Today I read the
next fifty pages of Ransom Riggs’ Hollow
City. The peculiar children are on their way to London to try and get treatment
for Miss Peregrine when they receive help from an unexpected source: a band of
gypsies. This could have been handled really badly and there’s no doubt that
Riggs’ portrayal of Gipsy culture has more than its fair share of
romanticization. However, given how many portrayals of Roma people are still
unabashedly racist, the way in which Riggs draws parallels between the Gypsies
and the peculiar children (both live on the margins of society), while
predictable, is also valuable for young readers to read. Not incidentally, the
son of the gypsies’ leader also turns out to be peculiar, as he’s slowly
vanishing (an interesting choice of peculiarity!).
I also finished Diana
Fuss’ Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy.
Having begun with a discussion of last words poems, Fuss then moves on to
corpse poems, which she describes as “a first-person poetic utterance, written
in the present or past tense and spoken in the voice of the deceased.” Dividing
such poems into five groups—the comic, the historical, the political, the
religious, and the literary—Fuss is interested in exploring the combative
relationship between the corpse poem and the elegy: “Corpse poems, unlike
elegies, strive to reconstitute death, not to compensate for it.” According to
Fuss, it is this desire to make death meaningful that keeps the corpse poem
alive today. Fuss closes out her book by discussing the form of the aubade,
which traditionally contains the laments of separated/abandoned lovers. This is
a form with a much closer affinity to the elegy, Fuss argues, in that they both
memorialize what is lost. And yet the two forms are also in tension with each
other because the aubade possesses the potential to “ethically outdo the elegy,
finally and fully resisting elegy’s most selfish impulse: to reverse the hands
of time and restore the dead to life.” Fuss concludes this short but
wide-ranging book by emphasizing once again the ethical content of the elegiac
form, a content that maintains the form’s appeal to both modern poets and
readers: “it is the effort to restore
or redress, the desire either to
acknowledge those lost to us or to address those suffering like (or even
instead of) us that powerfully articulates the ethical force at the heart of
modern elegy” (emphasis in original).
Peter Hyams’
sequel to 2001, 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) presents one with a dilemma.
On the one hand, to compare it to Kubrick’s film is unfair and can only reflect
poorly on 2010, but on the other
hand, such a comparison is unavoidable, not least because 2010 invites such a comparison in multiple ways. The best way to
approach this dilemma is not to enumerate the ways in which the sequel is
inferior to the original (what could be more dull?) but instead to note the
differences between them and try to account for those differences. First,
although Kubrick was scrupulous in avoiding any references to the Cold
War/superpower tensions in 2001,
those tensions are at the center of the sequel. Given the political atmosphere
in the US during the Reagan era, this is entirely understandable. Second,
whereas Kubrick minimized dialog and relied as much as possible on visuals,
both dialog and voiceover play a much more prominent role in 2010, especially in the final voiceover,
which essentially explains the meaning of what the audience has just seen as
well as projecting a hopeful future for humankind. Finally, and because of the
role of dialog in the film, there is very little room for ambiguity about what
happens and why in 2010, whereas 2001 is notoriously ambiguous and
therefore productive of many theories about its meaning. If 2001, as its frequently suggested,
perfected the science fiction film while simultaneously rendering it obsolete, 2010 suggests that science fiction
film remained possible after its predecessor, albeit in a (in this case)
relatively unreconstructed form.
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