A Geek Abroad

Mae Govannen, mellyn nin!

You may be wondering where I’ve been for the last month. For once, the answer isn’t “in my house, being lazy and watching copious amounts of TV.” No, this time the answer is much more exciting. I was touring the UK and Ireland on a three-and-a-half-week solo trip. I’d never been to those particular islands before, unbelievably, so it was a wonderful experience. And a nerdy one. Because most of the places I went out of my way to see were somehow related to my favourite books, movies, TV programmes, etc. And if I learned anything from this trip, it’s that the UK is a fabulous place to be a nerd.

Here are some of the geeky highlights of my adventure:

Platform 9 3/4 in King’s Cross Station (which looks nothing like it did in the movie, by the way).

The modern London home of a certain famous detective. It’s not on Baker Street. I found it completely by accident.

And here he is on actual Baker Street.

The Globe in its glory. (Albeit a bit blurry.)

Any other Pink Floyd geeks out there? This is the building that was on the cover of Animals!

This is the first floor of the Bodleian Library, the most beautiful building I have ever set foot in. Also known as the room where McGonagall taught dancing in Goblet of Fire.

It’s also the Hospital Wing. And the upper floor is the Hogwarts Library, but I wasn’t allowed to take pictures there.

The Eagle and Child! Home of the Inklings! SQUEEEEE!!

The town of Oxford is, fittingly, home to the hugest bookstore I’ve ever seen – Blackwell’s.

This is the house where Tolkien wrote The Hobbit!

By the way, no words, or pictures, could even begin to capture the utter awesomeness that is Oxford. Even if you’re not as huge a fan of Tolkien and Lewis as I am. It’s like everything good and beautiful about the last thousand years of Western history concentrated into a few square miles of marble and forests. Seriously, if you ever find yourself in England, don’t leave without seeing Oxford.

This is the first thing I saw after getting off the train in Edinburgh. Scottish stormtroopers, it turns out, are friendlier than the usual kind.

This is the boarding school in Edinburgh that inspired Hogwarts.

And this is the grave that inspired the name all wizards fear to speak.

And finally, this is the cafe where JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book!

This is the view from the top of the Sir Walter Scott monument, the tallest memorial ever built to honour a writer. (And believe me, it was a chore climbing up there.)

Trinity College Library in Dublin! I’m pretty sure this is what Heaven looks like. (It’s also what the Jedi library looks like, but that’s only in the prequels, so no one cares.)

Here’s Oscar Wilde in his native city, looking appropriately drunk.

And here’s my favourite Dublin poet, WB Yeats, looking unexpectedly attractive.

Yup. I went there. And it was a truly amazing experience. I think I made a pretty good companion.

You may recognize this restaurant from “The Impossible Astronaut.” It’s called Eddie’s American Diner, and their burgers are good, but the malts are rubbish.

This street has stood in for several London streets, particularly the one where the evil Santa robots attacked in “The Christmas Invasion.”

Actually, pretty much every part of Cardiff has appeared on Doctor Who at some point. This is the shop where Rose met the Doctor (right before it blew up).

And to cap off my trip, I went and saw my first musical on Broadway in NYC. It was The Phantom of the Opera, of course.

Long story short, I shamelessly indulged my inner geek for a whole month, and it was probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I highly recommend it as a cure for dullness and everyday American reality. But now I’m excited to get back to inflicting my geeky thoughts on you lot again! Stay tuned!

Namarie,
Aldy

Goodbye Lewis, Hello…

“And that is the very end of the adventure of the wardrobe. But…it was only the beginning of the adventures of Narnia.” – The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

“And for us that is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story.” – The Last Battle

I love how C.S. Lewis ends each of his stories with a beginning. Since it is now time to bid a fond farewell to Lewis–and to 2013–let’s do likewise by looking ahead to next year.

January’s fandom will be centered around a character who is just as fond of logic as Professor Kirke, and much more eccentric. According to Lewis, he lived “long ago when your grandfather was a child” (see The Magician’s Nephew), and since he was talking to children born in the 40s, that means quite a long time ago indeed. Yet he is as popular today as he ever was–so popular that we are still making up stories about him, and a few of those stories will be on TV in just a few days.

Any guesses? You’ll find out tomorrow! Namarie!

An Inspirational Quote for the New Year

“Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.”

-C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

Narnia Costume Site

Whatever I may say about the Narnia movies (see my earlier post), they did have some rather lovely costumes. And dressing up like a Narnian is not just for kids.

I’ve been following Brielle Costumes ever since it was just a little blog. Now it’s full website dedicated to movie-inspired costumes, and there’s a whole section full of Narnian ones. And they’re for sale! Unfortunately, “Brielle” found a way to copyright her pictures so I can’t use them on this blog, but you can check ’em all out here: http://briellecostumes.typepad.com/brielles-costume-wardrobe/narnia-costumes.html

 

Narnia Map

Look at this beautiful map of Narnia.

Don’t you just wanna go there?

Chronology of the Chronicles

As I mentioned in my last post, the Chronicles of Narnia weren’t written in chronological order, nor were they published in the order they were written. This is why some box sets label The Magician’s Nephew Book 1, and others The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It gets a little confusing. There are actually three ways to read the books:

1) Chronological Order:
The Magician’s Nephew
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Horse and His Boy
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Last Battle

C.S. Lewis recommended reading them in this order. However, this is the order in which he wrote them:

2) Lewis’s Original Order:
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – 1948 (intended to be a stand-alone book)
Prince Caspian – 1949 (written as a sequel)
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – 1950 (this is about when Lewis realized it was turning into a series)
The Horse and His Boy – 1950
The Silver Chair – 1950
The Last Battle – 1953
The Magician’s Nephew – 1954

Sidenote: I would give anything to be able to churn out good writing this fast. Two novels in one year?? C.S. Lewis makes me mad sometimes. Anyway, I wouldn’t recommend reading the books in this order, because The Last Battle just has to be last. It just wouldn’t feel right not to read it last.

3) Publication Order:
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Horse and His Boy
The Magician’s Nephew
The Last Battle

This is my favourite way to read the series. It’s chronological enough; I mean, at least The Last Battle is last, and we have all Eustace’s adventures in order. And it gives me a better sense of how Lewis’s ideas developed over time. As much as I love the first three books (and Dawn Treader really is one of my favourites), the later books feel more complete and have more complex, well-rounded characters. They also deal with progressively more complicated themes, theological and otherwise.

But then, sometimes I make up my own reading order. As I said before, the first Narnia book I ever read was The Silver Chair, and I loved it even without the context of the first three books. Sometimes, while reading them in the publication order, I read The Magician’s Nephew right after Wardrobe, just because it feels so much like a prequel. However you read them, they’re excellent books. The main thing is to read them. Please do, if you haven’t yet. The movies are a very poor substitute. Namarie!

Narnia and the Screen

 So apparently, someone’s really making another Narnia movie: The Silver Chair. They’ve even picked out a screenwriter (http://www.hypable.com/2013/12/05/chronicles-of-narnia-the-silver-chair-screenwriter-david-magee/).

I have very mixed feelings about this news. On the one hand, I’ve always thought The Chronicles of Narnia could make great movies, and The Silver Chair is one of my favourite books–and also the first Narnia book I read. (I didn’t care much about chronology when I was eight.) But so far, no one has ever managed to make a decent Narnia movie, though it’s not for lack of trying.

First, there was a cheesy cartoon version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that aired on CBS in 1979.

Nice for under-ten-year-olds, maybe, but unfortunately I didn’t find this until I was well past that age. Then there were the four dreadfully-produced BBC movies of the late eighties.

I actually grew up watching these, at the same time I was reading the books. They had one thing going for them: they followed the plot and dialogue of each book as carefully as any purist could desire. But bad child acting, terrible special effects, lousy music, and creepy makeup were always getting in the way of the story. I remember particularly disliking the BBC Silver Chair as a little kid. No offense to Tom Baker, but I’m pretty sure Puddleglum wasn’t supposed to be scarier than the Queen of Underland.

Then, to my initial delight, Disney and Walden Media brought Narnia to the big screen in 2005.

Like BBC, they started with Wardrobe. And to be fair, that movie was pretty good. There were some gratuitous chase and battle scenes, and it broke a few Narnian laws that any true fan of the books should have spotted (Narnians don’t ride Talking Horses except in battle, and unicorns? NEVER), but overall it had the right story. The Stone Table scene was almost as devastating as it was in the book (I think that’s still one of the most harrowing passages of literature I’ve read), which made Aslan’s return a truly wonderful moment. And of course, the special effects were eye-popping, especially compared to ye olde BBC.

But then Prince Caspian came out, and after that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and the stories just kept getting worse and worse. Prince Caspian turned Susan into a poofy-lipped warrior princess with an inexplicable crush on Caspian, gave the Telmarines bad Spanish accents, and relegated Aslan to a secondary character. Dawn Treader got rid of the accents and cast a perfect Eustace, but the ridiculous invented “evil green smoke” plot was still enough to ruin the movie.

What. The heck. Is this?

 There are a lot of difficulties involved with making the Narnia books into movies. The fact that they’re not written in chronological order, and they’re not always about the same characters, makes them harder to turn into a franchise than, say, Harry Potter. But the biggest problem is that C.S. Lewis’s worldview, which heavily influences his stories, was already politically incorrect when the books came out and is even more so now. Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with lines like “Battles are ugly when women fight” and “Every year you grow, you will find me bigger.” So, trying to please the fans of the book and at the same time trying to stay within the bounds of PC-land, they settle for clumsy paraphrases that sound good to nobody. Whatever you think of Lewis’s beliefs, glossing over them just does not make for a better story.

Which is why I’m not optimistic about the Silver Chair movie. The screenwriter they’ve picked, David Magee, does have an Oscar nomination, but that was for The Life of Pi, probably the most politically-correct movie dealing with religion that I’ve ever seen–and one of the furthest away from C.S. Lewis’s philosophy. So…I’m not very hopeful. But you never know. Maybe Aslan will perform a miracle!

It’s tough to make a faithful adaptation of a book that lives and breathes a philosophy you disagree with and/or don’t understand. But the fact that so many people have tried testifies to the power of the Narnia stories: people who would never pick up Lewis’s Bible absolutely love his fairytale. Which is why, whether or not anyone ever makes a good Narnia movie, I’m glad we’ve got the books. Namarie!

Merry Christmas from the Fandoms!

“Well done, everyone! We’re halfway out of the dark.”

“Four serial suicides and now a note. Oh, it’s Christmas!”

“Happy Christmas, Harry!”

And from the most Christmas-y fandom of all…

“Merry Christmas! Long live the true King!”

 

 

Swallowing the Dark

“…’He came down from Heaven’ can almost be transposed into ‘Heaven drew earth up into it’, and locality, limitation, sleep, sweat, footsore weariness, frustration, pain, doubt, and death, are, from before all worlds, known by God from within. The pure light walks the earth; the darkness, received into the heart of Deity, is there swallowed up. Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?”

-C.S. Lewis, The Business of Heaven

Bigger on the Inside

“In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”

-Lucy, The Last Battle