After a wedding shoot on Saturday I spent 10 hours on Sunday driving up to Malheur National Forest in Oregon to catch the eclipse on Monday morning.
In an ideal world I would have arrived a day or so early to scout a location and would have rented a telephoto lens with an eclipse filter. But you do what you can with what you have when an opportunity arrises.
I had never seen a total eclipse before this one. It’s an amazing experience. I wish it was something that lasted much longer. The sun dims slowly at first until the world is illuminated with a dim very direct light then suddenly darkness with only the pure white glow of the suns corona.
To me, the most amazing takeaway was how apparent it is that the moon is an object floating through the heavens. In total shadow, it seemed more three dimensional than it does under normal viewing conditions.
It was also interesting to experience the temperature change, stillness of the air, and the confused sounds of evening birdsongs in the dark moments of morning.
It’s literally 5:30 in the morning, but I had this dream that is so charming to me that I just have to write it down:
I just dreamed that I was organizing a showing of a film titled Tea with Princess Firehand for work at the library. That’s the top layer of the dream. We would show the film and have tea and a discussion. The next layer down is the film itself.
Tea with Princess Firehand is, in this dream, a Japanese film about the editor of a prestigious tea journal. In and amongst all the articles he receives on the history of tea and tea ceremonies, tea equippage, tea houses and gardens, thoughts on growing tea in the face of climate change, &c, he receives a piece of fanfiction. In the fanfiction story, a character called Princess Firehand (which is a ridiculous name, and I blame my sleeping brain) is doing tea–maybe for some other characters, I’m not really sure, but it’s fanfic and it’s her thoughts and feelings during this tea preparation. I think Firehand is from an anime, possibly a game.
So the editor gets this and at first he thinks its a joke or an insult and tosses it aside with the other rejected articles and it gets covered up under other submissions.
Of course, he finds it again when he’s clearing off his desk and reads the first paragraph. And then the second. And the third. And the next think he knows, he’s sitting there reading the whole thing.
And while it’s not great literature, he’s still sort of charmed by it and drawn in, somehow. So, as you might guess, he looks up whatever it is this character Princess Firehand is in and watches or plays that (which is out of character for him, but that’s the point) and then he decides to go out and find the author. (There’s a gap here; I just remember this image of the editor riding on a train with the story in his lap.)
That’s about all I can remember but after about 3 nights of nightmares, I’m kind of delighted with this. I’ll take it.
(Note: I do not like Faramir in the movies, and this is mostly an exploration of their differences from that perspective. I tried to avoid bashing, but eh. It’s also really long, much longer than I originally expected. You can watch/listen to the whole thing here.)
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I think I’ve finally–after all these years–had an epiphany about movie Faramir vs. book Faramir. How the discussions generally seem to go is this:
Faramir = nice and mild, thus where movie Faramir = nice and mild, movie Faramir = book Faramir. Where movie Faramir comes across as morally unjust, movie Faramir not only isn’t book Faramir, but falls outside the acceptable range of Faramirness. These unacceptable breaks are regarded as lapses in his character, inconsistencies between mostly-like-Faramir and not-at-all-like-Faramir.
On the other hand, if we look at movie Faramir’s character as a whole, I think two critical traits emerge. One, he’s generally accommodating, good-natured, and conflict-averse (not willful or independent; also not scholarly or otherworldly). Two, he’s overpoweringly driven by the desire to earn the affection and approval of his father–it defines who he is in a very large part, and is his overriding motivation for everything.
It’s not that he’s ‘not exactly like book Faramir,’ but rather, exactly what his defenders always said: he’s a different person. He doesn’t have OOC lapses now and then; his personality is radically, and consistently, different.
This is super long (hah! that I could level that charge) but also super good. It goes to the heart of why so many film adaptations of richly plotted/characterized novels, even good adaptations, are hard for me to love. The shortcuts of logic you get when hundreds of pages of text are pared down to a few hours of visuals are probably necessary, on some level, but I mourn for what’s lost.
Btw this is called Firebringer, it’s a majority-women musical about cavepeople discovering fire, there’s literally only 3 named male characters, and it’s on YouTube for everyone to watch for free
