Platypus of Truth

This August marks the 100 year anniversary of the Great War.  Soon, there will be none left who remember the world as it was before that cataclysm.  It is passing out of living memory.  In a smaller way, the work of J.R.R. Tolkien is passing.  His son and collaborator is in his eighties and when Christopher dies, we will lose our direct connection with the world of Middle Earth.  Christopher Tolkien seems to sense this and so the pace of publishing his father's unpublished works has increased over the past decade.  This can feel like a mixed blessing: even Tolkien's junvenalia is better than many scholars and fatansists best work, but do we need another fragment or pile of lecture notes? Answers to that question will differ, but I think each posthumous publication should speak for itself.  In this case, Tolkien's translation of Beowulf and the attending commentary is a treasure in and of itself.  That is to say, one needn't be a Tolkien enthusiast to appreciate it

Well, the semester grades are in and that means it's time to begin thinking about summer reading.  The semester closed out with me working my way through the complete Calvin and Hobbes and I also managed to sneak in The Goblins of Labyrinth by Brian Froud.  So, to start off the official 2014 Summer Reading list, I'll begin with more Calvin and Hobbes and The World of the Dark Crystal by Brian Froud.  I'd also be terribly remiss if I didn't include the recently released Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary by J.R.R. Tolkien.  Obligations out of the way, I'm also looking forward to a brilliant little micro-history of the town I grew up in written by the daughter of the founder: Saltbox House by Jane de Forest Shelton.  All things New England are welcome right now, so I imagine that there will also be a few volumes on the Puritans.  On the far side of my historical interests, I'm also contemplating a return to Chinese History with some Jonathan D. Spence.  Of

Where shall the word be found,  where will the word Resound?  Not here, there is not enough silence -T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday We are afraid of interior space.  Our lives are filled with movement and noise.  We hate them, we love them, and we cannot live without them.  Why?  Movement and noise fill.  Inner silence is empty.  Emptiness hurts.  The empty stomach pains us.  An empty life grieves and depresses us.  In a world of constant stimulus, quiet unnerves and threatens because it alerts us to our lack -and we're not used to that.  Late Modernity offers so many solutions, such possibility for satiety, that we have little experience of "going without" and when we do experience genuine lack we expect there to be an immediate "fix."  When there is none, we panic, we fell guilty, we become angry.  Yet the things that are truly worth having can't come to us until we are willing to live with the lack.  That might give us pause except that in a broken worl

A further thought occurred to me over the past week and I thought I'd add it as an addendum to my previous post .  I noticed that the plot felt "tighter" in the more constrained first third of the game.  The slums under Midgar are constrained in space, atmosphere, tone, action, and cast.  It is a wonderful feeling when you finally get out of Midgar and find a whole world to explore.   That said, after a half-hour or so of play it becomes clear that this new world is far more diffuse.  The cast begins to widen out beyond what the story is able to fully develop.  The action for many hours consists of chasing Sephiroth to a series of new locations that are only visited once or twice and these new locations lack the deep and consistent atmosphere of Midgar.  All these changes alter the tone of the story in ways that can be jarring.  The "tightness" wasn't there any more. Thinking about this reminds me of G.K. Chesterton's aphorism: "art is limitation.

So here's to the one I never got to play.  Some of us missed the bus when SquareSoft made the jump to Play Station.  The most I saw of Final Fantasy VII when I was growing up was thirty or so minutes of the opening.  Since then, I've heard nothing but rave reviews, but with no Play Station, no game.  The fact that a PC version was released at the same time seems to have escaped me.  Anyhow...  Steam was running a sale on the PC version this past Christmas and I decided it was time to finally sit down and find out what all the flap was about.  So here are my thoughts; a decade late and more than a dollar saved. The first thing I noticed (especially after having just replayed Final Fantasy VI) was the huge leap forward in graphics from previous titles.  We not only get a more visually dynamic battle arena, we also get a more subtle medium for story-telling culminating in several extended and well-done cinematics.  The polygons are clumsy by today's standards and there are