Lit’rachure

GIVE TIL IT HURTS!

Hey, Nutflix, leave Aslan alone!

Posted on April 10, 2025 by Mike Leave a comment

My God, there really isn’t anything whatsoever they won’t stand on its head and try to make a traveshamockery out of, is there?

Through a Wardrobe Dimly: Netflix’s Narnia Reboot
So last week, the word was out that Netflix is playing host to a reboot of “The Chronicles of Narnia.” On top of that, talks are apparently in the works to have none other than Meryl Streep voice Aslan. Yes, they are coming for Narnia in the same way they came for “Star Wars” and “The Lord of the Rings.” A galaxy far, far, away is not safe, nor is Middle Earth; why should Narnia be sacrosanct?

Deadline reports:

In the novels, Aslan is a talking lion who serves as Narnia’s guardian and a guide for the human children. Generally portrayed as a male, Aslan was created as an allegory for Jesus by author C.S. Lewis.

However, in “The Chronicles of Narnia,” Aslan is not merely an allegory for Christ. Lewis was quite clear that Aslan was Christ as he would have manifested himself to the inhabitants of Narnia. The biblical parallels are unavoidable with a respectful and thoughtful reading of the books, as they were meant to be.

To wit: in “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” we have this quote, “I am [in your world].’ said Aslan. ‘But there, I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

It is plausible that the producers of the reboot see Aslan as nothing more than an interesting main character in a fantasy series and thus have no compunctions about playing fast and loose with his gender. It is equally plausible (and altogether likely) that the producers are well aware of the intentional Christianity of the Narnia series and Aslan’s true identity and have taken it upon themselves to decolonize, deconstruct, and reassemble Narnia into something less Christian and more to their liking. Rebooting Aslan is another clandestine attempt at rebooting Christ.

As Fate would have it, I’ve recently been re-reading The Chronicles of Narnia for the umpty-leventh time, and enjoying Lewis’ inspired magnum opus trememdously; it’s been too many years since I last checked in on Polly, Diggory, wicked Uncle Andrew, King Peter, Queen Susan, Prince Caspian, Mr Tumnus, and the rest of the gang. Frankly, the only thing I find at all surprising about Nutflix’s latest attempt to shit in its own hat is that they didn’t go out and find themselves a Neegrow lesbian Transgender of Color rather than moldy-oldy White-bread broad Streep to voice Aslan, so as to offend, dismay, and just plain piss off as many Xtianist, binary, sane Normals as humanly possible.

Moar desecration, stat!

Posted on July 29, 2024July 29, 2024 by Mike

One sees yet another story like this and asks oneself: Is there really NOTHING they will leave alone without trying to befoul, besmirch, distort, and/or destroy it? And the answer comes back: No. No, there most certainly is NOT.

‘The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power’ Season 2 Will Feature Sauron And Galadriel Romance And Also Seemingly Features An LGBTQ Character
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 will continue its assault on J.R.R. Tolkien and his work with actor Charlie Vickers and showrunner Patrick McKay confirming that it will feature a romance between Galadriel and Sauron. McKay also seemingly confirmed the show features LGBTQ+ characters as well.

To be clear, Galadriel never had any kind of romantic relationship with Sauron in J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium given she was married to Celeborn. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien wrote, “A queen she was of the woodland Elves, the wife of Celeborn of Doriath, yet she herself was of the Noldor and remembered the Day before days in Valinor, and she was the mightiest and fairest of all the Elves that remained in Middle-earth.”

Furthermore, he made it clear that Galadriel was Sauron’s “chief adversary and obstacle” during the Second Age in Eregion. He wrote in Unfinished Tales, “In Eregion Sauron posed as an emissary of the Valar, sent by them to Middle-earth (“thus anticipating the Istari”) or ordered by them to remain there to give aid to the Elves. He perceived at once that Galadriel would be his chief adversary and obstacle, and he endeavoured therefore to placate her, bearing her scorn with outward patience and courtesy.”

This is anathema to Tolkien who made it clear that The Lord of the Rings was a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision” in Letter 142 to Father Robert Murray SJ.

The Catholic church is very clear on homosexuality. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.”

Commenter Gaheris gets what’s going on here.

No, you have never seen yourself in Tolkien’s writings.
They were never there. Ever.
You inserted yourselves, like you do with everything.
You are obsessed with self, with your groins, and expect everyone
else to be obsessed as well.
Sickening Narcissists.

This whole show, from the showrunners, writers, directors
and the cast are poison. Utter poison.

Indeed they are; they seem to consider it great fun, sticking their fingers in the eyes of people they know will never retaliate in the smallest fashion. T’was ever thus, and ever shall remain.

Via Ace, who hilariously retitles the show We Wuz Rangz. Inexplicably, he omits the obligatory “N Sheeitz,” gots no idea why.

Today’s must-read story

Posted on January 12, 2024January 12, 2024 by Mike

It’s all about baseball, folks, and it’s a pure-dee KILLAH.

The Comiskey effect: Can MLB revive what it lost in the retro building boom?
CHICAGO – During the last season of Comiskey Park’s existence, its replacement was rising adjacent to it.

As Comiskey’s final months ticked away in 1990, the new stadium’s giant concrete grandstands began to take shape, eventually towering over the old ballpark across 35th Street on the south side of Chicago.

Comiskey opened on a sweltering July 1, 1910 afternoon, the fifth of 13 so-called “jewel-box” ballparks built early in the 20th century. The ballpark was part of baseball’s first steel-and-concrete stadium construction boom, of which only Wrigley Field and Fenway Park remain.

Eighty years later, something very different was looming to the south.

While Toronto’s multipurpose SkyDome opened in the middle of the 1989 season – ushering in a new type of stadium, the first with a retractable dome – new Comiskey was the first baseball-only facility to open since Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium debuted in 1973.

Later named U.S. Cellular Field, and now called Guaranteed Rate Field, the facility featured a top-row, upper-deck seat 130 feet above the playing surface – more than twice the height of Comiskey’s, whose last row was 62 feet above field level.

Chicago native Matt Flesch recalls visiting Guaranteed Rate Field during its inaugural season.

“I remember being depressed that there were escalators. I couldn’t believe how high it was. The players were like ants,” Flesch said. “After new Comiskey was opened, in that first year when going to games, they were slowly tearing down old Comiskey. So you’d see old Comiskey with a gaping hole and a wrecking ball hitting it. And then you’re walking into this death star and you’re like, ‘Oh man, I cannot believe we are tearing this down.’”

Flesch released a documentary last year called “Last Comiskey,” which covers the final season at the old park and the White Sox team that played there.

“Bill Gleason was a famous longtime sports writer in Chicago. He has a great quote in the documentary. He said, ‘In Europe, they preserve their magnificent old buildings. In America, we tear everything down.’”

The architecture firm HOK, later named Populous, designed Guaranteed Rate Field. The firm also created Camden Yards, which opened in 1992 in Baltimore. Populous has designed or renovated 20 MLB parks.

Camden Yards was viewed as a revelation in design, harkening back to a bygone era because it featured the B&O Warehouse beyond right field, asymmetric dimensions, and wrought-iron flourishes. Camden Yards ushered in the greatest stadium construction boom since the jewel-box era.

In contrast, it made Comiskey’s replacement appear to be a massive error: it was generic, gigantic, and soulless. (HOK gave White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf a Camden-like option, but he turned it down.)

It’s one hellaciously compelling, soul-stirring read, even if you aren’t really much of a fan of the ol’ bes-o-boru, closing thusly:

Compared to Globe Life Park, the Rangers’ previous home built in 1994, architecture firm HKS moved the decks on average about 30 feet closer to the playing surface.

The last row of the upper deck is 33 feet closer and 5 feet higher in elevation. The first suite level is 39 feet closer, and the closest seating behind home plate is 10 feet closer. There are also 8,000 fewer seats in the new stadium.

Fred Ortiz, a partner at HKS, shared with me a few years ago two black-and-white photos that influenced the design. One was from the upper deck of another long demolished jewel-box park, Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., the franchise’s first home in 1961. The second was the same photo but with the steel support beams photoshopped out.

“What if we could eliminate those and bring fans closer to the field,” Ortiz said of the inspiration, “and change the dynamic of the cross section of a typical ballpark?”

While that exact effect wasn’t quite created, it was arguably the greatest change to ballpark design since Camden Yards opened.

If MLB clubs truly want to engage a new generation of fans, perhaps they should think about returning to what we once had: the experience of being close to the game, of better hearing it, seeing it, and feeling it. Perhaps that’s the lesson in moving from old Comiskey to new.

I repeat: even if your feelings about the game known far and wide as America’s Pastime are lukewarm at best, do NOT let this one get by you. The crack of a traditional wooden bat meeting the ball; the taste of those ballpark chili-dogs; the lush, manicured green of the infield diamond, marked off by the brown of the base paths; the feel of a well-broken-in fielder’s glove, the warm scent of linseed oil wafting from it; the umpire’s bawling cry of “Heeeerike TWOOO!!”—this article is richly redolent of all those precious things and many, many more.

The history of baseball is the history of the nation that birthed it, nothing more nor less, and the piece is bound to introduce you to a chapter of that wonderful history you almost certainly weren’t previously acquainted with. Don’t dare miss it.

A fool for Richard Russo

Posted on October 21, 2023October 21, 2023 by Mike

That would be moi. I’ve been a huge Russo fan ever since I swiped a former Significant Other’s copy of Empire Falls and, after finishing it, proceeded to wolf down the rest of her library of Russo’s amazing work in one great gulp of binge-reading. This rave review of his latest release describes what’s in store for the Russo reader.

In an endnote, Russo says that he kept returning to North Bath because he liked the characters—and there is a lot to like. He kept hearing Sully’s voice in his head, and gradually, he acknowledges, that voice became Paul Newman’s, who so unforgettably portrayed Sully in the film of Nobody’s Fool. But another voice also stuck with him, that of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who turned a bit part in the film as the officious but hapless officer Douglas Raymer—whom Sully bests in a comic confrontation—into such a definitive portrayal that Russo made Raymer a major character in subsequent North Bath novels. In Somebody’s Fool, Raymer is now the retired chief of the former North Bath police department, called back into service to deal with a dead body and with corruption in the newly consolidated Schuyler Springs force—whose crooked cops have much do with Thomas’s near-death experience. While it’s not uncommon for authors to disdain or disown film adaptions of their work, Russo has said of the 1994 film, “You could examine it frame by frame and you’d learn just about everything you needed to know about adapting a book for film.” It’s not an exaggeration to say that the film helped bring Russo back to North Bath.

Even as Russo publishes Somebody’s Fool, another of his works has made it to the screen—in this case television—in an AMC miniseries adaption of Straight Man. This 1997 novel is Russo’s “university book,” but unlike those that Vidal disdained, Straight Man is a wickedly funny, harshly critical depiction of life in an English Department where ideology shapes professors’ research and writing, academics use petty politics to advance their careers, and the decline of the humanities has created a constant fear of budget cuts. Though the novel itself is 25 years old, it so accurately depicted where the humanities were headed that it doesn’t take much massaging to turn it into 2023 series with the ironic title of Lucky Hank—a reference to the bored, cranky English Department chair, William Henry Devereaux, Jr., who endlessly torments his deserving colleagues. Though quite different from Nobody’s Fool, Lucky Hank has garnered similar acclaim—in part because both sources benefit from Russo’s gift for creating comic characters with serious significance.

Russo supported himself in college by working the kinds of hard jobs at which many of his characters toil. There, he watched his father and his father’s friends use humor to get themselves through jobs, after which he’d join them at some local bar to help laugh away the day’s aches. It’s that kind of storytelling, in Russo’s hands, that makes his blue-collar novels so engaging and palatable, because oftentimes the circumstances of his characters are difficult at best, near-awful at worst. American fiction is better because Russo stuck with characters who he thought he was escaping when he went off to school. The arc of his career reminds me of the words of the narrator of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound, writing about himself in the third person, when he observes that all he wanted as a young student was to leave behind “all the shallow provincials” of his hometown “for the deep emancipating world of Art. As it turned out, he had taken them all with him.”

Russo has done the same, in the process taking many of his lucky readers along for the ride, too.

It’s a ride I very much look forward to taking, and highly recommend to everybody else out there too.

(Via John Tierney)

Update! Just for shits and giggles I had a look in on the IMDb page for the Empire Falls miniseries, which I remember greatly enjoying back in the days when I still watched TV now and then. Somehow, I’d forgotten that it was Paul Newman’s last acting performance. It’s one of the vanishingly rare exceptions to the rule that any film or TV project featuring a long list of A-list actors is guaranteed to suck big green donkey dick.

Category: Lit’rachure

Hey, Nutflix, leave Aslan alone!

Moar desecration, stat!

Today’s must-read story

A fool for Richard Russo

CF Search

Login, RSS, &c

CF Archives

Categories

2A/Mostly Guns

Alt-American

Big Dogs

Essayists

Mil

Nuttin’ But News

Odds Bodkins

Overseas/Non-US

Portals

Pure Bloggery

REAL Journalism

The Funny Pages

Comments policy

CF Glossary

Subscribe to CF!

Shameless begging

Correspondence

Allied territory

Notable Quotes

RSS feed