Chateau Lloyd

That was a long book.  There are big books that feel big, and books that don't.  This felt big, and the problem was that Saunders not only went into excruciating detail about his subject's movements, incidental friendships and even meals, he also broke up his narrative with extensive discussions of Ford's literary works.

I tallied 83 pages on on the Parade's End series, which is fine in terms of criticism, but if you want to find out more about the author, it's a heck of a digression.

I'm also going to call Saunders out for being a truly impressive fanboy.  I like Ford's work, admire his turn of phrase, but I'm sorry, Last Post was a clunker of a book, and there's a reason why Graham Greene did not want it included in his reprint.  As he points out, the book was not part of the original scheme of the work and was added on later to explore what happened to Tietjens and Miss Wannop.

Having read the biography, it's pretty clear that Ford is creating an idealized version of his postwar life, one starkly at odds with what eventually happened.  Ford should have updated it ten years later, including Wannop's bastard child and the fact that Tietjens has abandoned her for another young woman and regularly keeps his eye open for new talent.

Saunders desperately tries to excuse Ford, emphasizing his art over his morally abhorrent behavior (well, this was written in the 1990s), but there is no inherent contradiction between moral uprightness and literary worth.  G.K. Chesterton was a brilliant writer as was J.R.R. Tolkien and Evelyn Waugh.  Waugh had a wild youth, and was by no means the model father, but he didn't abandon his wife and children and let himself constantly be led astray.  There was quite literally no woman he had a relationship with on whom he did not seriously consider cheating.  The only reason he remained true to his final mistress, Janice Biala, was that he was too ill to consummate any more adulteries.

To his credit, he never truly abandoned his Catholic faith and tried to raise his children in the Church. 

Though the work is quite long enough, I would have liked to see less literary analysis and more about his extended family, including his illegitimate daughter and his brother Oliver, who pops into and out of the narrative without much explanation.  An epilogue on his descendants would also have interested me.

Instead, Saunders - like his subject - regarded Ford's death as the end of the line, and wrote no more.

It's axiomatic that when Disney would do an animated adaption of a fairy tale for folk legend that it would be simplified and softened.  In a word:  "Disneyfied."

When Disney decided to tackle the story of Hercules in 1997, this posed a serious problem, because like all Greek heroes, he's got some serious flaws.

The reinvention of him as the beloved son of Zeus and Hera (hah!) who was tragically stolen and condemned to mortality by Hades (wonderfully voiced by James Woods) was about as far as one could get from the source material and still have a link to it.  The film works because it's in part a send-up of Disney itself, mocking toys, tie-ins and theme parks as Hercules becomes successful and famous.

But this does raise and interesting question, which is why Hercules (and the Greek gods in general) were so nasty.  The conventional (secular academic) view is that they represented the extremes of human behavior, outsized versions of our vices and virtues.  Thus, they regularly intrigued with one another, committed rape, incest and murder, yet also rewarded virtue and conveyed wisdom.

In short, the gods were fickle and it was best to take nothing for granted.

That being the case, if the gods were supposed to provide moral lessons, why weren't they more moral themselves?  Surely they could have been 'written' as exemplars of honor, dignity and restraint - which were virtues the pagans understood, though they did not always follow them.  Chastity was valued in pagan societies, as was marital fidelity, yet the gods honored these more in the breach, which encouraged those human who had the ability to do so to emulate them.

After exploring the Lord of Spirits podcast (which I had to quit, alas), it occurs to me that another explanation was that the Greek gods were in fact fallen angels, just as the Bible says, and that having rebelled against God, they were incapable of showing self-restraint.  They understood the divine virtues, but being in a state of rebellion, had little incentive (or will) to follow them.

This is a common human behavior, and the "downward spiral" is a real thing, one that I think everyone has seen happen.   Bad choice piles upon bad choice, countless opportunities to turn things around are wasted and eventually immersion in sin locks the unfortunate soul into a collision course with damnation.

Happily, there are also redemption stories, where people recognize where they are headed and make a needed course correction.  I'm an example of that. 

There is a key difference between humans and angels, however.  Having rebelled in the actual presence of God and knowing Him fully, the fallen angels cannot repent while humans still can.  There is no halting their spiral to the abyss.

All of which is to say that the Greek gods were who they were because they could be no other after their rebellion.  One can fault Disney for self-pedaling their depravity, but in fact anyone who was moved by the film to convert to Greek paganism would quickly learn how savage that faith really was.

I came to watch The Flowers of War through a rather convoluted course of events.  I'm not even sure how I stumbled over it.  I might have been browsing 80s movies and followed the breadcrumbs from Empire of the Sun through Christian Bale to The Flowers of War.  Alternatively, I might have been looking to see what Bale had done since the Batman films.

Having found the IMDB page, I was curious, but cautious.  The film is about an American mortician (Bale) trapped in Nanking during the Japanese assault and subsequent (gruesome) sack.  He, a handful of Catholic schoolgirls and a collection of prostitutes end up being holed up in the Nanking cathedral, and the only remaining priest has died.  Bale's character impersonates a priest in an attempt to protect them.

The trailer makes it seem as though Bale will have a conversion, becoming the thing he pretends to be.  Maybe the prostitutes will convert as well!

Nope, it's a muddled plot that seems to be based on a survivor's reminiscence of the Rape of Nanking. 

The Japanese are universally portrayed as murderous, rapacious and treacherous, which isn't out of line with their behavior at the time. 

What I found particularly interesting was the depiction of the Nationalist Chinese forces, who were appropriately wearing German M35 helmets and armed with Mauser rifles and Czech light machine guns.  These guys were a pleasure to watch, the the Chinese commander was a veritable John Rambo in terms of slaughtering the Japanese.  I much enjoyed this revisionist take. 

But the bulk of the film moved slowly, and uncertainly.  Bale's character is a lapsed Catholic who never utters a prayer or crosses himself.  He is shown in the pews at one point from a distance, and the narration describes him as praying, but despite all the harrowing circumstances, the schoolgirls never reflexively resort to prayer, nor does Bale try to lead them in it. 

As the peril increases, no one references God, it's all about deception and tactics. 

That's why I regard the film as a failure and a disappointment.  It was made in 2011, and I'm assuming the PRC played a role in its production.  This would explain the void where faith should have been.  Had I paid for a ticket, I would feel ripped off.  As it is, I liked the KMT John Rambo, and feel sorry for Bale, who seemed to struggle with what he was supposed to be and where the film was supposed to go.

As it customary, Chateau Lloyd put up its Halloween decorations at the turn of the seasons.  Halloween may be spooky, is certainly commercialized, but it is in the main a celebration of autumn, and it is rich with its symbolism.

While religious in origin, for most Americans it's merely about candy, costumes and varying degrees of schlock horror tropes. 

It is the second biggest "retail holiday," with Christmas still reigning supreme.  Unlike Christmas, it is less emotionally fraught because there are fewer associations with family gatherings and/or religious associations.  For the vast majority of Americans, it's about pumpkin spice everything, dress-up and trick-or-treat.

Autumn is my favorite season, no doubt a function of living in a state where the change of weather is welcome but fleeting.  The humid heat of August is yielding to the warm days and cold nights associated with early fall.  Later, the air will take on something of a bite, but stay above freezing.  Halloween itself has seen everything from balmy temperatures to snow flurries.  That's part of the excitement of this time of year.

There is also the brilliant display of color before the trees go bare.  Every year the cycle is a little different, which is why it is so special.  The older I get, the more I appreciate it.

I suppose it is no accident that J.R.R. Tolkien chose to set his epic tale against the arrival of fall.  I'm sure I won't be alone and re-reading his classic as autumn takes hold.

Apparently Warhammer 40,000 is celebrating its tenth edition this year.  I quite during the third edition, which makes me seven editions out of date.

In practical terms, this has saved me hundreds of dollars in what would now be useless rule books.

The game had its debut as Rogue Trader back in 1989, and the first major revision was in 1993.  This is the 2nd edition, which I still play.  The 3rd edition was release in the fall of 1998, and made significant changes.  I stuck with it for a while, but eventually quit, and later picked up 2nd where I left off.

I bring this up because as a game designer, I strive to create a definitive and clear rules set.  The more a system is played, the more problems are identified and subsequently corrected.  What Games Workshop has done is create a situation where the game sees significant revisions every three years.  These are not about correcting mistakes; they sometimes appear to be random design decisions to highlight new tactics or draw attention to new models or factions.

GW can do this because of a near-monopoly position in tabletop gaming, particularly in Europe.  I don't sense anyone else could ever be in that position, and as yet, GW has managed to stay afloat despite these changes.  Apparently, it works for them, though I can't help but wonder how long this will continue.

Gaming companies are uniquely susceptible to sudden failure.  SPI, Avalon Hill, TSR - all of these were industry leaders and are now defunct.  Some years back, I thought GW was close behind them, but so far, I've been wrong.  So maybe they've found the secret sauce.

I want to be clear that I admire the amazing effort that went into Max Saunders' exhaustive two-volume biography of Ford Madox Ford.

The problem is that I want to read other stuff, and I've got to finish this first.  Not only that, this book is crushing my other hobbies.  Long-time visitors to the blog may notice that I'm not doing movie reviews and of course, other books go generally unmentioned.

I'm not hate-reading this book.  I enjoy it quite a bit, but it is very dense.  I take issue with some of the author's views on Ford, but it's well-written and informative.

But it is very, very long.  I tried to split my time with other books, but all that did is drag out the process.  The only way out of this is to go forward.  I've set an ambitious schedule of reading a chapter a day, which should see me finish in 10 days.  After that, I can finally turn to the growing backlog of reading material.

This is something of a return to form.  I always read one book straight through, but as I got older, some of my choices were super-dense and I needed to be awake and alert (not that they didn't put me to sleep!).

Hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll be moving on to other things, and at that point I will also be able to offer my thoughts on this truly massive literary undertaking.

But the old ways are often the best ways.  I just need to move the book as I used to do, from couch to bedside.

Over the weekend I was cajoled into watching Dungeons & Dragons: No Honor Among Thieves. 

I did not enjoy it.

The problem was that I wasn't sure if I was watching a satire or a serious adventure film.  There were plenty of obvious laugh lines aimed at D&D players, and yet the pacing and general structure of the film indicated that I was also supposed to take it seriously.

This was impossible, because as the film itself demonstrated magic and do almost anything, and no sooner would this assertion be declared false than magic would in fact solve whatever problem was at hand.

This goes back to my repeated critiques of super-hero films and now Disney Star Wars, which is that if there is all this non-stop action, when am I supposed to find time to care about the characters?

The more wild and improbable (and unrelatable) the setting gets, the less invested I become in the outcome, because everything appears arbitrary and random.

At that point, if the good guys win, it won't feel like they earned it, they just happened to turn over the right card (or the game was fixed from the start).

This problem becomes doubly acute when the plot is built around a bank heist.  In the real world, I know that locks, walls of steel and massive doors covered by cameras present formidable obstacles.

But in the D&D world, there's probably a spell to circumvent all that - and then a spell to stop that spell, and a spell to the stop that spell, etc. 

As I said, arbitrary and random.

There's also the setting, which has no meaning to me.  Oh, I recognized some of the references from the game, but there's no overarching story of D&D World like there are of Narnia or Middle-Earth.

It's just a tale from the Land of the Knee-Walking Turkeys or something.  The Princess Bride felt far more grounded in that respect.  It make jokes about the genre, but not at the expense of destroying one's immersion in the story.  The fact that it was a story within a story actually amplified this effect - as Fred Savage became more invested, so did we.

Fans of the film have suggested that the digressions, asides and so on represent the course of the game, and in that case, I'd have loved to see a bunch of nerds sitting around the table arguing about what will come next.  Then we'd have to real tension because the story would finally be anchored in some sort of consistent reality.

Instead of being arbitrary and random.

The triumph of social media has destroyed the old way of celebrating anniversaries.  In previous generations, the arrival of a significant date would be commemorated with some sort of reunion.  Because such things happened at intervals of five or ten years, people would anticipate them, and make plans for travel, etc.

Alas, in our benighted age, people think that 'following' on various social media platforms fulfills this function.  It does not.  Partly because of Covid, there was no 30th year reunion for my high school graduating class, and the 20-year festivities had abysmal attendance.  Easier to just send messages on Facebook or something.

The problem is that social media is not real life.  People inherently seek attention, and so they manipulate the information they share about themselves, inflating accomplishments to bolster their self-esteem or highlighting challenges to gain sympathy.

Either way, social media serves as a form of performance art, and is no substitute for human contact.

Indeed, it amplifies the worst aspects of human behavior.

Happily, there are still places where people gather to meet face-to-face, and yesterday I participated in one of them.  My exact contemporaries were few, but the fact that multiple generations gathered and could still share common experiences and relate to one another in terms of life rather than politics or a need to find scapegoats was wonderful.  Indeed, attendance was unusually high, particularly among the younger crowd. 

This gives me hope that perhaps people are realizing that online relationships lack the fullness of a personal touch.  Far better to spend a few hours talking face to face than simply clicking thumbs up  or offering commentary.

Human were built to be together - to hear, to see and to touch one another.  After the lockdowns, maybe people are more sensitive to his.  We can only hople.

The change in the weather heralds the arrival of gaming season, a major part of coping through Michigan's long, dark winters.

Over the years, I've noticed there tend to be two types of gamers.  The most common are those who collect to collect - that is to say, as long as they retain interest in their hobby, they never stop adding to their pile of games or figures or whatnot.

Such folks rarely "downsize" the collection, they operate on an all or nothing basis.  They collect right up until the moment they liquidate, and their collections very often include unopened kits.

But there is a second class, and that's the one to which I belong, which collects to a point and then stops.   We may also made a decision to cull the collection in order to focus it, or stick with the parts that we like best.

Another way to describe this is the difference between "getting" and "having."  Much of the joy of collecting comes from the anticipation of the next purchase, and there is always a next purchase.  I enjoy the having much more.  I may teak this item or that, but there's a quiet satisfaction to having a collection come to completion.

The first style is more prone to hoarding because of course there's no natural end point.  There's always something new to add, even if collection consists of a limited set of items, because if you have them all, you can always buy duplicates or variants.

Indeed, our consumerist society lives to support people like this, and companies like Games Workshop depend to a large extent on never finishing their game systems.  There are always more rules, books or miniatures to buy.

That's one of the reasons I went back to an out-of-print edition, because it is finite.  My collection is not yet complete, but it's getting there.  Certain factions are actually finished, and haven't seen new additions in years. 

This frees me up to enjoy and appreciate the things I have, rather than fixate on what I don't.  I think that's a pretty healthy way to approach life.

While I continue to crawl my way through the Ford Madox Ford biography, I'm also digging back into Joseph Conrad and came across his short story The Duel.

I then recalled that an excellent film of it had been made in 1977, The Duellists.  This was Ridley Scott's first movie and it's excellence gave a huge boost to his career.

The film is an excellent adaptation of a very Conradian tale - a rational, intelligent officer who inadvertently offends a hot-headed comrade and then is forced to fight duel after duel with him against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. 

The film moves efficiently through the timeline, which runs from 1800 to 1816, and the costuming and atmosphere is superb.  The duels themselves are brilliantly choreographed.

It is also an example of using weapons to tell a story and the contrast between The Duellists and the decline and fall of lightsabers in Star Wars is pretty stark.

In short, it is a tight little movie of the kind that simply cannot be made today.