Easter Bookhunt 2015

Join the 5th Easter Bookhunt at the Magsaysay Park, Davao City on April 5, 2015! To register, just donate 3 books to Alleycat Tea House from March 23-31, 2015. For inquiries, contact 09085470950 or 09177949431.

Poster by Xiao and Aidx.

Update: The Davao Readers Circle, the organizer of this book hunt, now has an FB page. Like us for news and updates on upcoming events.

The Once and Future King

I started reading this early January. This would have been finished sooner if not for the first part of the book, which was about Arthur as a boy. It wasn't bad. In fact, I enjoyed how Merlin lived backwards so that the 20th century was alluded to many times. It's just that the writing was too queer for my taste. Some of the characters, especially in this first part, were ridiculous, albeit very kind, what?

But after that, the tone slowly started to get serious. It took me back to when we tackled King Arthur in high school, watching First Knight, Camelot, and Merlin (the mini-series with Sam Neill) with classmates. It made several references to Le Morte d'Arthur, the first one I was familiar with but haven't read yet.

Because of recent events, re: the Mamasapano incident, territorial disputes with China, and more and more international threats, it sucked me in. For a fictional(?) story that's at once funny and unfortunate, it presents still very valid points about war and humanity in general. And it would be nice if everyone read this for those arguments alone, if not for anything else. I've quoted some of those discussions in the book below:

"Man is the king of animals." -Wart (young Arthur)
"Perhaps. Or ought one to say tyrant?..." -Badger

"True warfare is what happens between bands of the same species. Out of the hundreds of thousands of species, I can only think of seven which are belligerent. Even Man has a few varieties like the Esquimaux and the Gypsies and the Lapps and certain Nomads in Arabia, who do not do it, because they do not claim boundaries." -Badger

"The destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees." -Merlin

"There is no excuse for war, none whatever, and whatever wrong which your nation might be doing to mine---short of war---my nation would be in the wrong if I started a war so as to redress it. A murderer, for instance, is not allowed to plead that his victim was rich and oppressing him---so why should a nation be allowed to? Wrongs have to be redressed by reason, not by force." -Merlin

"You have become the King of a domain in which the popular agitators hate each other for racial reasons, while the nobility fight each other for fun, and neither the racial maniac nor the overlord stops to consider the lot of the common soldier, who is the one person that gets hurt. Unless you can make the world wag better than it does at present, King, you reign will be an endless series of petty battles, in which the aggressions will either be from spiteful reasons or from sporting ones, and in which the poor man will be the only one who dies." -Merlin

"Morals are difficult things to talk about, but what has happened is that we have invented a moral sense, which is rotting now that we can’t give it employment. And when a moral sense begins to rot it is worse than when you had none. I suppose that all endeavours which are directed to a purely worldly end, as my famous Civilization was, contain within themselves the germs of their own corruption." -Arthur

"War is like a fire, Agnes. One man may start it, but it will spread all over. It is not about any one thing in particular." -Guenever

And for the last pages of the book, White gives in detail the final thoughts of Arthur, which I summarize below:

"Why did men fight?

...

¹Was it the wicked leaders who led innocent populations to slaughter, or was it wicked populations who chose leaders after their own hearts?

...

²everything was rooted in the past! Actions of any sort in one generation might have incalculable consequences in another...If everything one did, or which one's fathers had done, was an endless sequence of Doings doomed to break forth bloodily, then the past must be obliterated and a new start made...We cannot build the future by avenging the past. Let us sit down as brothers and accept the Peace of God.

...

³Perhaps the great cause of war was possession...He that would save his life was asked to lose it.

...

⁴Perhaps war was due to fear...Perhaps wars happened because nations had no confidence in the Word. They were frightened and so they fought. Nations were like people---they had feelings of inferiority, or of superiority, or of revenge, or of fear.

...

Suspicion and fear: possessiveness and greed: resentment for ancestral wrong: all these seemed to be part of it. Yet they were not the solution.

...

He saw the problem before him as plain as a map. The fantastic thing about war was that it was fought about nothing---literally nothing. Frontiers were imaginary lines...The imaginary lines on the earth's surface only needed to be unimagined." -T.H. White

With that, Arthur gets the same conclusion as Guenever.

James Corden and Sean Harris

There are actors who, coincidentally, suddenly show up everywhere. The past month or so I have been exposed to a lot of James Corden and Sean Harris movies. But I don't mind because they should be in more!

James Corden and Keira Knightley in Begin Again

Begin Again is one of the nicest movies I've seen. It's clean and fun, and we should have more of those types of films. James and Keira both played independent music artists/singer-songwriters.

I liked that he lost some weight since I first saw him in The History Boys.

James Corden and Emily Blunt in Into the Woods

From one musical to another, James played the Baker in last year's Into the Woods. He's got quite a nice voice, and if a man can sing, then plus pogi points to him! (I'd like to mention though, Chris Pine, Cinderella's prince, is the man! But this post is about Corden, so let's continue.)

Then, earlier this February, Vanity Fair released a short film featuring British actors recreating famous movie scenes. James Corden narrates the whole thing. Watch the 3-part short film here.



Bonus video: with Gary Barlow singing Take That's classic Pray. Gotta love them both!

Sean Harris in '71

My favorite depiction of St. Thomas was in the 1999 movie Jesus. That was all because of Sean Harris' performance. Since then, Sean has been known to play intense supporting characters or intense bad guy roles.

Sean Harris with Eric Bana in Deliver Us from Evil

This character actor supposedly stays in character in between takes. So imagine him on set of Deliver Us from Evil where he played a possessed former soldier.

Two of his next projects star Michael Fassbender. They are Trespass Against Us (another movie title from the Our Father) and Macbeth. I can't wait for Macbeth because he will be the good guy/antagonist to Fassbender's bad guy/hero.


Bonus video: Sean Harris wins Leading Actor BAFTA. Too cute, awkward, and funny!