Gimme fiction

For a while tonight, I watched home videos from the early to mid 1990s that my parents got somebody to burn onto a DVD.

Unlike my sister, who was all ham, I carefully avoided acknowledging the camera, ever. I think this has been my Personal Moral Code of the Camera: it is your duty to ignore them. They are documentary devices.

But here's the thing, Aiken: 15 years later, watching all these disembodied memories, I enjoyed watching my sister lope around for the lens. And it didn't take long for me to become utterly bored by my somber, quiet self. Fifteen years out, it's not actually accuracy that's revealing. It's performance.

Elrond, Toffler and the breakdown of the family

I saw Fellowship of the Ring tonight for the first time in four or five years.

I think one of the more touching things about Lord of the Rings, and maybe sword-and-scepter epics in general, is the presence of powerful parents. Literally. The books are scattered with the fantasy of vigorous, independent adult children whose parents are still at the top of their game.

Maybe this circumstance is actually a lost treasure of the entire pre-industrial past, the days before everything we learned was constantly being torn apart by discovery.



Frodo is wounded, lying on the ground in a forest. "We have to take him," Arwen says, "to my father."