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| Annoying Post About My SonUnsubstantiated(able) Claim (high bias):
My son is the smartest toddler I've ever met.
De-centering Qualification:
Except that he's not potty-trained.
Hyper-hyphenated Sentence of Support:
His almost-three-year-old's social-linguistic-skill-set-competencies astound.
Anecdotal Evidence (One):
While playing with a plastic gorilla in the tub, he dropped it and then scrambled to find it. After a while he held it up to me and said, "I didn't realize that it was beneath me."
I don't think I've ever used the word "beneath" around him, aside from singing it in verse 8 of St. Patrick's Breastplate at church most Sundays.
Anecdotal Evidence (Two):
While playing, I told him I was going to build a bridge and began standing blocks up longways. Eliot looked at what I was doing and said, "You can't build a bridge like that." I said that I could and kept at it. Eliot watched, until he apparently became exasperated at my audacity and said, "You can't be serious, Dad."
This is not a turn of phrase that Abby or I use at all, and I don't specifically remember it coming up in "The Incredibles," which is a serious influence in our household.
Conclusion:
My son impresses me on a regular basis.
Addendum:
For anyone who looks at these and asks "Who cares?" I feel that. Parents are easily impressed by their own flesh, much in the same way anyone might be impressed if they engineered a robot that could complete the simplest tasks with a substandard degree of competence, like walking clunkily around a room without bumping into anything. This isn't to undermine the parental pride of watching a child develop and grow, just to put it in context. There's nothing wrong with folks other than the parents not caring about a child's development, but through the parents' eyes a child's increasingly humanoid accomplishments delight and surprise primarily because of their simplicity. Just watching Eliot play in a wading pool unassisted used to be enough to lump my throat with a weird pride. He is me, but quickly becoming more and more him.
The joy of recognizing both strong bonds and total difference surpasses all understanding. That joy roots itself in God's creative joy, where He delights to put Himself into the world, and yet make that world separate from Himself. Where He can revel in the tensions between Him and not-Him, and feel pride in our smallest accomplishments and changes.
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| That's WIKI-Wonderful!There there are many ways to die unusual deaths.
Note: Some of these are pretty unpleasant.
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| I'm Not Much for the Theology Posts . . .But I thought that if anyone who, in an astronomical concurrence, both reads this blog and has questions about the Federal Vision actually wanted to get a broad-strokes notion of what FV is all about, this makes a good starting point.
It's not objective. Everyone involved in the statement is an FV thinker. But it does present both the common strains of thought within FV and those on which the authors have not reached consensus.
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| Nouvelle Verite and the Art of the FecundWill Oldham, (AKA-ed singer/songwriter Bonnie 'Prince' Billy), and Justin Rice are two among hip indie musicians to star in hip indie movies and turn in solid performances. Part of the charm of Old Joy (featuring Oldham) is its willingness to create space around characters by looking out on the world around them. Part of the problem of the movie is that the out-looking often draws attention to itself. Like Lost In Translation, the movie sets its scope small and focuses on what is essentially one emotion, and builds toward one, almost minor, moment.
Mutual Appreciation (featuring Rice) works sort of similarly, and is overall a better movie. It's semi-hamstrung by the fact that it fits within the "Twenty-Something Slacker" genre, though the movie does not quite deserve the label. (Twenty-somethings agonizing over their directionless-ness in NYC appeal to me less and less the more interesting and fulfilling my life and family in the Northwest become. NYC increasingly seems symbolic of a successful attempt to idolize childless meandering.) Its characters are true to life and lovable in the way that real people are lovable, which is to say all the more so for not being entirely lovable. It fulfills the dramatic dictum to "make an audience care about characters." The second part of that dictum is to then "put those characters in danger." I won't say that there isn't any danger for any of these characters (Old Joy included), but the danger is primarily internal and ordinary.
Now the fact that I enjoyed both of these movies, and Mutual Appreciation in particular, stirs up conflict for me, who oh so recently went on an extended Cormac McCarthy binge. McCarthy, who claims to not understand literature where life is not at stake, does use internal conflict, but only glancingly suggests it in characters threatened by loss of life. Both his drama and the subsequent reflection prompted by it arise out of strong conflict over survival.
Thankfully, there's no reason to really choose between these extremes. I'm of the mind that we ought to take our aesthetic pleasures as they come. However, there's no question that movies like these, light on conflict, tend toward the trite, where big, life-and-death conflicts tend towards grandeur.
Two quick off-shoots:
1) Mutual Appreciation is a story that could never be a novel. Nothing about it would work. It's entirely dependent on the characters as they exist on-screen, which is a great thing for a movie to be.
2) From the Childless NYC thing above: Joyce viewed the Irish Catholic attitude toward birth-control as a "crime against fecundity," by which he ostensibly meant personal and aesthetic fruitfulness. However, I'm more and more convinced of the necessity that artists be reproductively fecund. Of course, I'm not arguing the Catholic approach, but those who've followed Joyce seem to promote crimes against fecund maturity. An artist who hasn't experienced love of his own child and the attending trials, has limited his emotional scope needlessly, and finds little to tie him to the rest of humanity, who bear children prolifically and have for centuries.
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| All I Do Anymore Is Post Movie PreviewsThe director of Forrest Gump, a comic book and young adult author, the other guy with a story credit on Pulp Fiction, George McFly, Shiloh's Mama, John Malkovich and others have all gotten together to remake everyone's favorite Anglo-Saxon Epic: Beowulf.
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