Lance Schaubert

Sorry I neglected Monday, gang. I was shooting a short film. Here’s some quick crits for you:

Two years ago, I read The Invention of Hugo Cabret and gave props to Selznick. The guy invented a new medium – part silent film, part graphic novel, part picture book. Anyone who invents a new medium for telling a story gets the A from this teacher.

Beyond this, Selzinick actually told a good story well. I had hoped not only for a movie version of Selznick’s film tribute (thank you Scorsese) but also for ANOTHER BOOK!  Brian brought us Wonderstruck – a book about a deaf boy. Three quickies: (1) Selznick pays extravagant tribute to the awkwardness of Deaf culture, (2) he tells the story differently than Hugo, but just as well, (3) he changes up picture and text framing, reinventing his own new medium. Go. Get. It.

The Invention Issue of TIME magazine delighted me as always. However, I was terrified by the familiarity of the hummingbird drone. Mockingjay anyone? This little bot mimics the omnidirectional movement of a hummingbird at 17.7 km/h. They call it the NAV, but it looks like it came from The Capital surveillance machines inside The Hunger Games trilogy. CREE. PEE. I also thought it was funny how TIME admitted that Boeing’s Dreamliner was the “big” event this year in the airline industry inside a 3/4 page spread on the PurePower jet engines inside the new Airbus planes. Big media and your biased loyalties! Aww Shucks ;D

The New Yorker’s food issue gave a neato article on foraging – that trend of high-dollar city restaurants to live off the land. Jane Kramer wrote this one, having spent the summer foraging with René Redzepi along Dragør Beach. René runs the two-time “best restaurant in the world” inside Copenhagen, crafting his entreés from the bounty of his local culinary landscape. Apparently this is all the rage. In light of last month’s Occupy Everywhere articles, I’d also recommend the “All the Angry People” article by George Packer in the December Fifth issue, an issue that also plays host to Gopnik’s fascinating critique of Tolkien’s epigones – high fantasy for young adults. It’s technically about the last in Paolini’s Eragon series, but it provides much more for writers. In it, he compares literary writing to mythological writing. The first illuminates what one aesthete called “a desire which, through prohibition, seeks an unreal but realized object.” Fantasy in everyday life or an escape – that’s literary fiction. Mythologies? They provide the grammar and game plan for our experiences today. Great stuff, Gopnik, not that you care.

I’m tinkering with that Terry Pratchett novel on your right. I refuse to change that cover until I finish this one. Call it library renewal incentive if you please, but I will finish.

John Milton in VOLUME FOUR of the Harvard classics feels like semi-automatic catharsis. One of his poems, an early composition on the passion of Christ Milton quit halfway, hid this gem:

Befriend me, Night, best Patroness of grief!
Over the pole thy thickest mantle throw,
And work my flattered fancy to belief
That Heaven and Earth are coloured with my woe;
My sorrows are too dark for day to know:
The leaves should all be black whereon I write,
And letters, where my tears have washed, a wannish white.

That’s it for now. More to come on Demo Ball & Skyrim, for you hyper athletes and aesthetes respectively.