in my theology/philosophy. (You know, friends and family.) So I figure I should give a run-down of what's been going on in (unusually) sunny Van. However, as it is not a Friday, I feel hesistant about actually writing a 7 Quick Takes today. I'm a genre nerd, after all. However, I will maintain the numbered and bolded list format. Hopefully it will be less of a sprawl that way, but, well, most of what I do resembles sprawling in one way or another, so don't get your hopes up.

1. Part of my absence has been related to Netflix, so I'll start with that. I watched a movie a while back that I would like to recommend called Arranged. Rochel and Nasiri (Orthodox Jewish and Muslim respectively) both start jobs at an elementary school, where the students and staff all assume that they could not get along. Ironically, it is this assumption that causes them to become friends and, together, approach their up-coming arranged marriages and their principal's attempts to "liberate" them. This is an excellent movie, one well worth watching. It has much to recommend it, but most of all it manages to show the downsides of controlling parents while still affirming traditional lifestyles. In particular, Rochel's experience at a contemporary party reflected my own experiences.

I might also recommend 7 Khoom Maaf (Seven Sins Forgiven), a Bollywood film about Susanna Anna-Marie Johannes, an Indian woman who tends to choose the wrong men and, after wedding them, murder them. It's actually a very good film about a very broken woman who seems propelled despite herself on a path of love and violence. A particular scene I found interesting involved two anatomically atypical men engaged in a fight (the pre-arranged sort, in a ring, with spectators) in which neither the spectators nor the camera saw them as anything but competent, dangerous combatants. Their anatomies/abilities aren't ever mentioned.

I have watched a lot more than this (X-Men, the final Harry Potter, Captain America, Cowboys and Aliens, The Rite, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, seasons 2-3 of Heroes), but these are the ones that seem to me worth mentioning.

2. I went to No. 5 Road in Richmond and took photos. No. 5 Road is known for the sheer number of churches, temples, mosques, gurdwaras positioned along it. It has the nickname "The Highway to Heaven" (which isn't really fair, I don't think, to those groups who don't have a concept of heaven). However, because the buildings are recessed on their properties, I didn't get as many nice photos as I would have liked. As a result of this, though, I have started a photo series I am calling The Architecture of Belief, adding to it photos of any house of worship I photograph. I'll add some of those here.

Since then, I have also visited a few labyrinths to photograph, including an abandoned one.

3. I've recently become aware of Gene Robinson and David Somerville. The latter, actually, I learned about when attending a requiem service for him. Ironic? And the former I stumbled on researching for a previous post, and have since listened to his talks on Youtube. His 2008 Creating Change speech is well worth it. (I'm not a big fan of the introduction, so don't let that turn you off of the speech.) This also marks my opinions rather entirely, I guess.

4. Volunteering at the Crane Production Facility is great. (Recap: I narrate selected texts into a computer program; Crane staff will then take my narration and others' narrations and composite them into an audio book for the text impaired.) I've read all sorts of interesting and challenging things, like Proust (that was ambitious!), the appendices of some book, and parts of David Suzuki's The Sacred Balance, an eco-activist book. Yo, American readers, do you guys know who Suzuki is? He's a big deal in Canada, but it's hard to tell how much the States is aware of our exports.

Anyway, Suzuki's book is interesting and fascinatingly composed (I like that kind of science writing a lot), but I do have one complaint: omitting the serial comma in complex lists is atrocious! It's impossible to read it aloud correctly the first time, since that comma is crucial for signalling that this is a new member you're coming upon and that you need to balance your voice accordingly. I had to re-do I don't know how many sentences due to this. Go Team Serial Comma!

5. I visited the Belkin Art Gallery. The current exhibit is Material Witness. Not all of it was my cup of tea, but I should say that I found Konrad Wendt's Gegenstand brilliant (it's a split log--one half is art, the other is firewood), and I loved Martha Wilson's Orchids.

6. I made revisions to a paper on religion and Asian Canadian identity that might get published at some point. I hate revisions (who doesn't?), but it certainly is a stronger paper for it. A book arrived in the university library between drafts, and the information in that book played a large role in those improvements. Funny how much timing has to do with this sort of thing.

7. I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery. The Surrealist exhibit was less interesting to me (though I found some of the philosophical ideas underpinning Surrealism quite interesting, and I found the cultural influences on it--West Coast culture, natural history museums, Freud, Greek myth--a fascinating blend). I did quite enjoy Ken Lum's work, though: his social criticism is sharp, but also quite fun in a lot of ways. His stuff has a quotidian or pop and low culture feel to it, what with 80s-style portraiture attached to billboard-style logos of the subject's names. He also plays a lot with mirrors, and I found his mirror maze a lot of fun. I'd never been in a mirror maze before.

That afternoon I also visited the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, which is small and out of the way, but worth the visit (if you like Haida art or art theory). I also paid $5 to hold an albino Burmese python named Buttercup and have my picture taken with her. She was a beautiful, heavy, strong animal. The feel of her muscles on my shoulders and neck was wonderful and somewhat disconcerting.

8. I've been apartment-hunting. If all goes well, I'll have a place by the middle of the month, which will give me two weeks to move from one to the other. Fingers crossed.

9. I finally made the trip down to Granville Island to walk around. It's a nice place, though much of its pleasure costs money. There's a lot to look at, though, especially if you are interested in the creation of urban spaces. Much of the area is situated underneath a bridge, so to see how that bridge is used in the definition of vertical space was interesting. There were also lots of wedding photo shoots around when I was visiting.

10. Church stuff: I am being trained for more liturgical responsibilities; specifically, I am being prepared for proto-deacon roles. This is quite unusual (or, you know, unorthodox), as I'm not a deacon or even a diaconal candidate. However, the goal (I think) is to have multiple able to perform all tasks (except the priestly ones, of course) so that liturgical assistants don't need to serve every day. The irony is that I serve almost every week (I haven't had a week without some responsibility since getting back to Vancouver in June), but this might ease off in September, when the other server will be able to come more often.

11. Books. I've not been reading as much as is my wont, but I'll mention Emma and The Epistemology of the Closet. Wikipedia should be able to help you out with both of those, but I'll mention that I found Emma quite slow at the outset and quite engaging at the end, and that I'm quite pleased with Epistemology, especially as the first Axiom that Sedgwick posits is that "People are different from each other." A passing familiarity with my previous posts will indicate how important this idea is to me.

Aaaaaaand I think that should do. There's been letter-writing and MOA-visiting and what have you in there, but I imagine that should satisfy the curiosities of those who care.

7 Quick Takes (79)

(Quick note: Leah could yet again use your help in discerning atheist from Christian responses; since I think most of my readers are likely Christian, I'd highly encourage you to go over since for this round she'll be most interested in Christian responses.)

1. On the Saturday after you last heard from me, I went shopping at Metrotown Mall for clothing with two (female) friends. I do this sometimes; having a little money ear-marked for clothes but not enough fashion sense (or inclination, honestly) to actually make fashionable choices, I enlist the help of fashionable people who like clothes shopping but don't have the funds to do it as often as they'd like. Somehow they thank me for doing this, which seems backwards to me. The upshot is that I now have three new pairs of shorts, a new button-down shirt, and a new polo shirt.

2. Thanks to Netflix, I have watched numerous movies recently. (Some of these likely precede the last 7 Quick Takes, but I thought I'd lump them all here.)

Harry Brown stars Michael Caine as a pensioner and ex-Marine who tries to mount a one-man war against the street gang that murdered his friend and terrorizes the project he lives in. It's an OK movie, but quite bleak. Don't expect a thrills-a-minute ride.

The Life of David Gale is about David Gale, a death-row inmate (Kevin Spacey) who was formerly an anti-capital punishment activist. He has recruited a reporter to tell his story in the three days before his execution, and she comes to believe that he is innocent and tries to exonerate him before it's too late. (This film is fairly obviously anti-capital punishment.)

Traitor concerns the acts of a former US Forces operative (Cheadle) who now appears to be tied to Islamist terrorist groups, and the FBI agents who are tracking him. It's far easier to follow than most political thrillers but at the same time doesn't oversimplify. (Or, at least, it oversimplifies no more than other such movies do, which is probably to say it oversimplifies quite a lot.)

Agora follows the atheist philosopher Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) and her students and slaves during the conversion of Alexandria to Christianity. Three religious traditions--polytheism, Christianity, Judaism--clash during the time of transition. The film glows when Hypatia attempts to refine a heliocentric model over the clumsy Ptolemaic epicycles; the film is rather dark when it depicts human arrogance and religious exclusivism.

Kill Bill, which I'm sure most of you have heard of, is Tarentino's two-part take on martial arts and samurai movies. Since I was expecting it to be pretty bad, it was better than I expected, though I found I enjoyed the first part more than the second. The best moments in the second concerned the protagonist as a mother. However, the second part does not free itself from the orientalist baggage of the movies it references; it walks a fine line between parody and homage, and unfortunately is not explicit enough in its parody to escape from the label "racist."

(500) Days of Summer is sort of like a rom com, but isn't. I like the novelty of boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl, girl-leaves-boy-for-good, and I like narratives that wander across chronology, but that didn't save this movie for me. See, I could not stand the female lead--Summer--and as a result had difficulty getting into it. As far as I could tell, Summer displayed everything that is unlikeable about the "indie lifestyle" (affected voice, flouting social conventions, pretentiousness) and nothing that is likeable about it.

Centurion was better than I thought it would be; its protagonist is (surprise!) a centurion stationed in Britain. After the slaughter of the 9th Legion at the hands of the Picts, a small band of Roman soldiers is deep in hostile territory, fleeing back into Roman-occupied lands while being pursued by an expert tracker named Etiane. It is not an especially optimistic movie, a mood reflected in the bleak but beautiful landscape they run through.

Saving Face is not a movie that I would ordinarily watch, but recently I've been trying Asian-Canadian and Asian-American films. Wilhelmina Pang is a brilliant young surgeon and a kind-of-closet lesbian whose mother keeps setting her up with local Asian men. Suddenly her mother, Hwei-Lan, a widow, arrives on her doorstep needing a place to stay. Hwei-Lan is pregnant and was kicked out her parents' house because she won't tell who the father is. I'm afraid I'm not describing this very well. Watch the trailer. Anyway, as I said, it's not what I'd usually watch; it was funny, but rom coms are not really my cup of tea.

3. I am no longer catsitting as of last weekend. I've been enjoying the ability to sleep in and without interruption. The cat was wont to climb on me at about 4:00 in the morning. However, she was quite soft and I'm sure I'll periodically wish I had a cat to play with again.

4. This week (Tuesday) I began volunteering as a narrator for audio recordings of library books for the print-impaired. I've only done it once so far, but it will be a weekly thing. One's voice is usually sore afterwards. I'm pleased to be doing this, though; I feel like I'm not really doing enough positive work right now and appreciate the opportunity to get involved in this. Ability is such an underrepresented issue at the moment--compared, at least, to sexism, racism, heterosexism, etc, but not compared to neurotypicality and atypical anatomy, of course--and I'm happy to have even a small part in this endeavour.

5. Tuesday afternoon I attended a lecture on civic Islam and secularism. Dr. Amyn Sajoo gave the talk, entitled "Public Islam: Citizenship, Identity, Anxiety," hosted by the Iona Pacific Inter-Religious Centre at the Vancouver School of Theology. I can't hope to encapsulate his talk in a single take, but he addressed the Sam Harris version of secularism, which posits secularism as modern and rational, opposed to the traditional and sentimental religion. Dr. Sajoo suggested what I've written about before, that it is not possible to separate the religious and the "non-religious", and tied this in with an activist and publically engaged ethic in Islam. I should also mention that he brought up the idea of alternative modernities, ones that do not have an Enlightenment history, and how this seems to threaten some proponents of a non-religious secular ethic. I was very heartened by the talk not only because of what was said but also because the audience was largely Christian and I was so pleased to see such fairly conservative-looking parishioners interested in inter-faith topics.

6. I've been apartment hunting. Yesterday I was trying to respond to a craigslist advert and the e-mail address did not work. Since the location was close to where I currently live, I decided to walk over and see if a phone number was given at the location itself. After all, the rent was very low and the details in the posting looked good. It was a great deal and was close to where I wanted to live, so I wasn't about the let the failed e-mail deter me. I got to the apartment and saw a "vacancy" sign out front, so I took a photo of the sign, which had contact information on it. As I did so, a woman came out and interrogated me about what I wanted. I explained, and she seemed rather displeased. It turned out that the craigslist ad was a hoax. She did not know who posted it, but she was furious. There was a vacancy, but the rent was actually about double that listed. All told, that was disappointing. Fortunately, I do have some other leads.

7. I've started listening to The Wailin' Jennys. Leah at Unequally Yoked mentioned them last week. I particularly like "The Parting Glass", which I think I'd like played at my funeral (whenever that happens), and "Storm Comin' ."

Please proceed to Conversion Diary, host of this blog carnival.

7 Quick Takes (76)

I'm doing a 7 Quick Takes for the last month or so. Wow. This should be fun.

1. I returned to Fort McMurray for a brief time to visit friends and family. I'm still here as I write this but I won't be here for much longer. As usual, I'm staying with the folks.

2. Twice now we have gone to Elk Island National Park. This is a lesser known park near Edmonton. We did not see a single elk in the park, but we did see numerous bison. The first time we stayed in Edmonton; the second time we camped in the park itself. It was sometimes difficult to sleep because the ducks and geese and frogs and coyotes did not observe the 11 o'clock quiet hours. So the frogs chorused and the geese honked and the coyotes howled and yipped. The second time we also visited the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village. This Village is one of those where everyone acts like a historical person, refusing to acknowledge that it's 2011 rather than the 1920's. I suppose many people find this sort of thing annoying but I rather enjoyed it. Perhaps it is because I liked to hear them talk in their fake Ukrainian (or, in one case, British) accents. I learned things about Orthodox church architecture, too; did you know that Orthodox churches have their belltowers detached from the church as part of a separate structure because they do not allow instruments in the church and the bell counts as an instrument? I had not known this.
This was all quite exciting, but in trying to take supermacro photos of water insects, I managed to get water on my camera which eventually culminated in its permanent damage. Now the photos it produces are wonky. However, it was an excellent final shoot for my dear camera. I got clear macro shots of spiders, frogs, dragonflies, and water striders. I might put some of these up at some point.

3. My summer plans, as I think I indicated before, include lots of reading and writing. I am treating this sort of work like a full-time job. You can go over my reading to date here, though I should also add that I have been reading some blogs, particularly Experimental Theology, philosiology, Unequally Yoked, and the best in us. (That last is more of a personal project of a friend relating to people he knows, so it may hold less interest for random Internet people. Perhaps it holds some value for you as a project, though--writing nice things about people he knows--so you may want to look at the mission statement.) I have also been reading and editing a manuscript for a friend's writing project. Where writing is concerned, I wrote a draft of an academic article and am now working on Creative Writing, though I must shamefacedly admit that I spend more time writing journal entries and letters. My tendency to go on theoretical diversions means that I am, at least, thinking.

4. Fort McMurray has been dreadfully smoky. There are forest fires all around us. The one in Slave Lake got news attention, but there is also an enormous one north of us. The wind often carried think clouds in to the city, preventing me from running outdoors. It's worrying and inconvenient, but at least our community hasn't been destroyed.

5. My birthday occured. The most noteworthy things concerning this event are going to see Thor, having a picnic in the park, and getting The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. If you are a fan of Calvin and Hobbes, I encourage you to see this series Dr. Beck produced giving a theological reading of it. (If I'm not careful I will start recommending it as often as Leah does a certain Harry Potter fanfiction.) If you are not a fan of Calvin and Hobbes, I encourage you to become one. Otherwise my birthday was very quiet. I will have a joint (half-)birthday party with a friend in Vancouver when I return.

6. A little while back I saw the next installment of Pirates of the Caribbean. I realize that not many people liked it. It certainly was not as good as the first. Notwithstanding that, I enjoyed it, mainly for the mermaid-missionary sideplot. It was good that they excised the Elizabeth-Will story from the series; it had reached its logical conclusion and any further story there would be of incredibly shoddy value. They needed to have a morally steady character, though, and the missionary filled this admirably, I think. He is certainly less annoying than Will was. I also find mermaid myth and lore fascinating (but I mean the old stuff, where they're fay, wild, ammoral creatures as much as amorous ones, where they can get human legs without having to make a deal with a witch, where they can't quite decide whether to drown you or love you). While the Pirates of the Caribbean version wasn't exactly like that, I was still pleased. In fact, I was rather OK with the depature made at the end. (For excellent mermaid-related storytelling, please visit Hark! A Vagrant's mermaid story. In fact, visit anyway. World history, canonical literature, and Canadiana have never been more awesome.)
In related news, I'm coming to understand that my tastes in what makes a movie good vary significantly from almost everyone else's. I tend to gravitate towards elements I like without seeing the chaff that is the rest of the movie. If I like that element strongly, I like the movie. If there is nothing outstanding, I tend to dislike the movie. If there is something else that is not simply unartful but outright repulsive, not much can make me like it.

7. I have watched a few TED talks which I want to recommend. In no particular order:
Mustafa Akyol's Faith versus tradition in Islam
Kathryn Schulz's On being wrong (this is crucial for anyone who has an overwhelming confidence in their own rightness, aka most people on the Internet)
Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation
Dan Meyer's Math class needs a makeover (on making mathematics a good sell)
Nate Silver's Does race affect votes?

Please visit Jen at Conversion Diary, host of this fine carnival.

7 Quick Takes (74)

1. I spent a good portion of the first week of February preparing for a seminar presentation on Henry IV 1 & 2, in case you couldn't pick that up from the rant about "gentlemen of the shade" last week. Those are some plays, folks. If you don't believe that a scene can at the same time be hilarious and horribly sad, you might want to look at Part 2 (after reading Part 1 of course). I suppose the knowledge of how it ends makes it sadder than you might get on a fresh reading, but I still find the tavern scenes pathetic, in the full sense of that word.

In case you are somehow entirely unaware of these plays (which I realize is possible and not condemnable), you must be introduced to Falstaff. This video is an excellent way to begin, though I take issue with Welles' description of the reverend vice. It's a great piece of stagecraft nonetheless.

2. Last Sunday after church I attended the Lunar New Year Parade. It was held on Pender Street in the rain. This is, after all, Vancouver. After some (im)patience, I finally managed to get close to the front, at which point my photography improved.
I am a Rabbit, so it seemed important that I attend this parade. I had been planning on going with friends, but I did not get the text that everyone bailed until I was already on the #10, bound for Pender St. So I was there "alone," or as alone as one can be in a crowd. I overheard numerous homeless people griping about the sudden influx of people, though some of them were friendly. I had an interesting conversation with a down-and-out-looking fellow on the bus, who descibed to me in great detail how he manages to avoid fights with drunks through trickery.
The rest of this post will have photographs of said event along the side.

3. There is a used bookstore down the street from me, and they have been stealing my money ruthlessly. Fortunately, this yeilds books: a collection of Donne's poetry (Cait, the one I gave you), One Thousand Years of Solitude, and Fables of Identity. This last is a collection of Frye's essays. Frye is a Canadian and once-influential literary critic who enjoyed significant popularity and is now considered obsolete and/or unreadable by most literary scholars. I know this, and I know why. I cannot take his work 100% seriously (it's too universalizing, for starters), but I must admit that I'm enchanted by Anatomy of Criticism. I might not ever work Frye into my own scholarly work, but they can't stop me from holding a torch.
At any rate, I can't afford to frequent this bookstore too often, but it's not a bad place. And I have a coupon!

4. On the recommendation of a friend, I borrowed the film Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity (2002). It stars Sandra Oh (Grey's Anatomy) and Valeria Tian (Juno) and takes place in the Chinese Canadian community of Vancouver. It's funny, poignant, gripping, etc. and so forth. Mindy is a twelve-year old only child to her workaholic, money-harried mother. She is an eccentric little girl who tries desperately to improve her mother's financial and romantic prospects... by means of Taoist charms. Her inexpert attempts at these charms backfire, appearing to cause ripples in the local community. I suppose you might not like it if you are opposed to movies in which Taoist magic works. But it is a good movie. Watch it!
[American readers: I am not sure if this is available in outside of Canada. I am wholly ignorant of such things. I couldn't get it at the Roger's Video here, not even before it closed down. I had to get it from the library.]

5. Weather-related take: Last Friday I was tempted to write a post raving about the beautiful weather. I finished reading one of the Henry's in the Rose Garden, no sweater, no shoes, no socks. It was gorgeous. Yesterday was nice, too, but otherwise it's generally been rainy. No surprises.

6. This up-coming week is Reading Week. Today, then, was the last day before break. This afternoon I went to a lovely prof talk by one Prof. Patsy Badir on shame and failure in Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost and Twelfth Night. If I do post at all this week, it will either be a continuation of one of the unofficial series (The Fantasy Genre, for instance) or some more explicit form of literary geekiness. However, I have grading, reading, and writing to do for Monday and Tuesday after Reading Week, so I may be too busy for blogging fun.

7. If you aren't already, I suggest you go take a look at the debate at Leah's Unequally Yoked. The argument surrounds whether it is at all acceptable, from any point of view, for someone to steal a host from a Catholic church, desecrate it, and post a video of said desecration on-line. What fascinates me is that there should be no debate at all. It's an obviously reprehensible act. I don't, for instance, think that a Zoroastrian fire is actually sacred, but I would react in horror if someone put it out; I don't, for instance, think that the Qu'ran is the revealed word of God, but burning one in public is a gross insult. I don't see how anyone could fail to make this connection, though it's also clear that many do. Anyway. Go take a look. I've linked to the most recent post on the issue, but from there you should be able to navigate to the older ones. [Edit 12 Feb: I should clarify that Leah is not the one advocating desecration. Not at all. I commend her for what she's said so far.] [Edit 14 Feb: I have now linked to her index of the posts. Thank-you, Leah, for your lovely indexes.]

And that's it for me. Please visit Jennifer Fulwiler at Conversion Diary for more.

7 Quick Takes (70)

1. Last weekend I watched some movies with the fam: Casino Royale, Blood Diamond, The Bucket List, and parts of PS I Love You. I don't think I have anything to say about any of them right now.
(I am sure other stuff happened. We likely went for a walk outside; I went to church; I read The Girl Who Played With Fire; I probably read Castle Waiting Vol. 2 if I hadn't done that earlier.)

2. On Monday we went to Edmonton. That afternoon and night we went to Whyte Street and to the West Edmonton Mall. At the West Ed my brother bought and had fitted a suit, I bought The Liturgical Year by Joan Chittester and The Problem of Pain by C S Lewis, and my mother got painting supplies. My father, brother, and I then went to the gun range. I don't think I have ever fired a real gun before. It was fun but I know that the other two enjoyed it far more than I did. We tried three different revolvers. I wasn't terribly good.

3. On Tuesday we went to the Art Gallery of Alberta and the Royal Alberta Museum. As always the RAM was interesting; in particular I enjoyed the temporary exhibit of nature photography. The AGA was also interesting, though I understand far less about it. I liked some of the Symbolists; I liked some of the Canadian landscape painters; I did not care for Matisse; I quite liked Burtynsky, but then I already knew that. His Bengladesh shipbreaking series is wonderful. That evening we returned to the Mall, where we discovered that the new Harry Potter was sold out. So Nick and I went to the nerd store and then I got a cinnamon bun and went to Chapter's and then, finally, we went to see The Tourist. It was enjoyable enough but I have problems with it. I can't tell you the problems without spoiling the film, though, so I'll desist.

4. On Wednesday we returned to Fort McMurray. I wrote a letter on the way. When we returned we took some ridiculous pictures as a family.

5. Thursday morning my brother caught a plane back to school.

6. For much of yesterday and today I worked on my Asian Canadian paper. I am almost done.

7. It's New Year's Eve or some such thing. You know, I like the idea of seasonal cycles. I've never understood New Year's, though. It seems like a silly thing to celebrate, the turn of an arbitrary demarkation. Such are we funny creatures, that one bit of time should seem different from another bit of time just because we have collectively decided to put a marker between them.

Please go see the host of this fine carnival, one Jen Fulwiler at Conversion Diary.