Gojira

I paid to see Godzilla and Heisenberg, and there isn't much of either. So much for that.


It wasn't bad. The last few scenes were quite good. The first full shot of Godzilla and the blast of his roar seemed worth the nearly hour-long wait, but action was lacking, to my mind.

I -- and, I'm sure, many others -- wanted something like Pacific Rim. We got some of it, but whenever the action started getting interesting, we have the puny little humans closing their windows or the scene shifting to somewhere else on the Pacific.

I'd give it something like a B.

But I really hope the next Gojira film will be like Pacific Rim. (Mechagodzilla?)

Summer Reading

Reading has more or less consistently been a major activity for me during summer. I remember when I was about nine or ten, spending about five hours or more on my bed, zipping through all seven Harry Potter, all seven Narnia books, and a few other inconsequential paperbacks. It was during that summer that I set a reading record for myself: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix's 800+ pages in three days. The closest I've come since to meeting that pace was the summer after Harry Potter: Paolini's 800-page Brisingr in four days. I remember being severely disappointed with not having broken or at least met the record. Now, it takes me about a week to finish a 200 page book. But that's really because I read many more books simultaneously now -- which may or may not be a good thing.

I've tried to keep my list a bit more varied than what is usual for me, but it's not much of an improvement. But there is improvement, nonetheless.

So far I've read:
1. John Green - The Fault in Our Stars. Agh, what a terrible way to start off summer reading for an antisocial homeschooler. But it was a pretty good book. Green seems much more honest in dealing with cancer than I think any other author would be.
2. Dorothy Sayers - Whose Body? Peter Whimsey (and Bunter and the Dowager Duchess of Denver and Parker and the lot) gave me one particular impression: hey, look! it's Bertie Wooster (and Jeeves, etc.) walking around England solving crimes.
3. John Currid - Against the Gods. The first book really to give my list a sense of variety. Against the Gods is a short, recently-published book that introduces Currid's arguments for polemic in the Old Testament. It was a good read to interrupt all the New Testament reading I'd been doing.
4. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game. A rare time in my post-preadolescence (haha) in which I read through a book longer than 300 pages in roughly six hours. (You'll be shocked at how many times the characters use the word "fart".)
5. Dorothy Sayers - Clouds of Witness. I enjoyed this better than I did the first (Whose Body?). Yet more Wooster-Jeeves dynamic, except that Whimsey goes to America without Butler.
6. Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner. A rare gem in modern fiction. To my mind, it transcends nearly everything wrong with contemporary lit.
7. Chaim Potok - The Chosen. One of the two books I've finished today (yay!). I love it, especially since it tells the story of two boys from their late high school to immediate post-college life. Of course, following C.S. Lewis' advice, I really should read it again, maybe when I'm well past college, but for the moment, I love it.
8. Padraic Colum - The Children of Odin. The other book that I've finished today. Finally, I can say that I've read a book of Norse mythology, and not just World Book and Wikipedia. (Of course not original text, but still.)

There still remain, started but unfinished:
Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter (which really is a trilogy, of which I have finished the first book), G.K. Beale's New Testament Biblical Theology (about 80 pages into this 1000-page book), Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (I've defended Twain against those who would accuse him of racism, but I've never really read him, save through shameful *gasp* abridged versions, so this should be good. [And the explanatory note on Twain's "infamous" use of the n-word is deftly dealt with in the opening chapter. Vindicated.]), Beowulf (I've read an almost hilariously shortened version from my World Lit, but it does good to read the full. I think it's J. Hall's translation.), Veronica Roth's Divergent (snail's-pace reading, not horribly excited about it), Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories (I don't read it frequently, but when I do O'Connor never disappoints.), and Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica (or Theologiae, since I'm also trying to read it in Latin. I can read the original with some help from Wiktionary, and I can read the translation with relative ease, since I've read Chesterton's biography of the guy and multiple layman philosophical surveys. Not that I'll claim to completely understand what he's saying. [At least it isn't Talmud]).

I probably won't finish some of those books (Summa, in full, is about 3000 pages), and I'll definitely be reading others over the course of the summer.

(And, it really isn't as varied as I'd hoped for. Oh, well.)

Rereading Tolkien

"Who's watched the movies more than he or she's read the book?"
And, of course, I have to raise my hand.

(Not that the movie trilogy veers too far from the original content, at least not like the mutilated adaptation which is the Hobbit trilogy.)

Rereading The Return of the King has made me realize the richness of Tolkien's narrative, something which, when I was young, I missed.

Basically, it's awesome.

Ordinary Books

But then I suppose that the converse must be true as well, that if one only reads ordinary books, one will never know what a Great Book is.

Great Books

"... if one only reads Great Books one can never know what a great, as opposed to an ordinary, book is..."
~Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

Well, rats.

Iced Tea

ICED TEA or IN MEMORY OF A MISERABLE ORDEAL

In a restaurant, the name of which I do not care to remember, I experienced what might be called the worst of my trials. I suppose I should have counted it joy, all of it, but I don’t think it was one of those “divers temptations”. (I think it was really waiters’ temptations, but that’s currently being debated by scholars.)  The prophets and priests might call it one of the seven deadly sins – gluttony, to be exact – but one cannot rightly say so. I do not consider myself guilty; I was a victim, not a perpetrator.

               

I was then about half my current age. It was a buffet. I had been to buffets before and never had any problems with eat-all-you-cans, but, up to this particular visit, I had never been told No-Leftovers-or-Else-You-Pay-Double. You know how easily these rules can latch on to and settle in the mind of a child, and I, despite my budding brilliance, was no exception to this phenomenon.

            I cannot recall what food was served at the buffet. What I can recall, with vivid horror, is the iced tea.

The Devil can use the good things of life to his own purposes. I considered and still do consider iced tea a good drink. If there isn’t coffee available, iced tea is a perfectly good second choice for me. But after visiting that restaurant I didn’t want any iced tea for a while.

There I was, having eaten all I could, and there was iced tea in a dewy, cold glass. I consumed the iced tea in rapid swigs.

           

There were now no leftovers on my plate, and I was perfectly content. But, lo and behold, there came a waiter, arms full with glasses and utensils and a pitcher or two of iced tea. Knowing that I could easily drink more, I wasn’t upset when he refilled my glass. And it was consumed, my second glass of the day, and once again, no leftovers.

            My parents were chatting, and I remained a content little kid. I sat there quietly, seen and not heard. Then the ordeal really began, for there swooped in, like a fallen angel, another waiter, and poured a generous serving of iced tea into my glass. My cup ran over. But No-Leftovers-or-Else-You-Pay-Double, and I drank it down, slower than I had previously done, with grave seriousness.

             Now I began to feel some discontent. Surely this was a trick that restaurant managers used to squeeze double pay out of poor unsuspecting customers, but I was proud and stoic. I wouldn’t complain to my parents.

             I was given a respite, but eventually another waiter, in no way less sadistic than the others, refilled that accursed glass. If I had been more brilliant, I would have said “Waiter! Thing of evil! – waiter still, if man or devil!” Sadly, I was not so poetic, but you can imagine my anguish.

             Nevertheless, I did drink, very, very slowly. My stomach began protesting, but what could I do? I was an innocent, helpless victim of the evil restaurant bureaucracy. If ever I felt like a martyr, it was then.

            But you can guess what happened next. Yes, that glass – the exact antipode of the sangréal! – was refilled. Tears rimmed my eyes, as icy dew rimmed the mouth of the glass.

            There sat my parents, my brother, and my sister. Nobody cared, but they really couldn’t be blamed for that; I was too proud to tell them about my trial.

           

Maybe one of the great bowls of wrath had been poured out, and most of it fell on me – or on my little glass – and the rest most definitely didn’t fall on the people around me.

            I cannot imagine how I managed to gulp the iced tea down, but I have immense respect for my younger self. I’m sure it took me at least five minutes, and I don’t recall ever going to the comfort room.

Immense respect.

I’ve never since felt the weight of five glasses of iced tea plus a buffet lunch in my stomach, although I’m sure my gastrointestinal capacity is just as capable today.

It was at this point that my mother remarked at how many glasses of iced tea I was able to drink, and the dawn of a horrible feeling of realization crept into the horizon. I told her that Of-course-I-had-to-finish-all-the-glasses-of-iced-tea-because-No-Leftovers-or-Else-You-Pay-Double.

And she laughed.

The buffet principle apparently didn’t apply to drinks.

Everyone else had joined in the laughing by now, except my brother, who was too young to understand.

And I was compelled to laugh along. What else could I do?

After calling a taxi and getting in it, we continued laughing. I was laughing with one hand on my stomach and half my posterior off the seat because of the unbearable nausea.

               

It didn’t apply to drinks. Oh, what needless pain I bore, all because I wasn’t told that it didn’t apply to drinks. I blame my mother.

On the Profanity of Pilate

It is a beautiful thing that there is a distinction between the sacred and the profane. And it is even more beautiful that even the profane can be used towards the sacred.

Pilate found it funny to mock the Jews through their king -- put a crown, dress him up in robes, nail a "sign ... over his head [saying 'This is the Jesus, the King of the Jews'] where the joke was written out in three languages so nobody would miss the laugh (Buechner, Frederick, The Gospel as Fairy Tale)," and, ultimately, kill him. Profanity in its ugliest form.

But, haha, it was not the will of God to let Pilate's verdict stand. The profanity of the Son of God was overturned. And there's, perhaps, the most sacred thing we can read of -- nay, partake of.