MagicThought

Debroah and I have talked about how the book Inkheart [and the sequal Inkspell ] relate to this class but we both keep forgeting to blog about them. If anyone is searching for something amazing to read over the break, Inkheart is a winner. The movie version is coming out next spring which is also exciting. I thought the title, “Inkheart” was particularly interesting. . .

Basic things that I remember which relate:

Mo, the father repairs old books for a living.

Mother is absent for most of the book [it is very Helen Rossi-ish] also when mother does show up, she can’t talk but rather must write to communicate. . .maybe because these books are after dna tests? I don’t know. . .

Daughter has been given a love for books from her father.

Mo has the ability to “read” character out of books.

There is just generally a lot of writing and reading and books and fathers.

 Here are some Amazon summeries:

Amazon.com
Meggie’s father, Mo, has an wonderful and sometimes terrible ability. When he reads aloud from books, he brings the characters to life–literally. Mo discovered his power when Maggie was just a baby. He read so lyrically from the the book Inkheart, that several of the book’s wicked characters ended up blinking and cursing on his cottage floor. Then Mo discovered something even worse–when he read Capricorn and his henchmen out of Inkheart, he accidentally read Meggie’s mother in.

Meggie, now a young lady, knows nothing of her father’s bizarre and powerful talent, only that Mo still refuses to read to her. Capricorn, a being so evil he would “feed a bird to a cat on purpose, just to watch it being torn apart,” has searched for Meggie’s father for years, wanting to twist Mo’s powerful talent to his own dark means. Finally, Capricorn realizes that the best way to lure Mo to his remote mountain hideaway is to use his beloved, oblivious daughter Meggie as bait!

From School Library Journal
Grade 4-8-Characters from books literally leap off the page in this engrossing fantasy. Meggie, 12, has had her father to herself since her mother went away when she was young. Mo taught her to read when she was five, and the two share a mutual love of books. Things change after a visit from a scarred man who calls himself Dustfinger and who refers to Mo as Silvertongue. Meggie learns that her father has been keeping secrets. He can “read” characters out of books. When she was three, he read aloud from a book called Inkheart and released Dustfinger and other characters into the real world. At the same time, Meggie’s mother disappeared into the story. Mo also released Capricorn, a sadistic villain who takes great pleasure in murdering people. He has sent his black-coated henchmen to track down Mo and intends to force him to read an immortal monster out of the story to get rid of his enemies. Meggie, Mo, Dustfinger, and Meggie’s great-aunt Elinor are pursued, repeatedly captured, but manage to escape from Capricorn’s henchmen as they attempt to find the author of Inkheart in the hope that he can write a new ending to the story. This “story within a story” will delight not just fantasy fans, but all readers who like an exciting plot with larger-than-life characters. Pair this title with Roderick Townley’s The Great Good Thing (2001) and Into the Labyrinth (2002, both Atheneum) for a wonderful exploration of worlds within words.

erin

Ok, my fellow magical thinkers, just when you thought the culture couldn’t get any weirder, along comes a new movie that’s about a martian child who gets adopted. Hmmmmmm. One of my former students who has been following our blog sent me info about this. Thank you Alexis.

Dr. B.

The Martian Child
Theatrical Release Date: Oct 26, 2007 (Wide)
Cast & Crew:
John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Sophie Okonedo directed by Menno Meyjes more »

Synopsis:
The romantic drama Martian Child stars John Cusack as a recently widowed science fiction writer who forms an unlikely family with a close friend (Amanda Peet) and a young boy he adopts that claims to be from Mars. The new couple ignores some sage parenting advice from the widower’s sister (Joan Cusack) and gets more than they bargained for when a series of strange occurrences lead them to believe that the child’s claim may be true. more »

MPAA Rating: PG - for thematic elements and mild language

Release Company: New Line Cinema

Genre: Dramas, Fathers And Sons

Official Website:
The Official The Martian Child Site

Television Review | ‘Cavemen’
They Put on Their Pants a Leg at a Time; It’s Just That Their Legs Are Hairier

By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Is “Cavemen” the worst comedy ever to appear in the history of American television? No, it is not. Conceits have certainly floated about the offices of network executives that have been less promising than the notion of cavemen friends suffering prejudices together in a contemporary metropolis.

I seem to recall a show running briefly in the 1980s about two Rhodesian Ridgebacks living in an East Side town house who one day look up at their owners and say: “You know what? If a doofus like you can make a killing in the leveraged buyout market, so can we.” Hold on while I check to see if I can come up with the title in Wikipedia. Well, it doesn’t appear to be listed there. Just give me another minute while I glance through my volume of “Total Television.” Huh. I guess the show never made it past preproduction.

And yet “Cavemen,” which had its premiere on ABC on Tuesday, arrived with decent intentions. In all fairness to the producers who injudiciously decided to spin off an entire half-hour of fun from the Geico ads depicting cavemen fighting off presumptions of their insensitivity, the notion of Neanderthals crying over girlfriends and invading the universe of urban-professional effetedom isn’t an untenable comic premise. Who expected the world to fall in love with a theatrical version of “Xanadu”? But it did.

You might even imagine a sociological imperative existing for such a venture, with men forced, as they are in this confusing world, to embody the style of “Swingers” and the soul of “High Noon.” One joke in the show has a caveman working in some facsimile of an Ikea, where all the shelves and chairs have ridiculous, unpronounceable names like the Bludencrock or something. Let the record reflect: I laughed.

But I laughed through my pain. “Cavemen,” set in some version of San Diego where people speak with Southern accents, doesn’t have moments as much as microseconds suspended from any attempt at narrative.

The Geico ads themselves, endlessly downloaded and parodied on YouTube, possess a stronger sense of story line. Given that “Cavemen” was reshot, recast and rehauled before it finally made it to the airwaves, it’s hard to fathom why better use wasn’t made of Jeff Daniel Phillips, whose slouchy sense of exasperation at the feminized, judging modern world is what elevates the Geico campaign to addictive sketch comedy. Mr. Phillips will make only guest appearances on “Cavemen” — if it survives, that is, all the rocks and fire.

CAVEMEN

ABC, Tuesday nights at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.

As I mapped out historical trends today there are a few things I didn’t get to that I’ll post here. If you can think of more please add to this post.

So far in the two epistmes we’ve looked at extensively, Digital and Typewriter, there have been a number of recurrent elements. Some of these elements are:

Dragons
Writing technologies
unstable father figures
teeth
Absent or inadequate mother figures
Links between literacy and Fathers
Links between illiteracy and mothers

I keep forgetting to mention that the most popular dictation software on the market, i.e. a software program that can turn — as it advertises — “talk into type” is called “Dragon Naturally Speaking.”

Here’s what Wikipedia Says about it:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the speech recognition software package produced by Nuance Communications for Windows PCs. It was among the first programs to make speech recognition practical on a PC. NaturallySpeaking uses a minimal visual interface. Dictation appears in a floating small box as words are spoken, and when a pause for breath is taken, the program will essentially transcribe or paste the words into the location of the cursor.

Here’s the link to the product’s website:
http://www.digitalriver.com/v2.0-img/operations/scansoft/site/367062/367062_dns-talk.html

Here’s a review of tonight’s first episode of Moonlight, the new vampire tv show. Notice the vampire’s assistant is a female web journalist. Notice that her name is Beth, a letter of the alphabet, as in Aleph, Beth. Notice the coupling of the symbolic (rule book — the law and writing technology) with the imaginary (the kitchen — usually the domain of the maternal) in the article’s subtitle. Notice that the vampire is portrayed as a sex-less metro-sexual, intimating that he doesn’t need to have sex to reproduce. And I love the concluding thought: “In almost every way, ‘Moonlight’ demands that we question the grounds for its existence.” I would suggest that we can explain why such a new show exists.

September 28, 2007
TV Review | ‘Moonlight’
Vampire With a Rule Book and a Mighty Fine Kitchen

By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Mick St. John has the best kitchen of any character on network television. I take that back: he has the best kitchen on television, period. It goes beyond the standard chrome-and-granite generics of television culinary spaces, with open shelves that display a beautiful collection of bulbous glassware. It’s like a lab, but a warm one where you might actually enjoy a good risotto, and it looks out onto Mick’s lattice-walled living room with its Modernist collectibles.

Visions of all this are far too fleeting in “Moonlight,” a CBS series beginning tonight that, despite all the set-design talent behind it, is distressingly not about furniture or appliances at all.

It’s despairing to write these words, but the procrastination has gone on long enough: “Moonlight” is a frothily toned detective series in which a metrosexual vampire (Mick, played by Alex O’Loughlin) functions as chief private investigator. It’s a tease, really, to know that all those perfectly appointed rooms exist merely to establish the particularities of Mick’s vampirism. I was hoping I’d be directed to points of purchase.

Forsworn here are all the old metaphors of sexual predation. Mick is a vampire as late-stage consumer capitalist. He doesn’t exist if he doesn’t buy, choosing to get his blood supply from a dealer rather than sucking it out of victims. “Most vampires don’t have boundaries or rules,” he explains in an expository opening scene that is meant to look like a documentary interview with him. “But I do. I don’t hunt women, I don’t hunt children, I don’t hunt innocents.”

But the producers are onto a conceit that seems purely accidental. Vampires with a conscience are like cheerleaders in habits: what precisely is the point?

Mick is motivated to solve crimes involving vampires who are less morally inclined. He is righting the wrongs of his species and receiving vague assistance from a Web journalist, Beth (Sophia Myles), whose life he saved from a pernicious female vampire when she was a little girl. That was decades ago; Beth has blossomed in womanhood, and Mick, given his agelessness, still looks as if he could audition for a remake of “Beverly Hills 90210” during the college years. He loves her, but he fears revealing himself, and he sleeps in a freezer devoid of Frette sheets.

Ms. Myles, who was so captivating as a vampire victim in a recent PBS version of “Dracula,” just gets to play around as a ding-dong here in her role as a newscaster for Buzzwire, an online tabloid for which she racks her brain coming up with alliterative headlines.

In almost every way, “Moonlight” demands that we question the grounds for its existence. As soon as it goes off the air, I’d love to borrow the decorator.

Just read this in the NYT. It mentions Lacan briefly, but is most valuable for what it suggests about the relation between fatherhood and knowledge, i.e. the symbolic. Also a very good re-thinking of Freud’s value to our culture.

September 23, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Who’s Your Daddy?

By MARK EDMUNDSON
Batesville, Va.

SIGMUND Freud died 68 years ago today, and it remains uncertain whether he is what W. H. Auden called him, “a whole climate of opinion / Under whom we conduct our differing lives,” or whether he is completely passé. It’s still not clear whether Freud was the genius of the 20th century, a comprehensive absurdity or something in between.

Our confusion about Freud is something he predicted — and also provoked — particularly in his later work, now largely unread, which is preoccupied with the question of authority. It sheds light on our confused attitudes toward Freud, who always strove for cultural authority. But more important, books like “Totem and Taboo” and “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” illuminate our collective difficulties with power and particularly with the two scourges of today’s world, fundamentalist religion and tyrannical politics.

Probably the best way to understand Freud’s take on authority is to consider the mode of therapy that he settled on midway through his career. We might call it “transference therapy.” Over time, Freud came to see that his patients were transferring feelings and hopes from other phases of their lives onto him.

Frequently they sought from him what they’d sought from their parents when they were children. They wanted perfect love, and even more fervently, it seems, they wanted perfect truth. They became obsessed with Freud as what Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalytic theorist, liked to call “the subject who is supposed to know.” Patients saw Freud as an all-knowing figure who had the wisdom to solve all their problems and make them genuinely happy and whole.

Freud’s objective as a therapist was to help his patients dismantle their idealized image of him. He taught them to see how the love they demanded from him was love that they had once demanded (and of course never received) from fathers and mothers and other figures of authority. Over time, the patients might come to view the doctor — Freud — as another suffering, striving mortal, not unlike themselves.

The man sitting at the foot of the couch had to be revealed as neither a Merlin nor a Gandalf, but as a rather short, bespectacled fellow who smoked too many cigars and had a deep fondness for his dog Jo-Fi, the chow who sat beside him while he worked and to whom he occasionally addressed stray remarks. Once the patient could do that much, he was in a better position to treat other important figures in his life realistically. He’d be less prone to assault them with demands, to ask them for everything.

One of Freud’s key beliefs was that there is no sharp division between the psychologically healthy and the unwell. His patients longed for authoritative fathers — and so did Freud. In the early phase of his career, he embraced a sequence of mentors (among them Jean Charcot, the French neurologist; Wilhelm Fliess, a German doctor; and Josef Breuer, an Austrian doctor) who had nothing like his mental powers, but whom he vastly esteemed nonetheless. Freud said we all seek such figures, in both political and personal life.

In “Group Psychology,” Freud wrote about the qualities that a leader-figure, in his most extreme guise, possesses. “His intellectual acts,” said Freud, “were strong and independent even in isolation and his will needed no reinforcement from others.”

He also “loved no one but himself, or other people only insofar as they served his needs.” The leader’s confidence is absolute, for he possesses what everyone most wants, truth. His allure is as powerful as it is pernicious.

Well, you might say, it takes one to know one. Freud himself was drawn to authority. He liked to lord it over his disciples; he liked to make pronouncements; he liked — as schoolchildren say at recess — to act big. When Freud presented himself to the public, he almost never forgot the lessons that he had learned about authority in his consulting room and through his studies of the church, the army and tribal societies. “The autocratic pose” clung to him, said Auden.

Freud still manifests himself to us as a grand patriarch. Collectively we have thought about him as the father, as the one who is supposed to know. We have hoped he’d confer the truth — make us whole and happy. Of course, he cannot. But he has been different from all the other aspiring masters in that he has taught nothing so insistently as the need to dissolve our illusions about masters, and to be responsive to more moderate, subtle and humane sources of authority.

Such a figure — authoritarian and anti-authoritarian at the same time — cannot help but be confusing. But once we understand our confusion, Freud can also be quite illuminating. Among other things, his ideas about authority help us understand (and in some measure sympathize with) the hunger for absolute leaders and absolute truth that probably besets us all, but that has overwhelmed many of our fellow humans who find themselves living under tyrannical governments and fundamentalist faiths.

But the best of Freud will not be available to us until we can work through the transference he provoked. We need to see him as a great patriarch, yes, but as one who struggled for nothing so much as for the abolition of patriarchy.

Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author, most recently, of “The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days.”

I saw Eastern Promises this weekend, and as I might have guessed, given it was directed by David Cronenberg — the Director of The Fly and other amazing films — it is firmly rooted in the same unconscious cultural material that concerns us in this class. I won’t go into too many details because I don’t want to ruin it for those of you who plan to see it, but its plot is centered on at least three things that should be of interest to us: a codex diary that is so prominently part of the narrative that it is almost a character in its own right (everyone in the film wants to take possession of it), a parentless Baby, and writing on the body. Writing on the body is actually one of the main plot points!! On the allegorical level the film is very clearly attempting to re-write and update the Biblical story of Moses (and other abandoned infant myths) for our time. Moses is the first person in the Hebrew Bible to mention writing. The Bible is strictly an oral, matriarchal culture prior to his appearance. Moreover, there are no mothers in the film, but lots of Fathers — literally and figuratively. Another point of connection for our class is that Naomi Watts, who was catapulted into stardom by her performance in The Ring (in which she plays a single mother atttempting to save her son and rescue Sadako/Samara from the well, plays an unmarried surrogate mother-figure who tries to rescue an infant. Indeed, although for a moment the film flirts with making Naomi Watt’s character a sexy, single woman, she becomes the film’s primary embodiment of the Maternal/Imaginary early on. Indeed, she is the only maternal figure in a film dominated by Patriarchs. Moreover, there is a spectacularly vivid birthing scene in the film, despite the absence of mothers — a plot point that will become clear when you see the film. Beyond all of this, it is a remarkably well-made, intense, and gripping film. Dr. B.

I would strongly suggest that you see Eastern Promises, the new film by David Cronenberg, and starring Naomi Watts. For more info on this film, you can look it up on Rotten Tomatoes, a movie link I’ve added to this site under the Blogroll

I just heard an interview with Cronenberg who said that the film is mostly about language, and that it is very Biblical. Hmmmmmm…..