014 Bibliographies of anonymous & pseudonymous works
015 Bibliographies of works from specific places
016 Bibliographies of works on specific subjects
017 General subject catalogs
018 Catalogs arranged by author, date, etc.
019 Dictionary catalogs
Ohhhhh yeaaahhhh… Pure, unadulterated book crack. This is where things start to get good. Book lovers don’t have to go far to get their fix in Dewey. Bibliographies of all stripes serenade perusers of the stacks like the Sirens in The Odyssey, each its own rabbit hole of bookish delight. Be careful not to linger for too long here, though, as there’s so much more to see. (Although, if you’re already overwhelmed by the panoply of book choices before you, then perhaps a curated bibliography is a good place to start your reading adventures.)
The Dew3:
Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason by Nancy Pearl Dewey: 011.73 PEA Random Sentence: “Ah, the lure of the open road, or the open water, or simply the great unknown.”
A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam Dewey: 011.73 BEA Random Sentence: “Make no mistake: This was no charitable act of cultural enrichment.”
Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities by Russell Ash Dewey: 016.082 ASH Random Featured Book: Romance of the Gas Industry by Oscar Norman
In my continuing work at the Frances Willard House Museum and Archives, I’ve started working with the Willard correspondence, which begins in the mid-1860s and continues through the turn of the century. Because of this, and because of Frances’ high stature as a public figure during that time, there are a few letters I’ve happened upon from some well-known people that gave me that special feeling historians, archivists, and other history lovers feel when they encounter a gem from the past.
Today I came upon letters from another central women’s suffrage figure (Susan B. Anthony), three former First Ladies (Frances Cleveland, Lucy Hayes, and Sarah Polk), Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay, and a famous author (Louisa May Alcott). And I haven’t even entered the 1890s yet.
We’re really doing it, buddies! Teach Me How To Dewey (aka the Dewey Domination System, aka Operation Climb Mountain Dewey) is in effect, library card at the ready to check out some sweet books, and maybe a movie or two if we’re feeling lucky. Generally, each post that explores a new Dewey ten-spot will have an overview of the section along with some commentary from the Dewer (that’s the Dewey doer) and 3 featured books (Dew3? Book Drops of Dewey?). These books won’t necessarily be the best of their bunch, but rather representative or quirky titles the average patron otherwise wouldn’t have discovered. Shall we begin?
The Rundown:
000 Generalities
000 Computer science, knowledge & general works
001 Knowledge
002 The book (i.e. Meta writings about books)
003 Systems
004 Data processing & computer science
005 Computer programming, programs & data
006 Special computer methods
007 [Unassigned]
008 [Unassigned]
009 [Unassigned]
There I was, all excited to begin the great Dewey quest when, after an intriguing start in the “generalities” section, I got deluged by shelf after shelf of booktorials on “information systems” and Microsoft Word 2003 and other software guides that were already obsolete like three months after publication. If someone was starting at zero with Dewey and work their way up (like, say, a first-time library patron browsing for books or a librarian blogging about super cool things like classification systems), they probably wouldn’t be hooked yet. The section on “the book” is probably popular among librarians and bibliophiles, but even that didn’t have enough in my library’s stacks for me to linger.
And yet, in the very first leg of the journey we have already encountered the mythical Unassigned areas. I like to think of them as the Elephant’s Graveyard of Dewey. (The Librarian King GIF in 3… 2…) So mysterious yet full of power and portent. What book bones lay there? Will any new subsection dare enter that haunted terrain?
Oh, I just can’t wait for 010.
The Dew3:
Wrong: Why Experts* Keep Failing Us–and How to Know When Not to Trust Them by David Freedman Dewey: 001 FRE Random Sentence: “Okay, so lousy research can slip past peer review into journals.”
Aliens Among Us by Ruth Montgomery Dewey: 001.94 MON Random Sentence: “Their fleet is smaller than the Ashtar group, but equally dedicated to helping earthlings.”
The Smithsonian Book of Books by Michael Olmert Dewey: 002 OLM Random Sentence: “Such men often became moralistic, platitudinous bores.”
Ready for the Snapchat summary of Dewey? Here it goes:
The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) organizes library material in a numerical hierarchy by field of study. Each one has its own 100-level placement, called a class:
000 – General works, Computer science and Information
100 – Philosophy and psychology
200 – Religion
300 – Social sciences
400 – Language
500 – Science
600 – Technology
700 – Arts & recreation
800 – Literature
900 – History & geography
Each class has its own 10 subdivisions, which have their own subsections, which become more specific the deeper they go. So a book with a Dewey number of 300 will be more general than one with 301.355. Books are organized on the shelf in numerical order, with books with the same Dewey number organized alphabetically by author. (It’s a lot easier to understand when you see it on the shelves, so go visit your local library!)
A book’s Dewey number has two components: its class number (i.e. a number that designates its place on the shelves) and three letters, which usually are the first three of the author’s last name.
So in my library, David McCullough’s Truman has a Dewey number of 973.918 MCC, which got that because it’s in:
900 History & geography
– 970 General history of North America
– – 973 General history of North America; United States
The numbers after the decimal point identify the material more and more specifically by geography, subject, language, etc. And because David McCullough was the author, MCC is tagged onto the end.
That’s basically it. How an item gets cataloged fully – with subject headings, physical description, and all that extra info most non-library folks don’t care about – is both an art and a science, and one best left to professional catalogers because they actually enjoy doing it. But going forward, we’ll be just fine with the basic knowledge of what a Dewey number is and why it’s important for libraries.
The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) is kinda weird. For today’s app-ified patrons, it’s not very intuitive and seems tattered, like one of the old books it classifies. But despite what the sayers of nay say, it’s not time to dump Dewey. Instead, we should try to get to know it a little better.
Librarians encounter Dewey every day while finding books for patrons, weeding the stacks of old books, and selecting new material for the shelves. Yet it can be a bit hard to understand at times, even for librarians. How can such a fusty system be made fresh again?
“It would be nice if people were to understand that science is a special exercise in perceiving the world without metaphor, and that, powerful though it is, it doesn’t function as a guide to those very large aspects of experience that can’t be perceived except through metaphor.”
Wendell Berry, Life Is A Miracle:
“If modern science is a religion, then one of its presiding deities must be Sherlock Holmes. To the modern scientist as to the great detective, every mystery is a problem, and every problem can be solved. A mystery can exist only because of human ignorance, and human ignorance is always remediable. The appropriate response is not deference or respect, let alone reverence, but pursuit of ‘the answer.’ This pursuit, however, is properly scientific only so long as the mystery is empirically or rationally solvable. When a scientist denies or belittles a mystery that cannot be solved, then he or she is no longer within the bounds of science.”
N.D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl:
“My father uses a blue highlighter to remind him of the good bits he reads, but it has trouble sticking to sunsets or thunderstorms or the cries of the meadowlark in the spring. His guitar is more helpful.”
A passage early on in Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own popped out when I first read it and stuck with me as I watched Darren Aronofsky’s remarkable Noah.
Elie’s book chronicles the intersecting lives and spiritual journeys of four influential Catholic writers: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. I’m still working my way through it, but from the get-go I was hooked by Elie’s weaving narrative of literature, faith, and pilgrimage in the lives of these four exceptional figures. The passage that stood out to me described a moment in Dorothy Day’s bohemian days in New York City as a young socialist and hard partier. She was returning home at dawn from another booze-soaked bacchanalia when she felt inspired to stop at St. Joseph’s Church for the 5 a.m. Mass:
She knelt in a pew near the back and collected her thoughts. She was twenty-one years old. All her life she had been haunted by God. God was behind her. God loomed before her. Now she felt hounded toward Him, as though toward home; now she longed for an end to the wavering life in which she was caught. …
For the time being, she began to pray. “Perhaps I asked even then, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’” Perhaps she told herself, kneeling there, that “I would have to stop to think, to question my own position: ‘What is man that Thou art mindful of him, O Lord?’ What were we here for, what were we doing, what was the meaning of our lives?”
I wonder now if Aronofsky read this book while working on Noah, because the same thoughts that haunted Day also haunt Aronofsky’s Noah. Except the God that Dorothy Day sought and implored and felt haunted by was not the same God that Noah knew. God is known in the film as The Creator, the celestial deity that everyone in this ancient time knew to be the creator of the world and everything in it. The Creator is everywhere and is in everything. (“God was behind her. God loomed before her.”) And this Creator haunts Noah: with dreams of a great flood; with preternatural visions showing the weight of sin on the world; and with an overwhelming mandate from above to carry out justice on the wicked.
How Noah and his family deal with this is one of the key threads of this film, a miracle of a movie. I call it a miracle not to discount the massive amount of creative work put in by Aronofsky and his team to get it on the screen, nor to minimize the miraculous works from scripture depicted in the film; it’s a miracle because it’s good.
Again, I’m not discrediting Aronofky’s directorial prowess. The opposite, in fact. Christian movies (rather, movies made by Christians with explicit Christian messages marketed chiefly to Christian audiences) just aren’t that good. They too often focus on the transmitting the message (or The Message) instead of making good art. But great films can do both well without sacrificing either. Films like Noah and The Tree of Life and Short Term 12 and Ikiru and Into Great Silence and Winter Light and so many others aren’t worried about whether viewers “get” the message. They are art. They are beautifully created, and they are OK with asking questions and not hearing back about them. They ought to haunt you as they are haunted, by something deeper and bigger than themselves.
I’m grateful to Aronofsky for rendering this story for the screen with such theological savvy and care for craft. Noah isn’t perfect, but neither was Noah. Yet the Creator used him anyway. And why that is haunts me.
On my block the snow banks reign. They billow with the winter, building girth with every snowfall and polar vortex. This winter has been especially harsh. The banks are bloated with layers of snow that together tell the story of the season. The inch in late November sits at the bottom, hugging the frozen tundra and buttressing the snowfalls that followed: the blizzard before Christmas, the extra inches that welcomed the new year, and every nighttime shower that lubricated the roads and made hell of your commute. I can see all of these snowfalls now in the mounds that flank my neighborhood, bound together like a white pages in an epic novel. Season’s Greetings: The Snows of Winter 2014—coming to a bookstore or e-device near you. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that these paper stories tell time like the rings of a tree, like that from which the stuff of paper comes.
There’s a particular snow story I noticed recently on my block, on an unseasonably warm day. With the sidewalks leading to the street barraged with shoveled snow and many driveway ends flooded with snowmelt, someone had forged a new pathway to the street through a sturdy snow bank. This makeshift staircase, formed by the boot prints of many waylaid walkers, had been fossilized by nightly icings. So long as the cold held, this corridor would too.
But how strange it felt to walk on water! For if it were July and I took this same detour, my feet would not leave the ground. But it is February, and as I climbed this temporary trail to the street, I thought nothing of the miracle it was to walk upon a path made of solidified water.
This will not last. Snow burns just as paper does, and as the temperature rises and the sun burns stronger the stories the snow banks tell will slowly melt away. They will disintegrate and be subsumed back into the muddy earth, where they will atomize and reform as new stories for the spring to tell with a smile. Those wearied by the long winter usually cannot wait to bid it an unceremonious farewell, as if they blame winter for getting in the way of the more marketable spring. But the beautiful stories the spring tells were not earned; they were given. The flowers and the green grass and the robins and the balm of the temperate air owe their existence to the grace of winter, to the unheralded work it performs to prepare the earth for resurrection. It is hard work, but it gets done every year.
It’s winter yet in early March, but I can feel the coming of spring. In this dreary in-between when the cold and snow seem to linger like uninvited guests at party’s end, I don’t despair. Rather, I spend my late-winter days finishing the weighty tome of winter and anticipating how the story of this year will continue in the sequel of spring come April.
I collect cool words. It started with Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition: words like calumny, bugbear, abstemious, and postprandial popped out as I read that great history of Prohibition a few years ago, and I wanted to remember them, so I wrote them down. I’ve done that with my reading ever since, including with The Word Exchange, a new novel from Alena Graedon (out on April 8).
Fitting for a novel about dictionaries and language, Graedon was dropping cool words all over the place. I was racking up words I wanted to look up later and try to remember for future reference. But then something weird happened.
The Word Exchange is about the near-future, when the printed word and the things that house it (libraries, bookstores, magazines) have become obsolete thanks to the Meme, an iPhone-esque device that anticipates its user’s needs and intuitively delivers information. The Meme has become so thoroughly integrated into everyday life that users no longer need to remember word definitions; the Meme knows them and can retrieve them immediately. Because everyone is so dependent on their Meme for almost everything, including basic word definitions, they trust implicitly whatever the Meme tells them.
But something foul is afoot with Synchronic, the company that manufactures the Memes. For one, it has started buying words and creating new ones for their online marketplace called the Word Exchange. By creating their own repository from which the Memes pull their data, Synchronic’s users become locked in to the company’s proprietary language, which continues to expand with new user-created words that mysteriously (or not so mysteriously) begin taking the place of known words. In other words (ha!), Synchronic’s Meme isn’t freely delivering word definitions from the public domain; it’s selling an inferior product when its users could get better stuff for free. But in the Meme’s seamless digital ecosystem, quicker is easier than better.
Synchronic’s newest device, the Nautilus, takes the next logical step: it’s an electro-biological headpiece that integrates with the user’s brain on the cellular level, allowing for direct and instantaneous communication with the Internet. It would also further meld Synchronic’s manufactured language with its users’ own speech patterns. But that becomes a problem: a new epidemic, dubbed “word flu,” starts infecting Meme and Nautilus users’ speech with artificially manufactured words and wreaking havoc on their bodies.
And this is where the weird began for me. I had written down about a dozen cool words I wanted to remember, like amanuensis, ouroboros, ken, and variegated. Then I ran into a new word I was about to write down when I recognized that it wasn’t real. It was a Synchronic™ word, so to speak—a word created and sold by this secretive company that had snuck into the vocabulary of someone infected with the word flu. Until this moment, I had been an outside observer of the novel’s narrative, watching the characters navigate the shadowy goings-on in this vaguely dystopian near-future. But then I suddenly had a linguistic object lesson that made the novel much more present and prescient.
As a word-themed dystopian thriller, The Word Exchange is right up my (dark) alley. Graedon has a knack for description, though I ironically was most put off by the technical side of her writing style, i.e. an over-reliance on the em dash. Incredibly pedantic, I know, but such is the life of an armchair grammarian. Perhaps this and other choices were conscious and character-driven; if so, very well then. By the look of her Facebook page, Graedon has taken on a kind of skeptical techno-prophetess role to promote the book and guide the discussion around its highly relevant and pressing themes. She can certainly count me as a supporter in that regard.
I don’t know whether it’s due to some paucity in my education, a natural curiosity, or a sort of intellectual masochism (or all three), but I’ve occasionally sought out books about topics that often don’t agree with my brain yet still fascinate me. Being free from the shackles of syllabus reading (however instructional and edifying it often was) has allowed me to dabble in whatever topics I want, leading me down educational pathways I rarely dared to traverse before. I’m thinking specifically about math, science, and the other non-writing disciplines I failed to grasp or hone throughout my structured education.
The Joy of x by Steven Strogatz, a mathematician, is my most recent addition to this “continuing education” subgenre of my reading, and a delightful one. Dubbed “a guided tour of math,” this collection of bite-sized surveys paints key mathematical domains like Numbers, Shapes, and Data in broad strokes, simplified enough for English majors like me to understand them yet dense enough to require complete attention and critical thinking. I view Jennifer Ouellette’s splendid Black Bodies and Quantum Catsin the same league: right-brained books written for left-brainers, gateway drugs to some deeper, weirder stuff that should only be handled by professionals.
And I’m happy to leave that stuff to people like Strogatz (or his counterpart in astrophysics: Neil deGrasse Tyson), who are adept at communicating the importance and often invisible influence of the heady material they study to laypeople like me. The more books like The Joy of x and Black Bodies that are out there on library shelves and bookstores and talk shows, the more likely their subject matter gets the sympathy and support it needs. Though I came from the humanities, I also want STEM to get all the love it needs.
This has been the motto and mission of The Simba Life as I’ve used it since its birth in 2006. My inspiration for the name came from The Lion King, but I’ve long desired to wrestle the Simba name and its connotations away from Disney’s grasp and forge for it a new identity. As the Swahili word for lion, simba has a rich etymological heritage that demands to be explored. What does it mean to be a simba? And what does it mean to live the simba life?
Lions aren’t cartoon characters; they are ancient and majestic creatures, both endangered and dangerous. They are always on the hunt: for food and water, for shade, for new territory. Their search, like that of the Simba of Disney’s imagination, is elemental as much as it is existential. They search because they have to. They need food and water and land like Simba needed escape and discovery and revelation. We humans are also searching for something elemental and existential, whether we know it or not.
The Simba Life isn’t just a place on the internet; it’s a perspective. And since lions don’t roam alone, it’s a perspective I want to share with others who, like me, are wandering through the wilderness with uncertainty and wonder.
Which brings us to Simba Life Quarterly. As a way to expand The Simba Life beyond the confines of a lone voice, I want to produce a quarterly compilation of the work of many authors that lives out the Simba Life creed in different and illuminating ways. Short stories, essays, poetry, photography, film reviews, cultural commentary, songs, artwork–whatever medium it takes to illustrate The Simba Life will be welcome.
Potential SLQ logo. (Kidding.) (Or am I?)
Just as life itself has its seasons, so too will Simba Life Quarterly: the plan now is to release a new issue on each equinox and solstice, with the theme for each edition being the season into which it is transitioning. For the first issue, then, the spring equinox on March 20 makes “the coming of spring” an excellent and welcome motif amidst a brutal winter. The theme of spring won’t necessarily to be explicit in the contributions, but it will be in the DNA.
Indeed, with so many unknowns about how it will look and who will contribute, the SLQ will be a free, digital-only PDF publication, with this blog serving as a supplemental space for contributed content and my own ambles. If you or someone you know would be interested in contributing your own work of art, please contact me at thesimbalife at gmail dot com so we can talk about it.
Though its name might suggest otherwise, I don’t want this to become a stuffy literary magazine or merely an outlet for repressed English majors (ahem). It might be literary, but it also might be absurd, irreverent, witty, acerbic, playful, profound, or something else entirely. I don’t know what it will look like, but hakuna matata, right?
I have no idea how this journey will end. But it has begun, and despite my own apprehensions, I have to either run from it or learn from it. Here’s to hoping you’ll join me in making that choice.
As the second season of House of Cards begins Friday, it’s worth remembering that the Netflix political drama last left us with a prayer.
In last season’s finale, Frank Underwood, the politician who has schemed his way through a twisted plan of revenge, enters a church, gets on his knees and looks skyward. “Every time I’ve spoken to you, you’ve never spoken back,” he says. “Although, given our mutual disdain, I can’t blame you for the silent treatment. Perhaps I’m speaking to the wrong audience.” He then looks to the ground. “Can you hear me?” he implores. “Are you even capable of language or do you only understand depravity?”
Finally, Underwood concludes to the camera: “There is no solace above or below. Only us. Small. Solitary. Striving. Battling one another. I pray to myself, for myself.” As he exits the church he lights a votive candle in an array of lights. Then he blows them all out.
Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, doesn’t just inhabit the darkness; he creates it. And it’s darkness, along with the dirty deeds done in it, that haunts House of Cards. Set in Washington, D.C., the show follows the devious dealings of this veteran Democratic congressman, who feels betrayed by the newly elected president’s failure to appoint him Secretary of State. Embittered by the rejection, Underwood and his wife (Robin Wright) set the course for a new destination: the president’s cabinet.
“Through sardonic fourth wall-breaking asides to the audience, Underwood gives a play-by-play of his master plan as it takes shape, turning viewers into co-conspirators of his Machiavellian machinations. His ambitious plot soon ensnares Zoe (Kate Mara), a young and roguish reporter, and Peter (Corey Stoll), a freshman congressman with a sordid past.
The show’s pilot established D.C. as a place where the high-minded ideals of politicians and journalists belie a shadowy, noir-like underworld. Compromise — both political and moral — will come, like it or not. Underwood is a key player in this world, using his persuasive prowess to bend people his way in his insatiable quest for power.
But every one of Underworld’s power plays has a cost. Taking a step toward his sinister goals often means trampling whichever friend or foe is in his way. Peter was the most tragic victim of Underwood’s unchecked ambition in the first season. It was Zoe, Underwood’s former obsequious bedfellow, who by the end of the season broke free from his stranglehold and began, however unknowingly, to shine a light onto the darkness.
The teaser trailer for the second season shows Underwood taking the oath of office as the new Vice President, but he clearly learned nothing on his climb to the top. “One heartbeat away from the presidency and not a single vote cast in my name,” he says. “Democracy is so overrated.” Underwood mocked heaven and hell back in that season one finale. Yet if he had opened the book next to him then, he would have found a passage in Isaiah 14 that served as a word of warning to the king of Babylon, a ruler whose pride and arrogance would lead to his downfall:
How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! You said in your heart, “I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.” But you are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit.
Frank Underwood is his own conquering hero, but he now has much more to lose. House of Cards looks to continue the ongoing story of darkness versus light. Will Zoe expose Underwood’s deceit? Or will he climb even higher up the ladder? If pride, as they say, comes before the fall, then we’re in for quite a ride.
[Update: the video with show footage was removed, so this one just has the music. Doesn’t have the same effect but it’ll have to do…]
This might be one of my all-time favorite things. It’s the older version of the American Experience opening and theme (composed by Charles Kuskin) that so beautifully juxtaposes things I love dearly: film, American history, and music.
One reason I love reading about American history is this country’s ability to make music out of dissonance. The diversity of stories and characters in this video’s parade of images is but a dip into the great lake of trial and triumph this country and its people have swam in since the beginning. We’ve been at war with ourselves in a million little ways since before we were even a country. The producers of American Experience got that, and illustrated that in this montage.
A buffalo stampede and a Native American, followed by a white pioneer. A nineteenth-century African-American couple, followed by footage of Jackie Robinson. Theodore Roosevelt’s kiddish grin dissolving into the Sierra Nevada, followed by footage of the Dust Bowl, a factory, and a steam engine. Abraham Lincoln split-screened with Martin Luther King. A triumphant General Eisenhower fading to troops in Vietnam.
But the most poignant moment for me is toward the end (at :36 in the video). After a few soaring orchestral lines, the piano takes over the plaintive melody that underscores footage of kids chasing and waving goodbye to a passing vehicle, and then a swooping shot of the Statue of Liberty, America’s long-serving Greeter-in-Chief.
Goodbye and hello. Division and duty. Dissonance and harmony. In documenting this nation’s formative moments and movements, this wonderful PBS program (along with its celebrity brother Ken Burns) has captured the spirit of America. Likewise, this beautiful theme has captured the spirit of the show it represents, and I’m happier for it.
I watched this video from the 2005 Oscars to remember the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, but was reminded when watching it that Heath Ledger was also up for the award that year. And now both men are gone. When an old actor dies we can look back fondly on his career and be grateful for seeing him perform for so long. But when young and gifted men like Hoffman and Ledger died so suddenly, tragically, prematurely, it hurts.
As when Ledger died, when I heard the news of Hoffman’s fatal overdose I mourned not only for his family and friends, but also for the roles he’ll never have. Both men had come so far and done so much, even as relatively young men, yet still had so far to go. Cinema will miss them dearly, and so will I.
I’d like to thank two like-minded quotes for not leaving my conscience alone. I’m not thankful in the happy Thanksgiving sense—more like how someone keeps fighting an argument, if only with himself, though he already knows he’s toast. Fine, I give in, but I’m not happy about it.
The first is from John Wesley’s “Sermon 50” on the use of money:
That wherein you are placed, if you follow it in earnest, will leave you no leisure for silly, unprofitable diversions. You have always something better to do, something that will profit you, more or less. And “whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” Do it as soon as possible: No delay! No putting off from day to day, or from hour to hour! Never leave anything till to-morrow, which you can do to-day. And do it as well as possible. Do not sleep or yawn over it: Put your whole strength to the work. Spare no pains. Let nothing be done by halves, or in a slight and careless manner. Let nothing in your business be left undone if it can be done by labour or patience.
The second is from The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis:
Do not lose heart, then, my brother, in pursuing your spiritual life. There is yet time, and your hour is not past. Why delay your purpose? Arise! Begin at once and say: “Now is the time to act, now is the time to fight, now is the proper time to amend.” When you are troubled and afflicted, that is the time to gain merit. You must pass through water and fire before coming to rest.
These dudes must have had some intense New Year’s resolutions.
I’ve recently started volunteering at the Frances Willard House Museum, specifically in the archives/library, which holds material from and related to the life of Frances Willard, the suffragist and temperance advocate who led the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in the late nineteenth century. I got to see the museum’s recent exhibit, titled “Rights or Responsibilities? The WCTU and Woman Suffrage in Illinois”, which documents the development of the women’s suffrage movement in Illinois and the many players involved.
The exhibit spotlights an occurrence, documented in Willard’s journal, that she said helped to “stir up my spirit into a mighty unrest.” It’s 1856 and Willard, who was 17 at the time, along with her sister saw her brother and father off to vote while they had to stay at home:
This is election day and my brother is twenty-one years old. How proud he seemed as he dressed up in his best Sunday clothes and drove off in the big wagon with father and the hired men to vote for John C. Fremont, like the sensible “Free-soiler” that he is. My sister and I stood at the window and looked out after them. Somehow, I felt a lump in my throat, and then I could n’t see their wagon any more, things got so blurred. I turned to Mary, and she, dear little innocent, seemed wonderfully sober, too. I said, “Would n’t you like to vote as well as Oliver? Don’t you and I love the country just as well as he, and does n’t the country need our ballots?” Then she looked scared, but answered in a minute, “‘Course we do, and ‘course we ought,—but don’t you go ahead and say so, for then we would be called strong-minded.”
Willard did say so. She made saying so her life, which ended in 1898, before the women’s suffrage movement hit its crescendo but not before she had made an indelible impact on it. In addition to the Frances Willard House becoming a National Historic Landmark, she was posthumously honored as the first woman to be represented in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol.
Amazing what you can learn from museums (and archives and libraries), huh?
I tried something different with my recent 2013 Omnilist, naming 13(ish) of my favorite films, books, TV shows, and albums from the last year instead of a traditional top-10 list for each medium. But in that process I had to cut out a lot of films from the final list I otherwise would have loved to highlight. Here, then, are the movies from 2013 I loved a lot, but not quite enough to get on the podium.
Frozen Delightful soundtrack, beautiful setting, and charming voice work (especially by Kristen Bell and Josh Gad). It duplicates the Tangled model, while actually being better than Tangled. I’ve written before about the power certain types of music, especially the showtune kind, can have over me; Frozenhits that sweet spot often. It’s no surprise that Disney is turning it into a stage musical on the quick. I’ll be there.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Like most people, I thought this was much better than the first movie in the series. Like any good sequel, the stakes are higher and we get to see different dimensions of Katniss and Peeta as they struggle with new challenges. Plus: Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The Hunt I really should have included this on the 2013 Omnilist, but something had to give. Mads Mikkelsen, who previously played the oily villain in Casino Royale, shows tremendous range in this film from Denmark (an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language) about a schoolteacher who is accused of pedophilia. His guilt is never assured, so the small Danish village he lives in slowly turns against him and fuels his emotional disintegration. Moments of paranoia and indignation mix with flashes of grace from unlikely places, creating a gripping story in the tradition of Hitchcock’s “the wrong man” chases.
Inside Llewyn Davis This latest Coen Bros. fare would pair nicely with Frances Ha, another story of a twentysomething New York artist struggling to get by and get on, in a “Sign of the Times, 2013 edition” double feature. Llewyn is much less likable than Frances, but likability isn’t often a priority Joel and Ethan Coen have for their protagonists. That didn’t stop me from rooting for him—to make better decisions, to be a better human being. We all can be Llewynesque sometimes: flailing, stubborn, unable or unwilling to see the good in life or in other people. But if we stay that way too long, we too will find ourselves (spoiler alert) knocked out in a dank alley, watching someone else take center stage while we remain stuck in a purgatorial loop. I suppose the only cure is to listen to the film’s excellent soundtrack.
Love Is All You Need I usually have a pretty good idea about movies in theaters that I want to see, but this one came out of nowhere. Pierce Brosnan stars as an irascible divorcé whose son is marrying the daughter of Ida, a cheerful Danish hairdresser who caught her husband cheating. The two meet for the first time at the wedding in Italy and form an unlikely bond that develops throughout the often uncomfortable wedding festivities. Unlike many clichéd rom-coms, this film’s conclusion felt earned. It was a pleasure watching two diametrically different people come together in an uncontrived and sweet way.
Mud Matthew McConaughey is having quite the moment. His performances in The Wolf of Wall Street and Dallas Buyers Clubs are getting a lot of attention, but his turn as a mysterious Arkansan drifter in this Jeff Nichols flick is just as magnetic. Likewise, the two boys who discover Mud squatting in an abandoned boat on an island in the Mississippi River hold their own against McConaughey, who is on the lam but looking to reconnect with his old flame. Mud lives in the same charged atmosphere of Nichols’ previous great films (2007’s Shotgun Stories and 2011’s Take Shelter), where the characters fight mysterious and deadly forces.
Prince Avalanche I’ve never seen a David Gordon Green picture before this one, so when people say it’s a return to form for him, I’ll believe it and consider it a compliment. Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch are an odd but alchemic pairing of laborers repainting traffic lines in the wildfire-ravaged Texas countryside and struggling to reconcile their eccentricities and frustrations. It’s a spartan production with an emotional core, and Paul Rudd, in an uncharacteristically dramatic role, makes it happen.
The Spectacular Now One of the better high school movies I’ve seen, in that it captured that time honestly. I wasn’t like Sutter at all, but I knew kids like him in high school. I was more like Amy, the shy observant type who was attracted to people who seemed to live more interesting lives. Of course, Sutter’s popular-guy routine belied his budding alcoholism and strained relationship with his deadbeat dad, personal problems that caused him to make a number of bad decisions. But that’s high school, right?
Stories We Tell Not quite sure how this documentary didn’t get an Oscar nomination, but it will live on regardless as a story that is both unique and ordinary. Director Sarah Polley tells the story of her life through interviews with her family, weaving in reenactments with home videos and talking heads while also dissecting the medium of storytelling itself. Having just completed an oral history of my grandmother’s life, for which I combined interviews with her and over two dozen family and friend to tell the story of her life, I applaud her attempt to create a clean yet complex narrative out of a messy life.
The World’s End As someone who didn’t enjoy Hot Fuzz as much as Shaun of the Dead, I thought this was a return to the excellent mix of quick wit and cultural commentary Simon Pegg & Co do so well. One of the funnest and funniest moviegoing experiences I had in 2013.
Disney owns the Lost mythology, so why not a Dharma Initiative attraction on Discovery Island? :: http://t.co/AppFOyDL7V— John August (@johnaugust) January 13, 2014
John August’s above tweet informed me that Disney World used to have a wildlife attraction on their massive property called Discovery Island, which was abandoned in 1999 and left to be overrun by wilderness. Shane Perez, a self-described “urban explorer” and photographer, apparently snuck onto the island in 2009 and took some photos of the deserted exhibits and infrastructure.
The place looks eerily beautiful and, as John August suggested, the absolutely perfect place for Disney to install a Lost-themed attraction in the style of the Dharma Initiative’s digs. They would have to do very little; just install a few hatches, ferry over a VW bus or two, and slap a Dharma logo on everything and it’s set. I’d make a trip to Disney just to see that.
