So my summer blockbuster viewing, which got off to a disappointing start with Spider-Man 3 and 28 Weeks Later, went slightly better this afternoon with Shrek the Third. It’s genuinely cute and sort of amusing, and even if it isn’t those things all of the time — and is, more often than not, sort of tedious, really — overall it’s pretty harmless. Faint praise, maybe, but I don’t think I was expecting much more going in.
Month: May 2007
I have never had any faith in humanity. But I will give us props on this: if we can evolve, invent and theorize our way into the technologically magical, culturally diverse and artistically magnificent race we are and still get people to buy the idiotic idea that half of us are inferior, we’re pretty amazing. Let our next sleight of hand be to make that myth disappear.
Maureen F. McHugh has an interesting writing assignment in mind for her students:
Maybe set up a situation–someone walks into a room where someone is dead in a kitchen chair at the table–and generate what might happen next if the character is a detective, or if the character is a twenty-two year old governess who thinks of herself as plain, or if the character is a psychopathic killer, or if the character is a child. I’m very interested in the conventions we have established and in what reader expectations are in these situations, and how we deal with reader expectations. I think that a lot of plot is a tightrope walk between the cliche and the completely unexpected.
The strange side effect of today’s meta-stories is that kids get exposed to the parodies before, or instead of, the originals. My two sons (ages 2 and 5) love The Three Pigs, a storybook by David Wiesner in which the pigs escape the big bad wolf by physically fleeing their story (they fold a page into a paper airplane to fly off in). It’s a gorgeous, fanciful book. It’s also a kind of recursive meta-fiction that I didn’t encounter before reading John Barth in college. Someday the kids will read the original tale and wonder why the stupid straw-house pig doesn’t just hop onto the next bookshelf.
Via Gwenda Bond.