I plead ignorance, thank you for introducing him to me.
I'll look back in your previous weeks to see whether you consider Bass guitar as part of this featured focus.
If so, it would be worth considering, Jaco Pastorius. A wizard on bass.
I was fortunate to see him many times in south Florida in the 1970's. Mostly at, "Musician's Exchange", Don Cohen's contribution to the music scene in that area.
Thanks for these threads.

Hedges was week 15 of this series. An astonishing talent.

And yeah, so was Jaco. Seeing him live must have been really something. Although I had heard his name I didn't really appreciate him till a couple of years ago when I heard his solo album (which I think is just called Jaco?). I'm about at the end of this 52 guitars thing, so won't be venturing into bass guitar. I have a few shredders to include, and am trying to think of somebody important and interesting whom I haven't already written about to close the series.

Had such abusy week I have not read this yet. Ryan Croft as been at UND lecturing on Star Wars

I wish I could have heard that.

AMDG

No idea what "Marmite" is.
I do know, Vegemite. Hoping they are not related. Saw it on your post about Publix. I have a great story about that store. I'll spare you.
Just wanted to say, thank you, again for your contributions in this project.
Spent considerable time digitally thumbing through your guitar posts. It reminds me of spending hours in "Peaches" record store in the 1970's, 1980's. I "found" Ry Cooder's, Bop Till You Drop there. Still listen to, "The Very Thing That Makes You Rich". Still listen to a lot of old vinyl.
Glad to see that you covered Jeff Beck so early on (week 7).
Also appreciated seeing Paul Galbraith and John Williams (week 12). First time I heard the former I recall saying, "Finally, a guy named Galbraith who I can listen to". John Kenneth Galbraith? Yeeesh...
Hope your lemon tree survived.
Thank you again for the pleasurable trip through guitars.
All the best...

I really miss my little record store that was next to the Planters Peanut Shop with the Mr. Peanut roasting machine. All my records smelled like roasting peanuts.

There was a record store within walking distance of the office where I worked when I was 19, and I would go there at lunchtime, pick up a stack of records and eat in the listening room.

I liked those little crates at Peaches.

AMDG

Who is Ryan Croft? I can't find anything about him on the internet unless he's the guy who designs guns.

How funny you looked all over the web for him when he used to comment on your blog:)

I rather doubt it, since only three people ever read my blog and only 1.5 of them ever commented.

I thought it was Mac having a senior moment!

Paul, it was great. Students said he was awesome

I see from the ND site that Croft is a visiting professor at U. of Wyoming. The U. of Wyoming site says his field is English. You guys seem to have known this. I must have a poor memory for what people say about themselves in comments. Talking about senior moments....

The lecture sounds interesting--Eve/Mary allusions in the Star Wars trilogies.

Ryan C gave two lectures. One was for my 'Christ the Beautiful' course. I worked them hard all semester. They studied Nicaea II (ratification of icons) and the Renaissance and Pasolini and lots of hard stuff! This is the penultimate week of semester and I figured they deserved a lecture on images of hell in Star Wars. Ask Miss Christina Gotcha if they worked hard this semester, Robert!

The 17 fourth year Theology Majors in there loved Ryan's talk. So much so that they came back voluntarily for the 2nd lecture

The second lecture Ryan gave was on Eve/Mary typologies. That was for the undergraduates in general - not part of a course. There were about 100 students there - they were sitting on the stairs and standing up at the back.

They loved it.

Yes, it sounds great for all concerned.

And I understand your doubt, Maclin, but I can tell you that there is enough in Star Wars to analyze forsher.

Here's a worksheet I developed for students to compare the apocalyptic imagery in A New Hope to that in Revelation: http://www.starwarsintheclassroom.com/rogues/members/docs/rcroft/SW_Apocalypticism.pdf

This video my students made compares the fauns and the lion in the Faerie Queene to the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi:

http://repository.uwyo.edu/starwars_litcrit/4/

(might take a while to load since it's in HD)

This one is about monsters in medieval literature (including Beowulf) and Star Wars:

http://repository.uwyo.edu/starwars_litcrit/5/

And this one is about Princess Leia slaying Jabba the Hutt being a modern retelling of Judith and Holofernes:

http://repository.uwyo.edu/starwars_litcrit/3/

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I have a whole class I could teach just on Milton and Star Wars. I have lesson plans, too, on the Seven Deadly Sins, and the incorporation of Dante's Inferno into The Empire Strikes Back.

I also have a lesson plan for teaching the theme of incest in Star Wars and the Kalevala (a la Sibelius's "Kullervo and his Sister"). Going to try that out this Spring.

There's also a PBS interview with me that's pretty easy to find on YouTube.

For the Faerie Queen/Ewok video, if you put your mouse over the black box, you can watch the black line fill up. Then it will be ready.

Janet: Oh dear! Haha. I see your blog has knocked it out of the top spot, though. That's good.

When you search for "Star Wars medieval literature" our site is the first that comes up. I'm very proud of that.

Grading...ugh. Thank you for the reminder that I would have liked everything about an academic job except the academics.:-)

Re Star Wars, I don't doubt that the parallels are there and interesting. I just hope, as I said somewhere further back, that you haven't joined the "all texts are equal" school.

Good to see your sig on a comment again!

Or is that the name of your course, Grumpy? I get confused.

I had dinner with Ann Astell thanks to Francesca. She's wonderful. We talked about Joan of Arc. I have a lesson plan with her, a French romance called Silence, and Leia too haha. My students enjoyed learning about Joan of Arc this semester.

While we're on the topic of texts being equal, I agree with Auden that Milton is a better writer than Tolkien, but that Tolkien mounts a better theodicy than Milton. It depends on what you're looking for.

But anyway, just as Tolkien does certain things better than Milton, so Star Wars does some things better than Shakespeare. And Dante does some things better than both. I don't feel the need to order the canonical texts of the Western heritage into a hierarchy. I bask in the plentitude.

I certainly believe in the development of the canon, too, almost by definition--it's a living thing. I'm much less convinced that Star Wars belongs in it, which is to say less convinced that it will be of much interest two hundred years from now. But anyway, I'm glad things are going so well for you. I'd like to see the Rockies again.

Here's a question: can you think of any movie that you think will likely be part of the canon--that has the depth and staying power of, say, Paradise Lost?

I'm not trying to provoke: as a non-movie person, I'd really like to know opinions. My taste in movies is a pedestrian and sentimental as my taste in anything else (music, for instance).

Do you think they are still there? Maybe they have been removed for urban renewal. ;-)

Typing a comment which is really a post.

AMDG

Well, that's okay, since you also don't like Beowulf very much, and I think it's a better text than Hamlet. ;-)

I think Blade Runner, Chinatown, etc... will have the staying power of Paradise Lost. And, of course, Star Wars. Star Wars has been just as influential upon film as Paradise Lost was upon poetry.

But comparing films to long epic poems is not really fair. I think comparing films to drama is only a little more so. In that case, Chinatown and Blade Runner should have the staying power of the canonical dramatic texts.

Speaking of which, when Ben Jonson published his plays in a huge volume his contemporaries laughed at him for taking those particular texts so seriously. It was poetry and the ancients that were respected. Even not too long time ago it was questionable whether the study of English literature as opposed to Greek and Roman literature was truly important. I don't know for sure what the canon will look like in 200 years, but we should expect the unexpected. I think the place of sci-fi in the canon is assured, though, given how technology and culture is changing. Works like Snow Crash and Neuromancer are canonical.

I think Star Wars's place in the film canon and the larger cultural canon is also secure, due to its richness, its reflection of its socio-political context, it's artistic skill, and its thematic depth. And I'm also just going by the reactions I get when I show it to students for the first time. But maybe I'm just an enfant terrible. ;-)

Robert, I'd be very interested to know what your daughter thought. You have my email, so please write (or she can). I told all of Francesca's students they could email me if they wanted help with any Star Wars-related projects.

Oh, and I think the technology to play them will exist. Blade Runner has survived DVD and Blu Ray, and has actually gotten better with these updated formats. As long as total civilizational collapse doesn't occur, they should be playable. If collapse does happen, I totally see people preserving cinematic texts in dramatic form.

I'm not an expert on Langland, but lately there's been discussion about the darkness in Chaucer, which I find interesting, since he's often portrayed (and portrays himself) as a bumbling, innocently cheerful poet. But lately the darker edges of his texts and the ironic nature of that bumbling self-portrait have become more apparent. It's interesting how different ages react differently to canonical texts. The reception history of King Lear comes to mind.

Anyway, I have to run to work now.

Oh, and I meant to say in that long comment up there that Howard says that all the students hung out in Greenwich Village. That was the 70s, and it crossed my mind that Grumpy might have been there then.

AMDG

I started to say something like that, but from the perspective I'm really thinking about--multiple hundreds of years from now--he won't really be in a significantly better position.

"all the students hung out in Greenwich Village"--speaking of dated things, that sounds pretty quaint now. But I like the Howard quote.

And you can argue that because Star Wars (just to pick the most obvious example) deals with the big subjects, it will last. But greeting cards do, too.

The argument that such-and-such wasn't taken seriously in its day, but now it is, doesn't move me one way or the other. It's like the argument that because a lot of critics were wrong about Beethoven they're probably also wrong about this or that contemporary. Yes, there are a lot of things that were misjudged in their day, but also a lot that were judged correctly.

Not that I'm saying with any conviction that SW *won't* last--I'm just doubtful. Personally I'd put more money on Bergman's work lasting than George Lucas's.

The best question I think I got at ND, by the way, was from a student who asked me about the trope of blindness in Scripture and Star Wars (specifically referring to Han and St. Paul).

Happy Feast of the Immaculate Conception to everyone! :)

Some of this comes down to a difference in taste. I think you're hugely over-rating Star Wars and at least some of the others, e.g. Children of Men (whether you're referring to book or movie) and, to the extent I remember it, Neuromancer.

I'm not worried about big-name movies etc. not being transferred to whatever digital (or whatever) media formats come along. There are enough interested people in those (and enough money at stake) to keep them in perpetual migration (and resale, if Hollywood has anything to do with it). But some lesser stuff is disappearing, and a lot more may do so. My wife is an archivist and talks about this a lot--personal records, parish records, things like that. There isn't likely to be, in 2164, anybody finding an ancestor's diary in a box in the attic.

Orcs. The Jedi created orcs.

AMDG

The works of Shakespeare and Beethoven can be performed over and over again by different people in different settings and with different interpretations. That can't be said for a movie; it can only be played on a screen as it is. You can make another movie based on it, but that's not the same thing, is it?

As a total work of art a film involves sound, lights, camera work; but its "literary" aspect is the script. In many respects I can't see that a remake of a film, or its adaptation to another medium, is any different from a new staging of a play. We might say that Shakespeare's scripts are not the same as Shakespeare's plays, which had their own specific casts (with some lines written with particular actors in mind) and their own staging conventions that are no longer available to those who would perform the plays again. I'm pretty sure a lot of films could be adapted for the stage, or perhaps even for the radio, without losing their literary identity.

While I do think Star Wars is a useful distillation of certain aspects of story-telling, I'm not sure I would consider it "canonical" either. Does something not have to influence how we read the rest of the canon before it can be said to have become part of the canon itself? But then perhaps for some people it has had that impact.

For myself, I'd think of it like Boethius in relation to classical philosophy: it distills aspects of the classical canon and so makes it available to people who wouldn't otherwise have access to it (more through ignorance than through impediments, but the outcome is the same). Once those people do have access to the classics, will they still want or need the distillation? Is its usefulness not more heuristic than as an object of study in its own right?

So, on a desert island for the rest of your life, would you rather have Paradise Lost or Star Wars, assuming you could watch SW without electricity?

AMDG

Well, that's what I thought. On any given night when I'm tired and just want to let something run over my brain, I would choose Star Wars--or more likely nothing--but if it's all I could ever have, I would definitely choose Paradise Lost.

AMDG

If you can find the latter two books, you should probably buy them, because although chances of your finding yourself on a desert island are slim, you would certainly not want to be without them.

I could probably think of a number of movies I'd take over a number of books. But even considering relatively high quality in the one and relatively low in the other, a normal movie is only 2-3 hours, whereas an average book should take provide at least several times that. But if you're going to be stuck there for many years, it probably wouldn't matter after the first few.

I suggest we switch to a dessert island discussion. If you were stuck alone on an island for the rest of your life, what dessert could you not do without?

I do like Bladerunner but there are only parts that I REALLY like and I'm not sure about it's sticking power. Chinatown gave me the horrors. (Sorry Ryan.)

I wish we could all go take a class from Grumpy together. What kind of discussions could we have then?

Craig, I'm reading a book by Thomas Howard for my post in January and I just finished a chapter about the birth of his first baby. Ever since I started reading this book, I've been wanting to type out great gobs of it and send them to different people. There is also a chapter on the opera that I think you would love. I hope Joseph et. al. are thriving.

AMDG

Craig (and everybody): I've just given the topic of the long-term staying power of movies a post of its own, as I find it really fascinating.

As for desserts, I exclaimed aloud with pleasure the first time I tasted tiramisu, which fairly late in life. I think I asked where it had been all my life. I've since realized that it was *really* good tiramisu.

Still, for a desert island dessert, I think I might pick ice cream, especially if I could have both chocolate and vanilla.

I like vanilla with real chocolate on it or in it--dipped cones or chocolate chip. I lost my taste for chocolate ice cream about 10 years ago all of a sudden, and thank goodness for that since Bill has a box of it in the freezer at all times and I would fall prey to it if it were appealing. It is very fortunate for me that we do not like the same snack and desserts--except for tiramisu.

I haven't had any kind of dessert like this since October 31, so this is a rather sad topic.

AMDG

Yes. Have you read it?

AMDG

Well Paul, I see you are correct.

There is a program on our public television stations called Masterpiece Theater that has been on since 1971 and which airs British Drama, mostly from the BBC. I might be wrong, but I would imagine that in the beginning all the programs were from the BBC. I saw BR on Masterpiece Theater and I just naturally assumed it was BBC. I bet most Americans would make that mistake.

A lot of people seem to think that the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice is BBC, but of course it's not.

AMDG

Not just Americans Janet. It's almost universal among people not aware of the cultural politics of British television in the 1970s (something which I only became aware of from teaching a course on Post-War British society and culture a few years ago.) It's just that knowing what I do now, I always feel sorry for Granada when the assumption is made, and feel an urge to give them their due.

Well, once when poor Bill's Facebook was afflicted with ladies' foundation garments after I had looked at them in a catalog, I did get rid of the cookies for his sake.

AMDG

Janet, I've not read it, and until today had not heard of it. But it sounds like I would like it.

I'm tempted to suggest a "52 desserts" for 2016, but am afraid of being taken too satirically.

Janet, I think you mentioned it further up this thread.