Can I play with [Katniss]?* (spoilers below the ===)

I had had The Hunger Games on my “to read” list for a long time – I had seen a quick synopsis, and it sounded great. Then it started to get more attention, and I heard things like “If you liked Twilight. you’ll LOVE this,” which was a humongo-turnoff, so I put it out of my mind. Sarah read and devoured the books, and she’s normally a slow reader, so I looked at that as a vote in favor, but then again she did actually *like* Twilight, so it was still a mixed vote. When the movie came out, she and I saw it on opening day (!) in good seats at the Uptown (!!) and it was excellent. So it got back onto my list to read.

I figured that it would be a good airplane read, so I picked it up from the library last week when I found out I’d be going away. Well, I was wrong about one thing – I couldn’t wait for the flight, and finished it within about 30 hours of starting, which then left me extremely hungry for the remainder of the series. Happily, the airport bookstore had used copies of the other two, and I made equally short work of those.

These are excellent books – they are everything that a “classic” juvenile novel (in the tradition of Robert Heinlein) is supposed to be: thought-provoking and challenging, rip-roaring, and extremely relatable. To really talk about the book requires spoilers, so if you haven’t read it, go read it and come back: I’ll still be here.

===========Spoilers Below!==============================

Welcome back. The libertarian sensibility of the overarching story is appealing to me – that the biggest enemy is the government, and that the government would think nothing of drafting its children for gladiatorial combat is a classic SF extrapolation of the evils of the totalitarian states of the 20th century. I particularly like the book-not-movie-Tolkien-style demonstration of how being in and complicit to warfare changes a person for the worse – even a just war is still dehumanizing. Apparently the revolution will be televised.

I didn’t catch until it was pointed out that the name of the country, Panem is Latin for “bread” (my old teachers are certainly shaking their heads at the schoolboy fail there), but I should have – certainly the Roman allegory is played up in the dystopian environment.

I thought that Collins did an excellent job of making Katniss appealing and competent without any of the hyper-competence which is all too common in much fiction (Harry Potter, I’m looking at you) – her failures and mistakes are the teaching moments which allow her to grow, and allow us the readers to be brought along in the narrative. Collins did abstract the world – as far as we know, there aren’t any countries other than Panem: if there were, why wouldn’t district 13 (or the capitol for that matter) have enlisted aid?

There was one blind spot – the books had a complete absence of religion, which calls out for an explanation. During all of the other oppressive regimes in human history, religion has been one of the things to which the subject population has turned – think of American slaves singing spirituals, or of the various folks who rebelled against the USSR or currently against China – religion ends up being a non-state-based force (not always for the good). It’s possible that Collins didn’t want to go into it in the context of a YA book (in much the same way that there is no sex, although there are oblique references to it), or it’s possible she’s making some larger point, but if the latter is the case I would not consider the point fully made.

========Spoilers End here============================

All in all, these are fabulous, worth reading, and exceedingly thought-provoking.

* Paraphrased from Iron Maiden.

Next (Time I) Fall

Sarah and I went to see Geoffrey Nauffts’ Next Fall in Bethesda last week. The theme of the play is the clash of religious differences in a relationship. The specific case is a gay couple, one of whom is a young, idealistic, religious Christian, while the other is older, anti-religious, and extremely cynical.

Sarah had picked the show, so I knew a grand total of nothing about it before we arrived. When she told me the theme when we arrived, my heart sank a bit: Washington is an extremely secular area, and religion tends to be dealt with as an extremely harsh caricature is most of the modern theatre i’ve seen. Add to that the fact that it’s a gay couple, and I figured we were in for a few hours of beating up on religious strawmen.

Happily, my expectations were not met.

There are some of the same old tired arguments for and against Christianity were dredged up (in my opinion, the anti-arguments were a lot more tired), but viewed in the context of character development, they make sense. Of course they would have had some fights where those tired arguments were used – neither of their characters is supposed to be exceptional at argument, after all. The real center of the play was not the argument regarding who’s right: it was about the emotional conflict that their difference caused.

Nauffts did a masterful job holding this up from several perspectives – there were plenty of pointed anti-religious sentiments – but the thing that blew out my expectations was that he acknowledged the tremendous anti-religious bias which is rampant and endemic in some places. It’s fascinating see religion being treated as much of (or possibly more than) a “closet” issue than sexuality – and I certainly think that this reflects modern experience and sensibilities (in DC at least).

I was pleasantly surprised, and would give this play a strong recommendation. Definitely good work from the Round House.

A good nap spoiled

Sarah and I saw Red at the Arena Stage tonight, and it received a standing ovation from the majority of the crowd present.

Personally, I thought it was a poorly written, nearly plotless play about an unlikable, pretentious artist. The play dripped with condescension toward those who disagree with whatever art fad is currently in fashion, and both lauded and legitimized the view that only the artist can determine the “proper” customers of his (or her) art.

I know little about the real-life Rothko, although I know that I do not like his work – the vibrancy, pulsing, and other terms which are usually applied to it is utterly invisible to me. When compared to his contemporary René Magritte, Rothko’s deficiency becomes painfully obvious. However, if he was as unpleasant as this play makes him seem, then I’m particularly surprised that anyone was willing to give him the time of day, much less treat him as part of a new artistic vanguard.

Sarah thought the play was somewhere between “ok” and “pretty good,” so she had a significantly higher opinion of it than it did, but she likewise was surprised by the ovation.

Given the audience’s reaction, I can tell that my opinion is in the minority (singularity?) on this. Whether this is me expressing my philistinic lack of cultured appreciation or describing the emperor’s nakedness is obviously in the eye of the beholder.

*נכנס יין יצא סוד

I’ve been a relatively temperate wine aficionado for several years, but only developed the taste after starting to keep kosher. I initially liked the sweeter wines – like Baron Herzog’s white zinfandel (whose label boasts “hints of cotton candy”) or the assorted moscato d’astis (closer to a wine cooler than they are to champagne). Eventually I graduated up to a more complex palate (i.e. wine that is good with dinner rather than dessert), and have preferred a nice dry red wine (preferably pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon, or tempranillo varietals or blends) over the alternatives.

For a few years, there was a small not-quite-synagogue-based wine club – we jokingly styled ourselves the “Georgetown society for the promotion of inebriation” and would have blind tastings. The person who could identify the most wines was the winner, who received the acclaim of the rest and then had to host the next tasting. Oodles of fun, but eventually things changed – Sarah stopped drinking alcohol, so these events got a lot less pleasant for her, and some of the regulars moved away, so the whole thing basically petered out.

So I’ve settled down into a nice comfy rhythm involving inexpensive table wines. But then a friend of mine who was a wine guy from before he kept kosher told me that he was on a quest for a non-mevushal Bordeaux. I had encountered plenty of mevushal ones, and they were pretty good to my uncultured palate, but his opinion was that the heating process wrecked the delicate balance of the flavors, rendering those wines more disappointing than not.

So this piqued my curiosity, and I set about looking for non-mevushal Bordeaux wines, and I found a few. Most were out of my price range by a factor of 2-3, but one happened to be below $20: the Château La Chèze 2002 was around $19, so I got a few bottles. I now see what this friend was talking about: this Bordeaux is vastly more complex and delicate than the mevushal varieties that I’ve tried, and it was an absolute delight. I don’t have an educated enough palate to even know what all of the words the wine people use mean, but this seemed to change flavor both between sips, and also while it was on my tongue. If a good pinot noir were Newtonian physics, then this is quantum electrodynamics.

I suspect that more of this will be in my future.

*Eruvin 65a – “wine comes in, and a secret departs”

Babyproofing Your Marriage

Babyproofing Your Marriage: How to Laugh More, Argue Less, and Communicate Better as Your Family Grows by Stacie Cockrell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Babyproofing Your Marriage is easily the best book on marital relationships I’ve ever encountered, let alone read. The authors (three women) do a better job of getting inside the male brain than any comparable book I’ve encountered. Specifically, they do an excellent job explaining how precisely men connect sex with self worth and intimacy, and how corrosive vicious cycles get started. In recognizing how effectively they get inside men’s heads, I assume that their translations of women’s emotions into man-speak are as accurate as their translations of men’s emotions. The lessons in the book are couched in terms of what having a child or children will do to the daily life of the couple, but they are remarkably applicable to couples without children – good lessons in effective communication are always a good idea.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough, and hope lots of my married friends read it.

View all my reviews

Book of Mormon (includes spoilers below the line)

Sarah and I saw Book of Mormon yesterday, and it was very, very funny, and quite rude – we expected no less from Parker & Stone.

The play is the story of two mormon missionaries (Elders Price & Cunningham) who are sent to Uganda and encounter misery and problems (AIDS, dysentery, warlords, female genital mutilation) far beyond their very limited training and experience. Price feels the experience as a challenge to his faith, and Cunningham has to devise a not-so-orthodox way to attract the interest of all of the villagers who are preoccupied with their other concerns. Many of the thematic elements parody other musicals – the Lion King gets mercilessly mocked, and in general religious themes and ideas are largely ridiculed.

============== Detailed review including spoilers below ===============================

The basic premise of the musical includes a couple of wholly-unforced errors which weaken the story – a few examples (my memory of growing up in Utah is confirmed by the wikipedia) are that while a mission length is two years, missionaries normally change companions every few months, and are typically sent to multiple places. Further, in places where foreign language skill would be required (such as Uganda, where Swahili would be needed for effective communication), additional immersion language training would be provided. In addition, “Uganda” is used to represent “foreign African place which has no money and lots of problems” – but in actuality Uganda is one of the places that has actually dealt with AIDS better than, say, Washington DC (at least judging by the decline from 30% infection rate to 6.4% of Uganda, while during the same period DC has maintained a steady 3% rate).

Essential to the story is the idea that Cunningham is an inveterate liar who has not actually read the Book of Mormon itself – he goes on to completely invent ludicrous accounts (Moroni from the Starship Enterprise, for instance, or Joseph Smith having sex with a frog) to captivate his audience. The problem is that the premise falls apart under scrutiny: of all of the religions I’ve encountered, the one with the most self-scrutiny with regard to qualifications to perform important functions (like going on a mission) is LDS – a person exhibiting these qualities (where they were even recognized by his parents) would not pass muster and make it through at all. So the Cunningham arc and resolution to the whole story is essentially a strawman – it makes me wonder whether anyone involved in the writing of the story actually knows any Mormon missionaries: I suspect not.

The arc involving Price is much, much more believable, and thus much more cutting: the idea that a 19-year old kid could have wholly unrealistic assessments of his own level of understanding and could thus have a crisis of faith when things go wrong – well, that’s pretty much universal right there.

The high points of the show center on the believable: Price’s self absorption is shown in a wonderful song near the opening (interestingly, the program does not list the song names, so these are the best I can do) about “you and I can do amazing things, but mostly me”; a song about suppression of unwanted feelings (“turn it off” led by the obviously closeted-gay character); and Nabulungi’s song about dreaming of a paradise on earth called “Salt Lak-uh Citee”. It would be remiss to ignore the choreographic high point: “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream” – basically take a child’s conception of hell and make it hilarious.

Now, in the matters of religious doctrine, the authors sometimes play it straight: “I Believe” (an excellent song, by the way) uses straight-up LDS doctrine more or less accurately, and presents it to comic effect via juxtaposition of the universal and the particular: “I believe … in God above / I believe … that two tribes of Hebrews migrated to America in canoes.” Now, this was something which gave Sarah some discomfort, because once you start holding up religious beliefs to ridicule, where do you stop? Once you’re laughing at LDS belief that (for example) the highest level of heaven is being granted your own planet, why wouldn’t you laugh at the idea that (for example) God gave the Jews a bunch of commandments? Sarah asked the legitimate question: “would a play like this making fun of Judaism be considered Anti-Semitic?” To this I answer: no, because Mel Brooks already did this in the History of the World, Part I – “I bring you these 15 (crash) 10, 10 commandments!” However, picking on the Mormons in this way is not exactly what I’d call a profile in courage – the LDS church is a pretty mellow opponent: they might write a strongly worded letter to the editor, or discourage their members from seeing a show. That’s not exactly much of a fatwa.

I see this as part of the larger trend in modern society toward general mockery of religious faith – there is a pernicious kind of intolerant cynicism in modern culture, and it uses mockery and sarcasm as its primary weapons. One of the offhand things I found interesting in William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience was an injunction to avoid sarcasm – I spent some time thinking about that, and have come to believe that sarcasm is like an acid, which is extremely powerful and useful in specific circumstances, but always destructive and easily uncontrolled. The sarcastic streak throughout Book of Mormon is vicious and out of control, and that weakens the whole structure. I suspect that like Avenue Q this will be a limited run engagement without much revival staying power – the evergreen themes of growth and self-discovery get lost in the sarcasm and are like a baptism where you don’t let the convert come up for air.

I have found favor in the eyes of God

Sarah and I experienced something tonight, and I found it moving in a spiritually profound manner.

We went to hear the most recent of the Dumbarton Concert series, which in this case was Andrius Zlabys performing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I and Adam Neiman performing Chopin’s Preludes, Op. 28. I had expected to hear all of the Bach, and then all of the Chopin, but in this case, the program was structured as alternating pieces according to the ordering Chopin used.

The sheer beauty of the pieces brought tears to my eyes multiple times – Bach’s no. 24 in b minor and his no. 16 in g minor were particularly striking: I heard in Zlabys’ performance the hints of walking basslines such as would be fully at home in a modern jazz band, and the edifice Bach created has formed the basis of pretty much all of western music. Chopin’s no. 15 in D-flat major does a phenomenal job of capturing the emotion of a single line of music – he reveals depths formerly hidden, and it is sheer joy.

I hear their passionate music / Read the words that touch my heart
I gaze at their feverish pictures / The secrets that set them apart
When I feel the powerful visions / Their fire has made alive
I wish I had that instinct / I wish I had that drive
Rush, Mission

Hearing these excellent performances of some of the finest works ever written for keyboard instruments, I realized that, like Salieri, I have the ability to appreciate genius in composition without being one myself; unlike Salieri, I see this as a sign that God has favored me in showing me beauty. I will never create a work which is their equal; however, I can appreciate the things that they have done and allow it to inform and uplift me – my eyes when closed see the majesty of the works of God which He shows to me via their work. And thus, I feel the blessing of the Holy One, Blessed is He.