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I am totally not jealous of the people who saw Star Trek tonight. Because I got to see Ira Glass.
Yeah, it's kind of sad when you're geekier than Star Trek.
Last week, This American Life did a live simulcast from New York to movie theaters. It was 90 minutes, instead of the 60-ish the show has, and was people telling stories. (BTW, if you go t http://thislife.org/ there will be a free podcast of a TAL tale. If you go before this Saturday, it will be "Return to the Scene of the Crime," the edited version of this show of magnificence. Mike Birbiglia and Dan Savage talked without visual aids, and Starlee Kine had nifty Post-It Note art illustrating hers. Power of the spoken word, people. Pictures, painted before my eyes, with the visuals helping mostly to cement my attention.
Plus Joss Whedon, singing one of the songs off of the Dr. Horrible commentary track.
Dan was working very hard on not crying as he told his story, and I know I wasn't the only person in the audience with tears on my face. Can faith support you? Is that support enough?
I really can't put down in words how mesmerized I was with the stories. They all unfolded like flowers, and each time one ended, I had to mentally shake myself awake, shake myself out of the story.
It was mighty. A good hakawati, you know, they can create miracles.
Which actually brings me to something from earlier in the day. I finally finished Rabih Alameddine's The Hakawati. A hakawati, for those of you not up on your Lebanese culture, is a storyteller. Like Catherynne Valente's The Orphan's Tales, Rabih's tale is multiple stories, with each story breaking up the other, interweaving themes and motifs. (But not, as in Valente's work, directly affecting each other much.) There are two "real world" stories, that of the main character's present-day life (Beirut, just after the civil war) and that of the history and past lives of himself and his very large family. And there are two main fictional tales, that of Baybars [a highly fictionalised account of one of the first Mamluke kings] and of Fatima, a wise woman.
It was hard to get into, for me. The stories were almost mythological in their lack of personal growth for two of the four books that separate out the tome. But they weren't mythological; they were groundwork. I ripped through books three and four, racing to see what happened next and why events had fallen out the way they had. Despite the fact that most of the characters are men, the women are definitely powerful enough to make their mark and stand on their own. But with flair.
I think I will continue to remember something Osama's mother says near the end of the book, when she is asked about her fabulous style.
And that's the secret. Never wear clothes that are bigger than you are unless you intend to grow into them. If you want to wear a great suit, either you believe it belongs to you or you'll look like you're thirteen and wearing your mother's clothes. Doesn't that make sense? It's the same in life. Never live a life too big for you. Either grow to encompass it or shrink it to fit you.
Oh, and I can't forget this fabulous quote at the beginning by Ahmad al-Tifashi in The Delights of Hearts:
Praise be to God, Who has so disposed matters that pleasant literary anecdotes may serve as an instrument for the polishing of wits and the cleansing of rust from our hearts.
I don't know that I need to read it again, but it is a beautiful tapestry.
And now to bed, because I need to pull raisins out of cereal tomorrow so I can test it for toxins.
Yeah, it's kind of sad when you're geekier than Star Trek.
Last week, This American Life did a live simulcast from New York to movie theaters. It was 90 minutes, instead of the 60-ish the show has, and was people telling stories. (BTW, if you go t http://thislife.org/ there will be a free podcast of a TAL tale. If you go before this Saturday, it will be "Return to the Scene of the Crime," the edited version of this show of magnificence. Mike Birbiglia and Dan Savage talked without visual aids, and Starlee Kine had nifty Post-It Note art illustrating hers. Power of the spoken word, people. Pictures, painted before my eyes, with the visuals helping mostly to cement my attention.
Plus Joss Whedon, singing one of the songs off of the Dr. Horrible commentary track.
Dan was working very hard on not crying as he told his story, and I know I wasn't the only person in the audience with tears on my face. Can faith support you? Is that support enough?
I really can't put down in words how mesmerized I was with the stories. They all unfolded like flowers, and each time one ended, I had to mentally shake myself awake, shake myself out of the story.
It was mighty. A good hakawati, you know, they can create miracles.
Which actually brings me to something from earlier in the day. I finally finished Rabih Alameddine's The Hakawati. A hakawati, for those of you not up on your Lebanese culture, is a storyteller. Like Catherynne Valente's The Orphan's Tales, Rabih's tale is multiple stories, with each story breaking up the other, interweaving themes and motifs. (But not, as in Valente's work, directly affecting each other much.) There are two "real world" stories, that of the main character's present-day life (Beirut, just after the civil war) and that of the history and past lives of himself and his very large family. And there are two main fictional tales, that of Baybars [a highly fictionalised account of one of the first Mamluke kings] and of Fatima, a wise woman.
It was hard to get into, for me. The stories were almost mythological in their lack of personal growth for two of the four books that separate out the tome. But they weren't mythological; they were groundwork. I ripped through books three and four, racing to see what happened next and why events had fallen out the way they had. Despite the fact that most of the characters are men, the women are definitely powerful enough to make their mark and stand on their own. But with flair.
I think I will continue to remember something Osama's mother says near the end of the book, when she is asked about her fabulous style.
And that's the secret. Never wear clothes that are bigger than you are unless you intend to grow into them. If you want to wear a great suit, either you believe it belongs to you or you'll look like you're thirteen and wearing your mother's clothes. Doesn't that make sense? It's the same in life. Never live a life too big for you. Either grow to encompass it or shrink it to fit you.
Oh, and I can't forget this fabulous quote at the beginning by Ahmad al-Tifashi in The Delights of Hearts:
Praise be to God, Who has so disposed matters that pleasant literary anecdotes may serve as an instrument for the polishing of wits and the cleansing of rust from our hearts.
I don't know that I need to read it again, but it is a beautiful tapestry.
And now to bed, because I need to pull raisins out of cereal tomorrow so I can test it for toxins.
