Backward Mutters

  • Malachandra or Pandora?

    Watched Avatar in 3D this weekend. Enough has been said about the movie: its agenda, the screenplay, and special effects, and so I’ll forgo all that. I have however, been turning a concept around in my head concerning the view of space, humanity, and extra-planetary exploration in the sci-fi movie…

  • Favorite Paragraphs

    Here are a couple of my all-time favorite paragraphs. They’re from Booth Tarkington’s book Penrod–a story of a young, precocious boy named the same. “The serious poetry of all languages has omitted the little brother; and yet he is one the great trials of love–the immemorial burden of courtship. Tragedy…

  • Who’s Cranky?

    Well…I guess I can go ahead and get that new compact crank I vowed I would have if I ever did Mountains of Misery again. Speaking of which, Chum and the Good Dr. are already boasting about beating Red to the top even if they do the double metric. We’ll…

  • The Sun

    Over at the Big Picture, you can find a collection of great NASA photos of the Sun. The Sun is the fourth of the planetary spheres and whose qualities are imagined in C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” which will be released as a movie in December 2010.…

  • Saturnine

    The Big Picture posted a number of images from Cassini which caught Saturn at its equinox. Saturn is the the last of seven planets and its sphere in Dante is inhabited by the great contemplatives. For Lewis, Saturn is not merely time or age or death but always give over…