I Like Baz

I just got home from seeing Australia at the movie theater. It's definitely a Baz flick. You've got the outside filmed inside, loads of attractive stuff to look at, love, and, above all, a mythic/fairy tale feeling overall. This stuff is larger-than-life, guys. And, if nothing else, you know this, because the drover is just that, The Drover, i.e. a man with no name. Oh yeah, and there's voice-over and magic.

Now I won't say there's nothing to nit-pick, because there are certainly imperfections. (Like, why did __ have to die? That was pretty pointless.) But, at its heart, it's the kind of movie that I like. It sucked me in.

Why'd I like it? Because of how its over-the-topness balanced with its realism. It seems like the two shouldn't fit, but they do. The fact that I have a crush on the continent of Australia itself doesn't hurt, granted, but even aside from that, it's good Baz stuff. He's good at making fairy tales real. Instead of fantasy versus reality, fantasy becomes reality. It's like magical realism all over again.

I think I'm going to have to watch my all-time fav. Baz movie, Moulin Rouge, again soon.

The Hakawati

I'm annoyed.

You know when you're reading a book, and you're near the end, and you look at how many pages are left and think, "Ok, I've gota dozen pages to go," but you're wrong because there are endnotes and you've only got one more page of the actual book?
I was just reading The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine and had that experience. I confess, I was irked. Impressive, that in reading a book that's just over 550 pages, I hit the end and thought, "But no, I want more."

When I read Alameddine's book I, The Divine, I knew he was a good writer. Not many can pull off a novel written entirely in first chapters.

With this one, I was impressed again. It's gorgeously written and brilliantly executed. Two of the cool things about it: it's metafictionally groovy and the fact that it's written in the style of the traditional storytelling from which the book takes its name. He starts out telling one story, then splits off into another, then divides again. You get the main character's story of his dying father, then stories of the family's history, then a folk tale, which adds in another folk tale, sprinkled throughout with numerous moments of "Let me tell you a story." It's mind-boggling how he juggles it all, and especially how he manages to make it perfectly coherent. Brilliant.

Technically, I can see how he pulls it off. The inter-cutting of stories is constant, so constant that he doesn't stick with a single one for more than a couple pages before switching back to another, so the different characters and plotlines are always fresh in your mind. Also, the overall structure is grounded into two arcs, the present-day arc with the main character, and the story of Fatima, with all others in some way branching off from them. So, while you've got dozens of stories going on at a time, you've still only ever got two. Make sense?

If I can ever pull off something that intricate and complex, I will be infinitely pleased with myself.

An Eight Page Paper

Tonight I have my first essay for Scottish Lit. due. The guidelines, among other things, state that it should be about eight pages, but longer is okay.

I remember a time when the idea of writing an eight page paper was a page count that'd put me in a panic. "What can I possibly write about for eight whole pages?!"

These days there's less panic and more, "Okay, it'll take me about this long to read these articles so I can talk about them. About this long to do my Works Cited, and roughly this long to actually write the paper." A little bit of mental math later, and I have pretty good idea of not only how it's possible to write eight pages about anything, but also how long it'll take.

It's funny to think about it. Funnier yet, to think about it in relation to my Comp. 101 class. If I walked in to class tomorrow and announced that they had an eight page paper due next week, I wonder if half the students wouldn't immediately pull out paper bags and start hyperventilating.

How long does it take to write an eight page paper? About a day and a half.

On a related note, I found a nifty book on Scottish folklore in ballads. It's a bit reference heavy, sometimes mentioning half a dozen different ballads in half a page, but there's good stuff in it. Folklore in The English & Scottish Ballads by Lowry Charles Wimberly.

Just for Giggles: Intro to the Annotated Bib.

After spending a few boring hours compiling this annotated bibliography, I had to write an introduction to it. Oh boy, oh boy. Still, being able to actually write something other than "In this article..." was great fun.

So, in the spirit of sharing a painful experience, I'm going to share my intro. It's rough and I'll probably make some changes, but here's my rough:

Introduction

I began the semester unsure of how best to work up to my thesis. As I will be writing a creative thesis, the element of research will not be as prominent for me as for my peers who will be writing a critical thesis. I decided the best topic for my research would be to focus on the style of story I would be writing: magical realism. The more I thought about my topic, the further back I wanted to look at it. At this point I realized how much magical realism stories have in common with folklore and fairy tales, and that was when I narrowed my research.

In many ways, magical realism is simply a contemporary version of the fairy tale. Fairy tales tap into our subconscious and run through our cultural identity. They speak in the language of symbols and magic, teaching us about extraordinary possibilities and happy endings. As a result, fairy tales are an excellent medium for a wide variety of critical schools: feminism, sexuality, and cultural studies are especially applicable.

The contemporary fiction genre of retold fairy tales has developed in conjunction with these critical schools. These retold tales offer their own interpretation of the original story, as well as a commentary on the ideas and values represented in the original. Feminist retellings are especially popular and change passive female characters, like Sleeping Beauty, into active heroines. Another facet of retellings is modernized versions of the classic stories. Updated tales are popular in all forms of stories, and allusions, such as titling a film “Cinderella Man,” surround us.

My initial goal of researching fairy tales was to gain a better understanding of where the genre of magical realism comes from. However, as my research progressed and I looked at example after example of the ways fairy tales have endured for centuries and remain a central aspect of our cultural consciousness I realized something. These stories describe and influence much more than a genre of fiction. They describe and influence the foundation of our culture. Not only are fairy tales where magical realism comes from, fairy tales are where we come from.