Thor Enchanted - important lessons in comparative literature



As a family, we are slowly consuming the Avengers movie franchise. Last night, we finished watching Thor. When Thor's pals "Sif and the Warriors Three" show up to try to bring him back to Asgard, Z exclaimed, "Oh, so this is like Enchanted."

Mythical being cast out of their own world arrives on Earth through a magical portal to find themselves baffled by ways of the mundane, other creatures good and bad from the mythical world come in search of the outcast, hijinks ensue.

Yes, Z. Thor is just like Enchanted. (This sounds like something some of my friends would have written undergraduate seminar papers on.)

Reading: One of the things that Annie Dillard meditates about in For the Time Being is how we think about or fail to be able to think about tragedy on a large scale. A garment factory collapses in Bangladesh. A tornado causes "atomic bomb like" devastation in Oklahoma, leveling neighborhoods and schools. Outside my window the goldfinches serenade the dawn just like every other morning.

 Writing: Yes.

Dinner: O saves the day! First, the pizza dough I thawed wouldn't cooperate. I couldn't get it to stretch out. Holes kept tearing in it. Very frustrating. Then Z and I realized her soccer practice is at 6 not 7, as I had been operating on. As it was currently 6:10, we then hustled to get her out the door. Dinner? What dinner? And whence? I was a little bit in despair. In the car, O lobbies for going to get a frozen pizza. I am skeptical, so he asks, "So, what did you have ready to go on the pizza? Salami and what else?" I told him that I had some chopped tomatoes too. "Salami and tomatoes?" he says, "We have lettuce, right? Add some cheese and that would make a really good salad, and we could get some olives and banana peppers -- with Italian dressing. And we could have that with the frozen pizza." So we did. And it was good. I praised him later for his improvisatory skills. He said, "Yeah, I like to exercise my brain."

 Soundtrack: Found myself singing "Sea of Love" when trying to get the children away from Sarah's house. "Come with me ... To the sea ..."

Random thing: "A lot of memoirs end in catharsis. They're hunky-dory with their mother and father, their sister and brother, and I feel that's imposed. You're alone with yourself, and your writing, and the feeling of one's mind fraying, from a lot of things--the weight of time, the wailing of the foxes." -- Edna O'Brien in this week's New Yorker.







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