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On the recommendation of my Slovak tutor, of all people, our family watched the Walt Disney dog adventure Eight Below. The dogs are by far the stars here – gorgeous and intelligent, fiercely loyal, affectionate and courageous. Um, I wish I could be half as good as one of these dogs!

The human characters are interesting enough to not ruin a great dog movie. Their acting isn’t terrible, and they end up pulling together to do something almost 100th as heroic as the dogs (not bad for a dog movie).

If you are concerned about frightening scenes that might disturb small children, Paula only screamed once….

We finally got around to watching Julie & Julia the other night. The movie intertwines two stories: that of Julia Child and her husband Paul, from their arrival in Paris in 1949 to the publication of her cookbook, and that of Julie and her husband. I don’t remember Julie’s last name, or the name of her husband, because I found her story far less compelling than Julia’s, and really it only served (for me) as a vehicle to deliver Julia’s story. A movie about someone writing a blog as a therapeutic exercise and achieving a kind of “gilt by association” with a truly interesting person just doesn’t appeal to me.

On the other hand, Julie’s dishes made me very, very hungry!

Another joy of watching this film is Meryl Streep’s performance. Incredible. Another reminder that she is among the greatest actresses of our time….

In The Cold War: A New History, Yale history professor John Lewis Gaddis writes with skill that does justice to one of the most remarkable periods of history. His narrative isn’t simply chronological, but a presentation of the history seven times, from seven perspectives or themes. (Which reminds me of the book of Revelation – but I don’t have time to explore that analogy further.) The details of the story that have been revealed since the opening of the records from behind the former Iron Curtain are sometimes chilling and often change or at least challenge our old perceptions.

The highest drama for me, though, remains the rapid unravelling of communism in Europe in and around 1989. I’ve read several accounts of those events, and am always incredulous – though it happened in front of me.

Read this book!

The Hurt Locker was intense and interesting to watch as what seemed like a realistic peek into some of the dangerous soldiering going on in Iraq. Interesting to watch, and helpful to think about. The tag line is “War is a drug,” and that assertion is embodied in spades in the main character, Sergeant James. Drugs, of course, can be medicinal, sometimes necessary for healing; they can have nasty side effects or even induce fatal allergic reactions; they can also be addicting and provoke behavior that is dangerous to the addict and to everyone around him.

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Yes, I’ve lately been reading several works by and about C. S. Lewis – but he’s long been a favorite, and always will be. Recently I gave a copy of The Great Divorce (in Slovak) to a dear friend here, and that made me want to read it again. And though it’s nowhere near the achievement of Till We Have Faces, with its long stretches of expository dialogue, it still sparkles with its refreshing imagery. And even the less creatively written sections show remarkable insight into human nature.

One thing that caught my eye in this reading: I wondered who was the real-life model for Lewis as he wrote about the woman (Sarah Smith) who appears in chapter 12. Remember that we are in heaven, or at least on the outskirts of heaven. Sarah is a saint, and she is attended by quite a retinue, and the narrator asks his guide (George MacDonald) about them: (more…)

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves—
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress’d.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but ’tis not true!
And then we will no more be rack’d
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.

—from Matthew Arnold, “The Buried Life,” 45-76

For several years I longed for a copy of Peter J. Schakel’s Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces, but it was out of print – and used copies were rare and pricey. Before I moved to Slovakia, however, a thoughtful and generous friend went beyond the call of friendship to find a copy and nab it for me. I’m not sure how he did it – but I’m glad he did. I just finished reading it in preparation for tomorrow’s TWHF festival, and can confirm that my lust for this book was well justified, and well rewarded. Schakel helped me appreciate and delight in my favorite book even more than I already did.

And I’m happy to let you know that it’s back in print and you can grab your own copy at Amazon – or if you prefer to spend no money at all, you can even read it online here.

I’ve mentioned before the generosity of Slovaks and their core need to reciprocate any act done on their behalf. One common manifestation of this is that if you invite some Slovaks to dinner, they will never show up empty-handed. Very nice.

Last night proved to be a special instance of this: we invited our friends from Jaslovske Bohunice for dinner, and they showed up not only with a lovely bottle of wine, but with a box full of some homemade Vetrniky! The exclamation point, the boldface type, the italics, and the hedonistic photograph below are justified by these marvelous little caramel-capped, creampuff-like nuggets of wonder.

And Daniela made them well.

I can’t wait till next Saturday. Paula and I and several of our friends will gather in our home, grind and brew some fresh-roasted Ethiopian coffee, sit in our extravagantly comfortable living room, and spend who knows how long talking about my all-time favorite book.

I just finished my umpteenth reading of C. S. Lewis’s incomparable Till We Have Faces – and I was yet again moved. More than moved: shaken. Orual’s story is simply terrifying. Her long life of self-delusion – her unbending conviction that she loves her sister Psyche well, when all the time she in fact (as Bardia’s widow tells her) doesn’t know the first thing about love – is so convincing and so thorough that it presses me to probe deep within my own heart with dozens of embarrassing questions. Really, why do I like this book? It’s exhausting to read, and every time I read it I know it will be. So again: why? (more…)

Paula and I read a movie last night. (Read the subtitles, that is.) Summer Hours raises questions about what keeps families together across generations – or, perhaps, about what does not keep them together. It raises questions about the objects to which we attach both sentimental and aesthetic value, and how we maintain that value – or don’t maintain it. It raises questions about globalization, prosperity, integrity, history, and our relationships to them all.

It raises lots of big questions, and shows how some interesting people deal with them – or fail to deal with them – but as near as I can tell, it doesn’t manipulate you into a certain way to answer them. Which, I think, makes this an excellent movie to start a discussion that could go well beyond the wide boundaries of the film itself.

Let me put my recommendation this way: if you had asked me right after it ended whether I liked it, I probably would have said something like, “Hmmmmm….” But I woke up this morning thinking about it.