Culture – Page 21 – Scripturient

Little Dorrit: BBC Drama

We just finished watching the 14-part BBC series of Little Dorrit. As usual with most BBC series, it was superbly cast, acted, paced and filmed. Each episode was a mere 30 minutes, and almost every one of them ended in a cliffhanger fashion that made you want to watch just one more. You might not think of Charles Dickens that way, but much of what he wrote was for serial publication: in weekly or monthly magazines. To keep his audience hooked – and buying the magazines – he wrote cliffhangers. Not perhaps as gripping as, say, episodes of TV’s show ……… click below for more ↓

10,000 or 20,000 hours?

2013-05-16 2013-05-16 Arts / Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

Malcolm Gladwell introduced the concept of the “10,000-hour rule” in his 2008 book, Outliers. As Wikipedia describes it, “…the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.”* Gladwell does not specifically say that 10,000 hours of practice or apprenticeship will make you an expert. Like most things on the internet, it has been altered in the transmission; dumbed down for the simplistic misquotes we love to pair with pictures of kittens or puppies on Facebook. Rather what he said was that it will ……… click below for more ↓

Mastery: Self Help or Just Opinion?

2013-05-06 2013-05-06 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

Robert Greene’s new book has me somewhat flummoxed. It’s not at all like his previous books. The other books of his I have were all ‘meta’ books – books about what others thought on various subjects: power, leadership, war, seduction, politics.* Mastery combines biography with exhortations to raise one’s self up to the level of mastery. We are all potential geniuses. It strikes me as an overly-intellectualized self-help book. So far, anyway. I’m still only mid-book. But the little editorial conceit of capitalizing “Life’s Task” throughout the book already annoys me. That and it’s preachy, moralizing and somewhat condescending tone. ……… click below for more ↓

Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship

2013-05-05 2013-05-05 Arts / Books & Reviews / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

I was 8, maybe 9 years old, when my parents gave me a hardcover copy of Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship by Victor Appleton II. Probably a birthday or Xmas present. I can’t recall which. I just recall how excited I was when I read this book – my earliest experience of science fiction. I soon had a couple of dozen of the Tom Swift books in my collection. My memory of Tom Swift (Jr) and that book came back today when I wandered into a garage sale on Cedar Street and found a copy of the same original ……… click below for more ↓

Snow White and the Huntsman reviewed

2013-05-05 2026-05-25 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Music & ReviewsOne Comment

Take one part Brothers Grimm and one part Malory’s Morte d’Artur, add a dash of Tolkein, a pinch of Joan of Arc, a sprinkling of Robin Hood and a sprig of English folklore; mix it in a bowl with copious CGI, great natural settings, remarkably good stage sets, and what do you have? The 2012 film, Snow White and the Huntsman. The epic film (at least in the two-hour-eleven-minute extended version we watched last night) was an action-packed adventure that never made us feel it was dragging excessively. Seems, however, we and the critics disagree. I was impressed by the ……… click below for more ↓

Shakespeare’s Lost Plays

2013-04-27 2013-05-01 Arts / Books & Reviews / Literary pretensions / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Shakespeare’s canon, as it is known today, is incomplete. The Bard is known to have written several plays that were not, for various reasons, included in the First Folio printed shortly after his death. Other plays, several included in the third folio, were attributed to Shakespeare after that publication, but most are known not to have been written by him, and have since been rejected (called the Shakespeare Apocrypha). Some, like Pericles, have be given grudging acceptance in the modern canon. Many modern scholars accept Pericles as a collaboration between Shakespeare and a lesser talent (George Wilkins is suggested), but ……… click below for more ↓

The Pulp Renaissance

2013-04-20 2013-05-01 Arts / Books & Reviews / Literary pretensions / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

In the late 1950s, I came across a copy (1912; an original edition, I believe) of Edgar Rice Burrough’s first published novel, Tarzan, The Ape Man, on my parent’s bookshelf in the basement. A forgotten book, one my father had likely brought with him from England when he immigrated here in 1947, something from his own boyhood. It sat beside old volumes of the Boy’s Own Annual and other English books. Of course I had to open it and read it. From the very start, I was fascinated by it, by the adventure, by the sheer fantasy of it all. ……… click below for more ↓

Plato, Music and Misquotes

2013-04-20 2013-05-01 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Memes; Internet & Social / Quotes & Mis-quotes11 Comments

I spent a pleasant morning, Saturday, browsing through the works of Plato, hunting for the source of a quotation I saw on Facebook, today.* I did several textual searches for words, phrases and quotes on sites that offer his collected works, along with other works by classical authors. Now I must admit that in my reading, I have not read everything Plato wrote. I’ve read several dialogues, and then mostly pieces from his works. Reading the entire Republic has, sadly, defeated me, but I have it available for another try when I retire. Despite my unfamiliarity with his full canon, ……… click below for more ↓

The Missing Lines

2013-04-19 2018-03-20 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / History & Biography / Literary pretensions / US Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

The National Museum of Iraq – known originally as the Baghdad Archaeological Museum – once housed some of the oldest works of literature in the world. Treasures from the origins of civilization, from the cities of Sumeria, Babylon, Assyria were on display*. In 2003, when the Americans invaded**, a battle was fought between US and Iraqi forces at the museum. The Iraqi troops fled, and looters came in. According to Wikipedia: According to museum officials the looters concentrated on the heart of the exhibition: “the Warka Vase, a Sumerian alabaster piece more than 5,000 years old; a bronze Uruk statue from ……… click below for more ↓

Profundity

2013-04-17 2013-05-01 Arts / Culture / Literary pretensions / My WritingLeave a comment

In 1923, William Carlos Williams wrote one of the most profound poems in the English language: The Red Wheelbarrow. It reads like a Japanese Zen haiku: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. Wikipedia tells us that the poem’s title is not its original, but rather one applied by its readers. The poem was first published in anthology titled Spring and All. The poem itself was simply titled “XXII,” indicating its place in the collection. Referring to the poem as “The Red Wheelbarrow” has been frowned upon by some critics, including Neil Easterbrook, ……… click below for more ↓

April, the cruellest month

2013-04-15 2013-05-01 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / History & Biography / Places & GeographyLeave a comment

April, wrote T.S. Eliot in his remarkable poem, The Waste Land, is the “cruellest month.”* And not merely because of the inclement and unsettling weather that seems to mix winter with spring in unpredictable doses. Nor for the necessity of filing one’s taxes before month end, always a painful chore. I started thinking about April while watching the movie, 1911, about the Chinese uprising against the Qing Dynasty, in 1911 (saw it this weekend). Fascinating period of Chinese history that led to the first republic under Sun Yat Sen, but, I wondered, was it so interesting elsewhere? Yes, it seems ……… click below for more ↓

Enter Christopher Marlowe – Again

2013-03-27 2013-03-27 Arts / Balderdash & Hoaxes / Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Literary pretensions / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

Back in the late 1990s, I wrote an essay about the “controversy” over who actually wrote the works of Shakespeare. I wrote, then, Not everyone agrees that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. The challenge to his authorship isn’t new: for the last three centuries it’s been the most popular whodunit of literature: trying to uncover the true identity of the author of the world’s greatest dramas and comedies. I can’t think of another author of note in the world who is considered not to have written the works under which his or her name is penned. Even Shakespeare’s many contemporaries are considered ……… click below for more ↓

Shaolin: the film

2013-03-17 2013-03-21 Arts / Film & Reviews / Language & Grammar / Music & Reviews / PoliticsLeave a comment

I like Chinese films, particularly the epic wuxia films. They are often a refreshing change from the effects-driven/CGI monstrosities pumped out by Hollywood. They remind me of the westerns of the 1950s, usually with good and bad sides in stark relief. Subtitles don’t bother me (better them than dubbed). I’ve watched the Chinese film industry mature over the past three decades and the quality has become remarkable. Cinematography is sometimes breathtaking. One of the most appealing aspects is that they tend to do more with people than with special effects, which gives crowd scenes a more human, less manufactured feel. Gotta ……… click below for more ↓

10,000 words too many

2013-02-23 2013-02-23 Arts / Books & Reviews / Internet & Social Media / My Writing / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Been working the last two-and-a-half months on my latest book for Municipal World. A bit of a challenge, actually – trying to combine marketing, branding, advertising, public relations and communications topics into one coherent yet succinct package has been difficult. There are so many things to say, so many areas to cover, that brevity often escapes me (there are those that say it’s always that way with me…). I’ve been reading about three dozen books on the topics, and an unknown (but very high) number of websites and white papers on the same subjects. I have almost 2GB of PDF ……… click below for more ↓

Is it time for a Collingwood ukulele group?

2013-02-22 2013-02-22 Arts / Collingwood / Culture / Musical Instruments / Personal Reminiscences2 Comments

When a friend recently told me he had joined the new Guelph ukulele group, it made me somewhat envious. After all, having a local support-performance-practice-chat-socialize group for any hobby is always great. When your hobby is a passion that requires an audience to realize itself fully, a local group is de rigeur. You simply need others people to practice with to get better and share the joy. Uke groups have been springing up all over. The ukulele is currently the most popular musical instrument in the world. The Corktown Ukulele Jam is a weekly group get-together in Toronto that I’ve ……… click below for more ↓