Silent Sundays at South Mountain Park

In preparation for the MS 150 in March 2010, I've tried to get out with other GCU people on some rides. So far, the most consistent has been the Silent Sunday rides for the past two months. From the parking lot to the San Juan Lookout is 6.3 miles, by odometer. So, to the lookout and back is 12.6 miles, while it's a 3.4 mile climb to the intersection of the two summit roads, one to a lookout pavilion, and the other to a group of antennas. So far, 19.4 miles total round trip.



Once upon a time (1990 or so), I (in an incautious moment) mountain biked up the National Trail to the antennas with a college student. It was hard, and more acrobatic than I actually was.

Since then, I've never been back to the antennas. Last month, I made it partway up the climb. (That's the trash can picture.) This month, I've made it to the intersection split (pictured). Next month, maybe to the lookout or the antennas.




I really like this trail, winding as it does through high Sonoran desert landscape. It also gives a good workout.

The Duchess

Of course, a movie starring Kiera Knightly is always going to be visually interesting, but this film ended up being surprisingly dissatisfying. It may be that I'm not a fan of the genre of modern Romance, which is what this movie ended up being. In Northrop Frye's terms, Romance has the structure of comedy (disorder to order), plus exotic settings and interesting noble characters.

This picture, instead, played up the "modern Romance" conventions one sees in such books as Shogun, Gaijin, and the Thorn Birds. The "main characters" have lives that never turn out well; it does not end in relationship, but in a kind of stasis. In the Thorn Birds, for example, the great lovers are torn apart by the calling of the male character, having only one night together. In Gaijin, the putative hero dies of his wounds relatively early on in the novel, leaving no character focus.

In the same way, The Duchess not only compresses the heroine's love life into a few weeks in Bath, it falsifies history as well. In history, the duchess's affair lasted for years.

I'm beginning to believe that there's something to Frye's (and Aristotle's) contention that the actual structures and archetypes of literature carry a special meaning.

The Dark Knight

A couple of days ago, I watched Batman: The Dark Knight, at my son's suggestion. It is different. It's more noir and "realistic" than the others; Christian Bale is the same, but they had to replace Katie Holmes with Maggie Gyllenhaal. One of my friends yesterday said that she hated the movie because, among other things, she felt that Heath Ledger's depiction of the Joker was over the top, and not at all funny. I, on the other hand, found it to be an intriguing look at the incipient anarchy of humor, and the way that unrestrained humor becomes horror.

I'm always intrigued by the rejection of the "hero" concept. The movie also provided an interesting definition of it: "A hero is someone who plays by the rules--always--and saves society." Given this, Batman can't be a hero, because he doesn't play by the legal rules. But he is a hero because he covers up Harvey Dent's descent into madness, in favor of Dent's image as a hero. So, the concept is exposed as a lie, and the Dark Knight becomes a new definition of the term: self-sacrificing for the society when he instructs Gordon to "tell them I killed those people," since people need an heroic image to believe in. In the same way, Alfred burns the last letter from Gyllenhaal's character because Bruce Wayne still needs something to believe in.

Thus, the traditional concept of the hero is deconstructed-- it's not following the rules, it's one's motivation for action that becomes heroism.

I was also intrigued by the incipient apologia for waterboarding and harsh interrogation methods in the questioning of the Joker in the city jail.