For Later Reading

We are in the middle of a monsoon storm, with heavy rains (but no wind) on and off for the last three days. Lots of flooding streets, landslides in the mountains, but good to prepare the fields for rice. (I should add: and with the rain, electrical brownouts and internet interuption).

So bookmarking posts for later deep reading (on my tablet).

Brian Sibley reposts an essay written in 1986 about a trip to Disneyland.

Disneyland,’ Walt once remarked, ‘is like Alice stepping through the Looking-Glass. To step through the portals of Disneyland will be like entering another world.’
More than that, it is like stepping into a living cartoon. Disneyland is a three-dimensional outworking of the techniques and illusions of the animator s art.
The animator is unique among film-makers in creating worlds, entire and complete, out of nothing more than graphite, ink and paint. Everything is drawn from scratch: story, characters, settings, sights and sounds, shots and angles – all dreamt up, imagined and then imbued with a semblance of reality.

This was the point of the film Saving MrBanks: That creative people can reimagine the world.

Escapism? Ah, but as Tolkien noted: it is not the fleeing of a coward from the battle, but the escape of a prisoner.

-----------------------

Related Item: Series of essays by David Warren on culture. Today's essay is a rumination on the idea of authority, and how the modern world discards the authorities in the past, letting one be manipulated by the puppet masters who manipulate us.

again, using imagination to reimagine the world.

------------------------------
Tolkien library: an educator ponders: Why are Tolkien's books popular for schoolkids?

the writer seems a bit daft however, as he claims:

As one accomplishes the first quarter of the book, the tone of Tolkien starts portraying into a melancholic being who does not find it easy to separate good from bad. 

REALLY? I would have thought that the lesson of the book is summarized by Aragorn, who corrects this idea:

• 'How shall a man judge what to do in such times?' 
  'As he ever has judged,' said Aragorn. 'Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.'

------------------------------------