31 Days, 31 Memories - Day 18

[bironic]

Alan and Denny mambo-ing in Denny's office for several minutes. Is all I have to say about "Boston Legal" tonight.

18. Elementary School

For a few years as a kid I watched and re-watched the Superman movies, especially the second one, which starts with Clark and Lois at Niagara Falls, and Superman has to rush to rescue a boy who plummets toward the water after playing on the wrong side of a railing. I decided, for whatever reason, to try the boy's game once at school. It hadn't looked very difficult and I thought his mistake was only a plot device. Like he'd done, I stood on the bottom of the cubby shelf and took turns gripping the bar on top, left hand, right hand, left again, with a brief space in between where neither hand touched the bar and I fell slightly backwards before catching hold of it again. Easy. Until I missed, once, and stumbled backwards into a desk. Into the falls. The teacher wanted to know what I was doing.

Comments

[bironic.livejournal.com]

I've also found that it's hard when parents react like this. My father is resistant to the idea of fiction in general, preferring science -- though I've persuaded him in the past year or so to read HP and now The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe -- and often doesn't understand how it can be healthy to spend so much time dipping into novels and TV shows and movies when they aren't "real." And when I started reading vampire lit back in high school my mother similarly freaked out, demanding to know what was so attractive about blood-sucking, violent freaks (she thought). It took years to get her to understand their appeal.

Not everything in the imaginary world is imagined. Must be the lesson of that one...

Funny, I was just writing down what happened. I wonder if that's one of the marks of a storyteller's brain, that you have a sense of what the story should contain (whether it's fictional or not) and how it should be told, without necessarily consciously recognizing the meaning(s) of that story. Last week pynelyf had a similar comment about how my memory of finding a missing book in the back of my desk had a wry humor about it, which I didn't notice while writing.

I think this ties in to how much a reader can interpret from a book vs. what the author "intended."

[kabal42.livejournal.com]

My father at least seems to have a liking for fiction, and a little for the fantastic. He's at least read Lord of the Rings and while he doesn't really like sci-fi or fantasy, he likes "magic realism" and stuff like Umberto Eco or Karen Blixen. So there's a little more understanding there.


Good point, the intention vs. interpretation. It's always been a favourite paradox of mine, the way we interpret the works of writers and artists. There can indeed be intent behind it, but sometimes it's just a story and all we read in to it comes from us rather than the author. lysa1 had an entire class on this at the U and told me it's called structuralistic critiscism.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Whereas my father hadn't heard of C.S. Lewis or the Chronicles of Narnia until he read the movie review. *shakes head*

Note to self: look up structuralistic criticism.

[maddy-harrigan.livejournal.com]

This mistrust of anything that isn't "realistic" or "relevant" both saddens and terrifies me. People NEED fantasy, we NEED fairy tales, because we need to be able to imagine a better world. Whenever I finish reading Narnia, I end up peering around this suddenly dull-looking, ordinary world of mine, filled with this tremendous LONGING.

For backup, I turn to Lewis himself.

This is from The Silver Chair, when the heroes are trapped in the Underground World of the Witch, being enchanted to believe that the things they remember from the World Above are only dreams or make-believe.

"Suppose we HAVE only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours IS the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."

Or, to take another source:

"These all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For ... [they] desire a better country." (the letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11)

[bironic.livejournal.com]

That is a fantastic quote from The Silver Chair. Must read it. *mutters* Must read a lot of things...should quit job to make more time for literary pursuits...