Two pieces are being published today, a review of "All About Steve"<http://www.frederica.com/writings/all-about-steve.html>for Christianity Today Movies, and a review of National Geographic's "In the Womb--Animals"<http://www.frederica.com/writings/animals-before-birth.html>for National Review ONline. Those are links to the essays on my website, and the full text is below.
We're still waiting for copies of my new book, "The Jesus Prayer: The Ancient Desert Prayer that Tunes the Heart to God", to arrive. Of course you can order it anywhere books are sold, but here's a link to our parish bookstore <http://www.holycrossonline.org/our_parish/khourias_corner/> where you can get a copy that is autographed. Perfect for your Christmas shopping list. ************************* Animals in the Womb “In the Womb: Animals” by Michael Sims (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009) What is life like “In the Womb”? Thanks to National Geographic, we can refresh our memories with a beautiful book by that title, as well as a TV miniseries that makes use of the most advanced video technology. A new book and series now examines the prenatal life of our fellow mammals—and it’s weirder than you’d think. Of course, you might be a professional zoologist, and nothing here would surprise you. But I was amazed to learn that an elephant’s trunk is a hundred times more sensitive than our fingertips. It contains 40,000 individual muscles, while the entire human body requires only 639. And did you ever think about an elephant’s feet? Don’t those enormous, calloused feet look like they would ache, from stomping around under the weight of maybe 11,000 pounds of elephant all day? But the feet are so sensitive that they can receive sound waves through the ground; elephants can “hear” through their feet. And though those massive feet look flat as pancakes, the sole is actually spongy and convex (a design that Nike might want to study). “In the Womb: Animals” is indeed mesmerizing, and can turn you or anyone you know into a veritable fountain of Wow Facts. Since the book is about gestation, it is also about sex, and there is a lot more variation in how animals mate than I’d ever suspected. The male elephant’s “curvy three-foot-long penis” never actually enters the female; the male lemon shark doesn’t even *have* a penis. Perhaps irritated about being teased for this, he and some buddies grip the female in their jaws while assaulting her, a process that will leave her with scars, “and some females don’t survive mating at all.” Slipped off into handy-fact land again; sorry. An aspect of this book that I particularly appreciated is the deftness of author Sims’ prose. It doesn’t read like one amazing info-bit after another, though to a large extent that’s the material he has to deal with. The tone is conversational and lightly amusing. Discussing the prenatal development of a dog’s mouth, he writes that it is also the equipment he will use to bark, “that impressive tool dogs use to greet, notify, and threaten, as well as to torment writers who are trying to concentrate.” In mating, dogs “lock together in the ‘tie’ stage that provokes so much embarrassment when dogs mate in front of the children and neighbors.” Though the actual mating takes place immediately, dogs are initially unable to separate, and can struggle into a tail-to-tail position where they remain for up to an hour, “failing to look nonchalant.” But why in the world is dogs’ equipment designed for this to happen? “Scientists theorize that this posture evolved to allow the participants to better defend themselves if a predator catches them in flagrante.” On virtually every page a theory is proposed to explain why this or that odd feature evolved. “All female dogs go through a pseudo or phantom pregnancy.” (All? I didn’t know that.) This feature evolved so that unmated females can nurse the puppies of a momma dog needed elsewhere (e.g., to hunt). Puppy eyelids appear a month after conception, in order to seal the eyes shut against waste in the amniotic fluid. Dewclaws on a dog’s leg indicate a five-toed ancestor; over time, dogs’ feet evolved so they could run faster, on tiptoe. Some theories sound more theoretical than others; the tendency to wonder and guess is one of the human creature’s most endearing characteristics. So sometimes we seem to be in the land of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So” stories: this is how the leopard got his spots, this is how the rhinoceros got his skin, and this is how the dog got his dewclaw. But at times these suggestions raise more questions than they answer. If evolution is the result of random mutation offering superior benefit for survival, what survival advantage did the “tie” condition offer to dogs? Surely the standard mammalian practice allowed dogs to defend themselves better. Any mutation may, of course, occur; the question is how disadvantageous mutations could have become the prevailing mode. How did baby kangaroos evolve to be born in a nearly fetal state and then struggle up to their mom’s pouch, when the usual pattern of remaining longer in the womb is so much safer? It’s great that a shark’s yolk sac, its prenatal food source, is able to turn into a placenta after it depletes--but why did it evolve to deplete prematurely, before the shark was finished developing? Why did the sand shark evolve so that the strongest fetus devours all his brothers and sisters in utero? Wouldn’t that quite literally inhibit rather than advance reproduction? Scientists don’t claim to have all the answers; as Sims says, “All over the planet, human beings are amassing such facts and doing the best they can to interpret them. When nature reminds us that our explanations are approximate, we tweak them again.” This work of observing and theorizing is thrilling, somehow; it is always exciting to learn something new about our very complex world. “How exciting,” Sims writes, “to decipher old mysteries and discover new ones in previously uncharted territory—inside molecules, at the bottom of the sea, beyond our galaxy, and in the womb.” And how awesome it is to recognize that only human beings have evolved to find this knowledge exciting. Whether you search beyond the galaxy or in the bottom of the sea, you won’t find another animal this fascinated and thrilled to study other creatures. As G. K. Chesterton said, the simplest lesson of the ancient cave drawings is that an observer has now “dug very deep and found the place where a man had drawn the picture of a reindeer. But he would dig a good deal deeper before he found a place where a reindeer had drawn a picture of a man.” This beautiful record of animal life “In the Womb” is not produced by cats or crocodiles but by members of our own human race, the most curious (in all senses of the word) creature of them all. *************** All About Steve You expect certain things from a Sandra Bullock comedy, and if that’s what you’re looking for, “All About Steve” will not disappoint. She’s perky and quirky, slim and lovely, and a very good sport about looking unglamorous (here she survives both a tornado and a fall into an abandoned mine). You’ll be unsurprised to learn that romantic complications arise, followed by a happy ending. So if you enjoyed “The Proposal” or “Two Weeks Notice,” you’ll surely get a kick out of “All About Steve.” Now that I think about it, though, there actually *is* a surprise. Though the ending is a happy one, it’s not conventional, and not the one I was expecting. In fact, there are elements in this film that were original and pleasing. Why, then, is the overall impression so bland? To start at the beginning, Mary Horowitz is a cruciverbalist, a crossword-puzzle writer, and she supplies a weekly puzzle for the Sacramento Herald. In an opening montage we see her composing a puzzle with her favorite blue felt-tipped pen, and then follow her as she walks through the city, tickled to see citizens everywhere working out her clues. At the paper’s offices she does her over-eager best to convince her editor that they should let her supply a daily puzzle. We’re picking up that there is something odd about Mary. She’s a fountain of knowledge, and maintains a constant stream of cheery, free-associating comments, oblivious to the discomfort of her hearers. (Even those who can’t hear her get worn down; a deaf girl, later in the film, signs, “I don’t know what you’re saying, but you talk too much.”) She seems to have no idea of what is appropriate to say or do; she could be an ambassador for Oddballs Without Boundaries. Bullock has given the character a perfect set of physical traits and expressions. She walks like a child who’s been admonished to walk, not run, and at any moment seems likely to go bounding away like a spring lamb. Her obsession with trivia and her beloved vocation seems off-kilter as well. “Be normal,” her editor pleads: go out on a date, have some fun. Mary protests: “Crosswording is the most spectacular fun a person can have. Without passing out.” But that evening she does go out on a date, and that’s when the trouble begins. Her mom has arranged a blind date with a friend’s son, and Steve—a roving cameraman for the news network CCN—turns out to be an attractive guy. As soon as they are in his car she hurls herself at him, and during their brief grappling he says, “It’s lonely on the road. I wish you were there with me.” But at that moment his cell phone rings, and he’s ordered to leave immediately for a breaking story in Tucson. As Mary departs, Steve murmurs, “Thank God. See you later, crazy person.” That’s the setup, and the remainder of the story follows Mary as she trails Steve from one news scene to another, under the mistaken impression that they are a couple. She is serenely intransigent on the subject. “I’m a guy. Guys say things like that. I didn’t mean it,” Steve tells her. “Then how do I know that you mean what you’re saying now?” she responds with a confident smile. The weak spot in the story is precisely this relationship between Mary and Steve. Brad Cooper may be a fine actor, but he’s a misfit for this role. The character is made of cardboard to begin with, and when Steve exhibits distinctive personality traits, they feel inorganic and don’t make sense. (Steve would not be stupid enough to think he could escape Mary by wearing a false moustache and wig, while still driving the CCN van.) On the other hand, the star reporter in the news team, Hartman Hughes, is terrific. Thomas Hayden Church improves a conventional dumb-TV-reporter character with an ox-like, sluggish delivery that is effectively hilarious. When Steve throws a snack bag out the van’s window, Hartman tells him, “Give a hoot. Don’t pollute.” It’s not a funny line, except that Church speaks it the way an especially earnest Neanderthal might have. Any time Church is on-screen he steals the show, which is a perk for the audience but doesn’t help the unity of the story. The surprising element turns out to be a group of equally-odd people whom Mary meets at a news scene. They are protesting at a hospital, where a baby born with three legs is scheduled to have the extra leg removed. When a sweet-faced, plump young woman with a Southern accent tells Mary that they are on the “pro-leg” side, it is not hard to hear it as “pro-life.” These wierdos with their religious slogans look to be set up for ridicule, but as Mary travels with the girl and a geeky guy who carves appleheads we find that, for all their oddity, they are kind, courageous and faithful friends. Mary discovers that she fits right in with such folks, and that conforming to the general idea of normal is not actually necessary. This is an original turn, to present apparently pro-God protesters as genuinely good people. It’s original, as well, to throw away the “happily ever after” cliché in favor of true friendship with people who, like you, earn only the world’s contempt. Mary’s concluding line is, “Just find someone as normal as you are—or lots of them.” If only the rest of the film had been that original, that ready to be “abnormal.” ******** Frederica Mathewes-Green www.frederica.com
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