Towers

If you're at all a fan of the Lord of the Rings (which I'm not so much anymore, but I have been.....but I have been many things), you're aware that the second installment in the series is called "The Two Towers." Everyone has probably wondered what the two towers are, and the answer is always that there are options.... they could be the two evil towers or they could be the good tower and the bad tower. My favorite part about that little discussion/debate is that Tolkien didn't care what two towers you picked, because he never titled anything The Two Towers. The publishers made him chop the book into three and they chose the titles for the three parts. There's something interesting about the fact that a debate exists to which there is clearly no clear answer. There is no answer. The towers in the title aren't even necessarily in the book because the author did not choose that title. For all we know, they could be the tower of London and the Eiffel tower, signifying the route between Britain and France that so many soldiers were forced to take in WWI....Tolkien was in that war, after all. But I'm slightly Derridian.

In Vertigo, by Alfred Hitchcock, he made his crew superimpose a large white tower in the background of shots from Jimmy Stewart's apartment. Hitchcock usually liked to use locations and keep them true to their real-world spacial placements, so this was out of the ordinary. When asked why he was so insistent on the placement of the tower, his reply was positively Freudian.... my advisor told me you couldn't trust anything Hitchcock actually said about his films though.....

One of my favorite songs is sung by a woman but from a male perspective. It's this: Recessional, Vienna Teng. I once wrote a paper about gendering narrative voice. My conclusion was that, for whatever reason, the totality of things written in the English language don't allow for as much imagery from the man's perspective as from the woman's. Even, it seems, as women enter a "non-gendered" third person narrative, the language must get more flowery (for lack of a better word). From the first person though, it seems rare that men are allowed to speak of the beautiful things in life. "Amelie," if you've seen it (this) was written by a man and directed by a man...but it's among the closest examples there are of a first-person narrative with the camera, and that first-person is female.

Sometimes, what we say, what we do, what we mean, and what we actually believe, are completely divergent and magically correlative.

-Zack

"She faded into that newborn crowd
Like a warning of what could be lost."
-Vienna Teng