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Sennacherib
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Birthday: 2/26/1988
Gender: Male
Interests: I love medieval languages, but my real consuming interests are king arthur, and who he really was, and trying to trace back all the myths of the world to their historical settings. That means I'm also interested in Atlantis, which right now I'm pretty sure was next to england. Becasue of the movies LOTR has lost its appeal, so I read the Silmarillion. I also liked the S because its presented as a group of myths.
Expertise: Chess, movies, the year 1000, left-handedness, dealing with upstart brothers who are taller than you, proving that 2=1
Occupation: Computer related (Internet)
Industry: Other
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
12/2/2004
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| Boston won the world series, and though I am no fan of baseball, I die a little inside.
That aside, there is a nice little homily in old english, brought to my attention by ANSAX-NET which ends thusly:
Thaet waes thonne thaet se wuldorcyning on middangeard cwom forth of
thaem innothe thaere a claenan faemnan, ond tha swa se hyhtenda
gigant, swa Drihten on middangearde blithe wunode oththaet he becom
to thaem heahsetle thaere rode on thaem upstige eall ure lif he
getremede.
It was then that the wonder-king came forth to Earth from the womb of
the ever-pure virgin, & like the rejoicing giant, so too did the Lord
joyfully dwell on Earth until he came to the throne of the rood; on
his ascent, he comforted (fortified?) all our lives.
Apparently, this is referring to the psalm which refers to the sun running his course like a strong man running his race. Because in Latin, Jerome used the word gigans. It's pretty neat.
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| It occurs to me that I promised--yet failed to produce--a scathing denunciation of Christian movie reviews in general, and Brendan O'Donnells review of Children of Men in particular in the last C/A. I present it to you now, patient readers, if you still exist.
The basic idea, the vector that carries the virus, if you will, that spawns both the specific and general problem has to do with the problem of translating mediums and ideologies. This is seen immediately in Mr. O'Donnell's review:
To a great extent, these are necessary
and forgiveable—to complain that the movie doesn't allow access to Theo's interior the way the book does is akin to
complaining that trains don't float. Books and movies speak different languages, and the two ought to be considered otherwise
distinct works of art.
Mr. O'Donnell concedes the point, yet all through the review, one can hear him pounding his feet in a tantrum of frustration that the movie is not the book. He obviously loves the book, but has to grudgingly admit that, "The Children of Men, considered as literature, could be better." Mr. O'Donnell displays a fine grasp of the art of understatement. Yet P.D. James, as he tells us, was a Christian and thus we must exalt this book over whatever somebody does to desperately turn it into a some sort of great art. James wrote the book from a good Christian viewpoint, and thus literary demerits are belittled, just like Flannery O'Bloody Connor. Heaven forbid that we should be given a peice of good cinema--a vanishing rarity these days--but I get ahead of myself.
Mr. O'Donnell then moves on, takes a cheap non sequitur at the New York Times, and generally huffs about how the movie dares to present a different view of the world, and doesn't deliver the suffocating preachiness that he would have it give. He goes on...well, to cut my original rant short, C/A made the huge mistake of allowing a fanboy to review the adaptation of his holy cow. It's a mistake that many smaller publications fall into, and it inevitably begins to devour the publication like a cancer. I can almost envision him begging to be allowed to review this movie (though it was doubtless condemned before he ever watched it), then shuddering in ecstasy as he rushes to the defense of his precious, his one, his only, his precioussssssss.
Stripping away the fanboy faults, the main problem is that of overwhelming practicality, I guess you could call it. The movie doesn't beat you over the head with Christianity--far from it--but instead presents a powerful image of Mary and Joseph. It would be easy to belabor the point, but the movie never outright points it out, mainly because it's so freaking obvious. Yeah, the movie was obviously made with a liberal bias, but aren't we as Christians commanded to bring all things captive to God? Isn't it better to realize that this movie, while just a movie, presents a powerful support of Christianity? Shouldn't we be glad that our enemies have essentially handed us a support in the war of the two cities?
See, the basic problem with Christian movies and movie reviews is that we have lost our subtlety. A movie has got to be made with explicit Christian intent, to the sacrifice of the story, or we reject it. Here we are handed a story on a platter, but we reject it and the commandment to be as subtle as serpents, in favor of our clubfooted, misbegotten works that stumble around the Christian community in agony, forcibly kept alive by the fetishists of practicality, while it begs us to put it out of its misery.
I notice that I was getting rather passionate here, so I'll insert this summary: We do no favors to our God to reject His gifts in favor of heavy-handed tactics that in fact cast shame upon us and God. Why is Christian art so maligned? Maybe in part because we fight against the world, but mostly because it sucks. We have subordinated art to theory, and submitted our artists to fanboy control. It's very possible to have a fanboy application of Christianity, and that's what's happening to those Christians who write about art, especially movies.
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| I just got my wisdom teeth removed, so I'm spending a huge amount of time surfing the net in between reading. (And filling crosword puzzles with the letter "k", but that was when I was seriously doped up.) I found this abominable example of extremism.
Now, I consider the lesser forms of grammar nazism to be, at best, amusingly idiosyncratic, at worst, worthy of a little head shaking, such as insisting that infinitives not be split, or that the plural of octopus must be octopi, and so on. These are people who are trying to hard to latinize the English language, and don't pay enough attention to dialectical differences, or who assume that languages can be consistent. Slightly more ire goes to the obnoxious clan of "grammarians" who try to root out "redundancies" in the english language, such as "whether or not" or other such phrases which are idiomatically correct, and serve to emphasize the intended meaning. What follows is, I fervently hope, a joke, because if it isn't, I'm going to have to assume that people are far more foolish than I previously thought them to be.
Hit? Reached? Surpassed?
I'm proud to announce that the community now consists of greater than 700 members.
The question I have is:
How would I say "We have __________ 700 members" in reference to the community?
I
considered using "hit." However, we didn't physically smack 700 people.
700 people were not touched when we "reached" 700 members. And no one
was passed when we "surpassed" the milestone. 700 were not owned (or
channeled) so we didn't "possess" them. I'm not sure if "consists" is
correct either.
I grant that I'm being a bit too particular, but the quandary still remains. Care to weigh in with your own advice and opinion?
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Consider that the community being referred to is one of grammar-nazis, and I think the probability for this being a joke drops to about 50%
Don't people understand the idiomatic use of words? Is there no place for metaphor?
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| I wanted to get a few things that I had written down off the schola forums, which I had not been on in some time. Unfortunately for me, they seem to be password protected, and I had forgotten it. Wanting my writings right then and unwilling to wait, I decided to use the wayback machine. It worked, but then I noticed something interesting. I typed in the schola-tutorials.com/classpages, which was the old address for the student atrium. Then I accessed the last stored time before it was changed. To my delight, I was in the old forums, and I got my stuff. Then I noticed that though I was ostensibly in a stored copy of the old forums, I could still read the most current messages, such as ones from Jul. 24 and 27, 2007. I once again thwart anything that might reform my sloth.
Yeah, this post seems a case of "So what." The point is, though I have no antipathy against Mr.C, quite the opposite, I still get a kick out of outsmarting computer programs, even if by accident.
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| Beowulf Movie Trailer! It looks so very good.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/beowulf/
I'm glad that they're going the seduction route with Grendel's Mother. I always took the poem to be going in that direction in that part.
P.S. Actually, after repeated viewings, they're probably going to say that Hrothgar fathered Grendel, which made him the greatest king ever, but came with the curse of Grendel. Then, Beowulf comes over, which I alway believed was to repay the debt the Beowulf's father owes Hrothgar. Going back the Hrothgar as the father of Beowulf, there's some interesting discussion about it on ANSAX-NET, with this discussion started my James Earl, a professor at the UO.
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