Back to a Galaxy Close, Close By

So, I promised five parts to my "Star Wars Chronicles" but my faithful editor has informed me that my fifth installment is a bit tangential so I will save that for another time.  I had fun playing literary analyst again.  Thank you to anyone dedicated enough to read all of it.  Some of you may have been scratching your heads wondering, "What is she talking about?  It's just a story."  Of course, there really is no such thing as "just a story".  Even a book as simple as The Pigeon Wants a Puppy is instructive as well as entertaining.  Anyone can play the analysis game.  The important thing is to abide by the big rule--stick to the text.  While a sentence like "and then his grandmother took him to the pet store" may fill a reader with fond memories of the time Grandma took her to get her first pet and then an ice cream cone, those feelings are only relevant if they are supported by the text.

Another no-no in literary analysis is to read about the author's life and then hunt for parallels in the story.  While that information can be useful, not all stories are autobiographical.  Again, sticking to the text itself is what's important.  In the world of literary criticism it doesn't cut it to say, "well, this is what the text means to me" unless that statement can be supported.  Of course, that kind of thing is great for a casual book club where the goals are friendship and fellowship.   I interpreted Star Wars from my perspective as a Catholic woman.  I could have taken another approach and come up with a different, no less valid conclusion by sticking to the script.

OK enough about that--back to life at Casa Doyle

Speaking of the the arts and humanities, we did something yesterday that we've never done before--we saw a production at The Miller Outdoor Theatre downtown.  It was a bilingual opera for children called How Nanita Learned to Make Flan.  All of the productions at the Miller Theatre are free to the public and I was very surprised to see how sparse the audience was especially given the quality of what we saw.  All of the girls, even Ella, sat through the whole thing.  The set was very basic and the cast was small.  One pianist took care of the music.  Watching with the kids, I was able to point things out to them that they probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise.  My favorite part was when one of the actors played a clock and showed the time as Nanita described what she did at different hours of day.  With his long thin arms, he really looked the part.

After the opera, it was raining so we ate our lunch inside the pavilion with two other families.  After that, we headed to the Museum of Fine Arts, free on Thursday, for an angel hunt.  We decided to pair the kids up--a couple counted paintings with Mary in them, others Jesus and the littlest counted the angels.  We only stayed a little over an hour but it was so much fun and it gave me ideas for activities to do next time.  It's amazing how much you can teach kids just by looking at paintings.  One of the things we talked about is how hard it would be to understand some of the them without knowing the biblical or mythological stories behind them--something that's also true of literature.*

Six o'clock

Seven o'clock

Mia's message made with the alphabet cookies I brought for lunch

*One of the classes I took in grad school was a seminar on Latin American theatre.  There were about ten of us in the class and we each had to write a 15 page paper on one of the plays we studied during the semester.  We work shopped one of the papers as a class each time we met and the author had to defend his or her thesis.  My paper was about parallels to Jesus' passion and death in my assigned play.  It was one of my better papers.  I'll never forget the reaction of one of my colleagues.  Her comment was "well, I can't say much about this.  I've never read the Bible" and she tossed the paper aside.  So, as you probably know, Spain and her former colonies are all heavily influenced by religion and Catholic culture.  I wanted to say--"And you're a phDstudent?  Get ye to the library!"  But I didn't and the professor didn't either.  I got an A on the paper though so I must have convinced him that my thesis was supportable if nothing else.