Posts Tagged ‘Beowulf’
Monday Morning Links!
* Call for Papers: “Reframing Science Fiction.”
* Chris Ware: Why I Love Comics.
* Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical.
* I just can’t believe “crip theory” is really a brand with staying power, but it’s showing up in job titles now.
* Margaret Atwood on our real-life dystopia: “What really worries me is creeping dictatorship.” Oh, if only it were “creeping!”
* All Things Must Pass: McDonald’s franchisees say the brand is in a ‘deep depression’ and ‘facing its final days.’
* Who’s to Blame for Mass Incarceration?
* Teach the controversy: Is UC spending too little on teaching, too much on administration? More links below the chart.
* The Plan to Make California Wet By Bringing Back Beavers.
* Buck Rogers and the Copyright Trolls.
* Free the cheese bandits. Free all political prisoners.
* I still think Democrats are severely discounting the possibility that Clinton gets indicted.
* Vox, the website that explains the news, suggests Nordic genetic superiority might explain Denmark’s social institutions. Interesting, but not dispositive! I get that this is supposed to be a troll, but all the same…
* Wealth therapy tackles woes of the rich: ‘It’s really isolating to have lots of money.’
* Fukushima Looks Like An Apocalyptic Ghost Town 4 Years After The Nuclear Disaster.
* A few days ago, a reddit user posted a thought-experiment about living in Las Vegas and working in San Francisco, commuting four days a week by airplane. Their back-of-the-envelope calculations have them saving about $1100/month.
* I’ll allow it: Larry David Fulfills Destiny, Plays Bernie Sanders In SNL Cold Open. Bonus David Content! Larry David’s Daughter’s Instagram Will Make You Wish She was Your Best Friend.
* Beowulf vs. Satan vs. Grendel vs. Dracula.
* I’ve seen this movie: Aer Lingus Passenger Flips Out, Bites Fellow Passenger, Dies.
* And somehow I always knew it would end like this: Japan Engineers Design Robotic Bear to aid in Assisted Suicide.
Tuesday Links
* Essential for faculty with student loans: How to use the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Act. See also: The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual.
* The most insidious feature of kludgeocracy is the hidden, indirect, and frequently corrupt distribution of its costs. Those costs can be put into three categories — costs borne by individual citizens, costs borne by the government that must implement the complex policies, and costs to the character of our democracy. Kludgeocracy in America.
* Gasp! UW administrators received largest share of raises in 2012-13.
* In black communities and black families, like the one where I’m from, kids are chosen. Knowing that the odds are against us, kids that show promise (not always academic, but athletic, musical, etc.) at an early age carry the hopes of their families and communities. They are supposed to defy the statistics to go out and become doctors and lawyers and send for mom, dad, and grandma. I was one of those kids: never got into any real trouble, maintained good grades, somehow managed to perform well on the ACT despite my school’s terrible preparatory program, and fell into a full scholarship at my state’s flagship university despite zero knowledge of how to apply to college. I was on track, but somehow along the line something happened, and I feel as if I failed to meet my end of the bargain.
I didn’t lose my way in some extravagant fashion by being kicked out of school or falling into a drug conviction. My deviation was much more subtle. Rather than going to school to be an engineer or a pharmacist, I chose to be a sociologist.
* There is a paradox in the workings of higher education so insidious that, even while it is destroying one’s life, the victim still rejects the possibility it exists. The seemingly impossible contradiction is that even though one is well educated, hardworking, and employed at a prestigious institution the recompense granted is a salary below the national poverty level.
* Museum of Science Fiction May Become Reality In D.C.
* Median wage falls to lowest level since 1998. Forty Percent Of Workers Made Less Than $20,000 Last Year.
* Childcare is crazy expensive.
* Beowulf opening line misinterpreted for 200 years?
* This isn’t because The Walking Dead is especially complicated, or even because, compared to its contemporaries, its cast is unmanageably large. It’s simply because The Walking Dead doesn’t care — not about internal logic, not about emotional or psychological coherence, not about its own ongoing history. And not at all about consequences.
Anglo-Saxons of the Caribbean
Gary Kamiya has a nice comparative look at the film adaptations of Beowulf and Lord of the Rings, including some interesting words from the man himself:
In a famous allegory, Tolkien compared the author of “Beowulf” to a man who, inheriting a field full of ancient stones, used them to build a tower. His friends, recognizing that the stones had belonged to a more ancient building, tore down the tower “in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions.” What they did not realize, Tolkien ends, was that “from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.”
Tolkien’s point is that the fantastic elements in “Beowulf” are ancient archetypes that have deep roots in human beliefs, fears and wishes — myths, in other words. And in “Beowulf,” he argues, these myths are an essential part of a tragic tale whose theme is “man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time.” The greatness of Beowulf derives from the fact that it is a poem created in “a pregnant moment of poise”: It is balanced between a Christian worldview, in which death and defeat are ultimately themselves defeated by Christ, and a Germanic, pagan one, in which fate rules all and man’s courage alone confers nobility. It is, Tolkien writes, not a primitive poem, but a late one. The pagan world is already past, but the poet still celebrates its vanished power. The fact that a poem written more than a thousand years ago was itself looking back at a lost world gives the poem an uncanny double resonance to the modern reader: “If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo.”
Meanwhile, elsewhere at Salon, Andrew Leonard is concerned about inconsistency and arbitrariness in wizarding law.
Gerry Canavan 