This weekend, I:
> finished watching Gettysburg. This was a big feat only because the movie was over four hours long. The film, based on Michael Shaara's novel, The Killer Angels, which I've yet to read, was made in the early nineties and starred Martin Sheen (General Lee), Tom Berenger (General Longstreet), Sam Elliot (General Buford) and Jeff Daniels (Colonel Chamberlain).
Shot on location at Gettysburg National Military Park, it featured thousands of Civil War re-enactors and dozens of artillery pieces. Between relatively bloodless battle scenes, I felt like I was watching a Greek drama with heroes delivering emotional monologues or philosophizing on the battlefield. That element of the movie I can forgive only because the film strove for and achieved authenticity in every other respect, especially when it came to facial hair.
Of the many men waxing poetic, Buford moved me the most. An excerpt of his "speech", as he stood on the outskirts of town the day before the battle and observed the Confederates approaching, is at the end of this entry.
> watched part of Super Bowl XL. I missed the first half, but caught the half-time show and most of the second half. With no real interest in either team, it didn't matter to me if Seattle or Pittsburgh won. Because I'll soon forget, Pittsburgh prevailed 21-10 and the quarterbacks were Hasselbeck (Seahawks) and Roethlisberger (Steelers).
The Rolling Stones were the much-hyped half-time performers. The most impressive thing about their act was the stage, which was in the shape of their logo (the big lips with the big tongue hanging out) and surrounded by hundreds of screaming fans. During their first song, "Start Me Up", the tongue rippled until it finally fell away to reveal more screaming fans underneath.
I've never been much of a Stones fan. I'm sure they are great musicians and performers, but I just don't find them or their songs very likable. Considering that football's biggest event was happening in Detroit, I would have rather listened to the sounds of Motown.
The best commercial I saw was a MasterCard spot featuring Richard Dean Anderson reprising his role as (Angus) MacGyver. The closing scene of him at the grocery store buying tube socks, paper clips and chewing gum and stuffing them in his pockets was classic.
> finished reading C.S. Lewis: A Biography by A.N. Wilson. I read this book because of my renewed interest in the author since the release of the Narnia movie.
The film rekindled the battle between those who wish to deify Lewis and those who wish to demonize him. Instead of listening to either side, I hunted for an unbiased biography. Wilson presents Lewis in a fair light, revealing his strengths and weaknesses, providing the reader with a realistic picture of the man.
Lewis was a brilliant literary critic whose theological writings were most powerful and accessible when rooted in allegory and imagination. At the same time, he was an inferior poet (his first professional aspiration) and philosopher (his second) who could see the talent of others, but was blind to his own.
The most surprising thing I learned about Lewis was his thirty-plus-year relationship with a woman twenty-seven years his senior, who he claimed was his adopted mother, but was most likely his lover. My favorite (and probably the most famous) story is the one concerning Lewis' late night walk through Oxford with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, which eventually led to the writer's conversion to Christianity.
> finished reading Der Ring des Nibelungen by Richard Wagner (translated by Andrew Porter). One of Lewis' childhood influences was Wagner, specifically his Ring operas, which were inspired by Nordic and Germanic mythology. Normally, I actively avoid anything related to opera, but once I read the basic storyline, my curiosity led me to read the English translation of the German libretto (in book form) and listen to the first two operas (Das Rheingold and Die Walk�re) in the four-opera cycle.
Although I'm still not a fan of operatic singing, I must admit that Wagner has me hooked. I'm blown away by his prodigious array of leitmotifs to represent characters, places and themes. I'm also taken with his effective, if sometimes excessive, use of alliteration (Stabreim), which I learned from one of the essays was a very old German form of rhyming.
While I was intrigued by the story's underlying mythology, I was most struck by some of the similarities between it and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien didn't come anywhere close to plagiarizing Wagner, but one can tell that he was aware and likely influenced by the German composer. With a quick search, I was able to find a great New Yorker article comparing the two sagas.
"Meade will finally attack, if he can coordinate the army. Straight up the hillside, out in the open... in that gorgeous field of fire. We will charge valiantly and be butchered valiantly. And afterward, men in tall hats and gold watch fobs will thump their chests... and say what a brave charge it was. Devin, I've led a soldier's life... and I've never seen anything as brutally clear as this. It's as if I can actually see the blue troops in one long bloody moment... going up the long slope to the stony top... as if it were already done... and already a memory. An odd, set... stony quality to it. As if tomorrow has already happened and there's nothing you can do about it"
- Sam Elliot as Brigadier General John Buford
