January 2010
18/01/10 16:05
The Wire‘The Wire’ is an US drama series which gives a post-modern perspective of Baltimore life and specifically the organisations that the people live within and battle against. The landscape is distinctly grey with good people doing bad things and bad people doing good things – a refreshing change from the conventional Hollywood narrative. Given the acclaim the series has received and evidence that other film makers clearly want to buck the trend of happy endings and neat conclusions, I wanted to raise a couple of discussion points about what this means in terms of storytelling and a wider view of life. In this post-modern context is there still a place for a more distilled version of life to inspires us, or is realism the new ideal? Would ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ have been better if Red had picked a fight with Andy on the beach at the end, evidence that his problems with anger were still with him despite the best efforts of the Shawshank correctional facility? A related issue concerns the relationship between art and life. ‘The Wire’ is justifiably applauded for it’s accurate portrayal of real life, but life can imitate art as well as art imitating life. I have come away from certain episodes of 'The Wire’ feeling a little despondent about my ability to make any impact in life – the system always wins despite all our best efforts (although I fully accept Bill’s proviso that I have only seen 3 out of 5 series’ of ‘The Wire’ so far). I guess film and TV can either tell it how it is, or tell it how it could be. ‘The Wire’ is brilliantly crafted and introduces intelligent complexities rarely seen elsewhere, but in less capable hands the desire to react against traditional Hollywood can look as contrived anything that Hollywood itself is producing (see the recently released ‘Up in the air’).
Being post-modern about it, both realism and idealism clearly have a place.
In the Beginning There Were Stories – Thoughts about the Oral Tradition of the Bible
William J Bausch, Twenty third Publications 2004
The main thesis of the book is the fact that before the books of the Bible were written own, they were spoken. Oral tradition and story telling is a key to understanding the Bible, and involves unlearning our modern literary approaches. This avoids the danger that the text becomes taken literally once the story is written down, and any understanding is deductive and cerebral. In fact God reveals his truth wrapped in story.
Other insights into understanding the Bible are gained by understanding the culture of the Middle East, in particular how it contrasts with our current culture. Otherwise we miss out on “presumed understandings” and insert our own instead. One example given by Bausch is how we have understood the phrase “no room at the inn” as being no room at a commercial hostelry, when these did not exist in Biblical times. Mary and Joseph would have stayed with family even if there was very little room and they ended up with the least satisfactory accommodation.
Other interesting points he discussed are the role of editing, the reason for writing – the Gospels are essentially propaganda, and the use of “midrash”, which he describes as an inventive combination of scriptural interpretation and reflection on contemporary events, employed by religious teachers in the Middle East.
I have some misgivings about his thoughts on the role of “myth”. Certainly “myth” can point to truth, but I would disagree that it does not matter whether none of the Bible happened at all. But the book is a useful corrective to the current conservative approaches to the Bible and a challenge to our own world view.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Infidel my life
Ali tells her astonishing life story, from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia to her intellectual awakening in the Netherlands, to her life under armed guard in the West.
NEVER GIVE UP!
http://www.ted.com/talks/william_kamkwamba_how_i_harnessed_the_wind.html
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