Platypus of Truth

My wife and I were discussing our favorite books from the Chronicles of Narnia on our way back from lunch.  My wife, true to her sunny personality, is a staunch fan of "The Voyage of the Dawntreader."  I can't argue with that choice but, when push comes to shove, "The Silver Chair" has always been my favorite. I have a bit of a theory.  I think "The Voyage of the Dawntreader" is Lewis' grail legend.  If that's so, then I'd hazard a guess and say that "The Silver Chair" is his "Pilgrim's Progress." -just think about the shape of Puddleglum's hat and the fact that he lives in the Fen Country and you'll see what got me thinking down this line. That brings me to why I like "The Silver Chair" so much.  When I was little, we had a children's version of "Pilgrim's Progress" that my mom used to read to me.  I lived in New England and the Christianity I was raised with had a heavy tin

Why do we love to explore? I've played Squaresoft's "Secret of Mana" through more times than I care to count.  As I've stated earlier, it has sentimental value to me.  In the final analysis, however, sentimental value only goes so far.  So why do I keep playing. It's a fair question.  Look at the map.  You'll see that the world of "Secret of Mana" is no where near as complex as that of "Final Fantasy III."   In addition, the English dialog is simple to the point of being facile; though, from what I hear, that's not the translator's fault.  The whole look of the game is brightly colored and rather on the "cutesy" side.  The only place where it really measures up to the Final Fantasy series is in the soundtrack which is beautiful and moving, especially considering the primitive tools they had to work with.  All that said, I still love this game. So what's so great about "Secret of Mana?"  In two wo

Usually I wait until summer to devote myself to pulp, but a gift certificate from a student allowed me to get started early this year.  With my love of (most) things Victorian, and my interest in pulp, it was inevitable that I would turn to works of Rider Haggard and his celebrated creation, Allan Quatermain.  Having just finished "King Solomon's Mines" last night, I am ready to report. I grew up with the Indiana Jones movies.  Late in college I was introduced to Allan Moore's (what ever shall we do with him?  He is the Alcibiades of the comic world.) "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."  With these things under my belt, as it were, I must confess that I was worried that the source would not live up to my expectations.  Lesson number one, grasshopper, never doubt the Great Books (at least not in that way)!  "King's Solomon's Mine's" lives up to all the hype.  From the first page to the last, it was one straight-forward, rollicking adv

I was pleased to note this past weekend that my post on "miniature worlds" made the "33 Things" list over at the Evangelical Outpost.  Huzzah!

I was explaining regionalism to my students this morning and trying to get them to understand that authors from various regions of the country have a distinct "flavor" even though they're all Americans.  In an attempt to sell them on the artistic value of regionalism, I borrowed a little bit from Chesterton and told them that Shelton Connecticut is my Pimlaco.  It doesn't matter if anyone's ever heard of it, loving Shelton gives a rootedness to all I do.  I then proceeded to list for them a dew New England authors and attempted to sketch out what exactly the New England "flavor" is. My List: Herman Melville Nathanael Hawthorne Edgar Allan Poe H.P. Lovecraft John Knowles (as an outside-insider) What do I notice as the hallmarks of New England literature? First, there's a heavy emphasis on the spiritual side of life.  With the exception of "outsider" Knowles' "A Separate Peace," each author's work is unapologetically suf

This string of posts began with a list of my three favorite books .  I'm not always up for lists of favorites, though I've created a few for this blog, but I was inspired after seeing this post to try and think through what books influenced my life the most.  It's also a fitting question since I just asked my students to write a one to two page paper on the topic of "whether a book can change someone's life."  Without further ado, then, here is my best guess at the books that changed my life.  Note: they are in no particular order. 1. The Gospels; especially Luke and John.  It was a close reading of the gospels during my first two years of high school that solidified my commitment to the Christian faith. 2. Job.  Having suffered from childhood cancer, the problem of pain has been at the core of my life.  Job helped create a context for beginning to wrestle with that question. 3. The Oresteia.  Aeschylus' handeling of the problem of pain, especially in t

M My students and I have reached  "Balin and Balan" in our trek through Tennyson's "Idylls of the King."  In this idle we find a demon knight terrorizing a haunted wood and sallying forth from a cave called "the mouth of hell."  Great stuff for quest literature.  Over the course of the poem it is hinted at that the demon knight may King Pellam's disaffected son, Garlon.  The image and the name stuck in my head for some odd reason.  It was only after something totally unrelated set me to thinking about my childhood that I made the connection.  In the original Final Fantasy, the first quest that the Light Warriors face involves tracking a demon knight to a ruined, cave-like temple.  The knight's name?  Garland.  It's probably a coincidence, but the connection intrigued me; two little bits of my childhood linking up and making a whole.  Even stranger, several of my students have played that game in its re-release and would get the connection i

Tolkien detested all things French.  Ok, so maybe Humphry Carpenter over-states Tolkien's sentiments just a bit on that count.  We're also assured by other Tolkien specialists that Tolkien found the Arthur legends too French to be a proper English mythology.  Still, every schoolboy of Tolkien's era would have had to know his Tennyson.  Oxford may have been designed to beat it out of you, but some of it must still have stuck.  In Charles Williams' case, a lot of it stuck (perhaps because he never went to Oxford).  Now maybe it's just coincidence, but I've been seeing some odd parallels between Tennyson's "Passing of Arthur" and Tolkien's "Return of the King." Don't believe me?  Here we go.  Though neither Frodo nor Arthur are killed in battle, each receives wounds that cannot be healed in this world and have to pass over to an earthly paradise.  To reach this earthly paradise, they must travel by boat with supernatural atte

Some time ago, I set out to cover the major works of author Robert Heinlein.  Along with Isaac Azmov and Ray Bradbury, Heinlein set the standard for post-war science fiction.  I'm not big on sci-fi, but with a reputation like that, Heinlein's a "must-read."  Previously, I'd taken a look at "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "Podkayne of Mars."  "Stranger in a Strange Land" is still on the list.  I've just finished "Starship Troopers" and so it's prime time for a review. I think I've enjoyed "Starship Troopers" even more than "Podkayne of Mars" and "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."  The later is pretty hard to beat!  "Starship Troopers," however, seems to present Heinlein at his best: futuristic military fiction with a lot of arm-chair philosophy thrown in.  This, even more than the other works, cemented for me the title he earned during the sixties of "the dean o

The kingdom of Hyrule has one castle, one village, one church, and a myriad of ruins left from an older civilization. Evidence suggests that the primary industries of Hyrule are logging and fishing. No evidence of large-scale agriculture exists and, as such, we must conclude that a large portion of the kingdom's foodstuffs are imported. Hyrule makes Lichtenstein look large. On the other hand, maybe asking where Link gets his rice balls is like asking where the Narnian factory is that supplies Mrs. Beaver with her sowing machine. A friend of mine, staring at the map of Mordor that hung on the wall in our bachelor apartment, once asked how Sauron could feed all his orks. Another friend and I quickly pointed to the sea of Nurn and explained that there was an agricultural region on its banks and that additional foodstuffs could be imported from the tributary states in the south. It wasn't the answer he expected. The point is that Tolkien had an answer for just about everyt

My brother and I were talking the other day and he mentioned that he'd gotten into playing Evony. He said the nice thing about it was that no matter what else was going on in his day, he could spend a few minutes in a world where everything is just for fun. No matter how many times you die or fail you can always get up and try again. That put me in mind of something a family friend said once. He was out on the mission filed at the time and said that the fun of playing a video game was that it offered you thirty minutes of control no matter how out-of-control the rest of your life was. That got me thinking. What is the proper roll of control in our lives? Our impulse is often to say that seeking control is bad. However, there are types of control that are vital to daily living: self-control, control over vehicles, control over our budgets, control over the materials that we use to do our jobs. Psychologists tell us that when we lose control in one area of our lives, we of