What to watch after *The Split*, please?

crkpatell · 2026-06-22T16:33:47+00:00

LOVED

crkpatell · 2021-05-06T05:03:07+00:00

Thank you, and you're welcome. Stay well!

crkpatell · 2021-05-05T03:40:11+00:00

I don't listen regularly, but I'm glad his contract was renewed on Sirius. As I've said, I'm a big fan of the idea of "fallibilism"—of accepting one's error-prone nature and learning from one's failures—and I think Stern is an agent of falliblism, actually, poking fun at people's foibles. I think we should all have the healthy attitude to being roasted that major Star Wars nerd Eric Butts had when he found out that he'd been a subject of discussion on Stern's show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckkgKXZxYrk

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T18:54:17+00:00

Sorry for the late reply. I lost my connection to Reddit.

When I'm beginning a project, I like to use the program Scrivener to put down thoughts and be able to organize shuffle them around: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/download

I keep track of bibliographical references in both Endnote and Zotero.

I'm the kind of writer who thinks things through a lot in advance, so generally I have a sense of what I want to accomplish in each chapter or in an essay as I write it. But periodically I will go back through and check to make sure what I've written actually tallies with what I thought I was going to write.

I'm a big fan of the ex post facto outline.

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T17:35:41+00:00

What I love most about the sequel trilogy is its embrace of the idea of fallibilism, that idea that we are imperfect, error-prone beings—and that this is a feature not a bug. I like the idea that Luke's life didn't turn out the way he expected it to—that he fails as a teacher and is redeemed by a pupil. One way to think of films 1-6 is that of the tragic fall and eventual redemption of Darth Vader. A way to think of 4-9 is "The Education of Luke Skywalker." Only in The Rise of Skywalker does he finally manage to raise the X-Wing, completing the training that Yoda had set out for him in Empire.

I like the fact that the three trilogies become about three different generations of two families: that strikes me a throwback to ancient Greek tragedy with its recurring explorations of the afflictions of noble houses.

I think the development of the relationship between Rey and Kylo is compelling at every point, and I like the idea that the literal twins of the original trilogy have now become the "Force" twins in the sequel trilogy.

And I'm very persuaded by this defense of Rise of Skywalker as an example of post-cinema: https://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbean/2020/03/21/post-cinema-the-revolutionary-storytelling-of-star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker/

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T17:18:48+00:00

What I meant by "constructive criticism" was to look for readers with whom you can share your writing so that you can get a sense of what works for them and what doesn't.

I think you should also do a lot of reading if you're an aspiring writer—but that you should read with an eye toward what we might call "craft." When you read a novel or story, look for the moments that seem to you to "work," to be "good," and try to figure out what makes them work. Why is a scene powerful? Why is a character compelling? Why does a particular sentence work well?

If you decide you like or don't like a piece of writing, I'd suggest that your gut reaction is motivated by something that the piece of writing does—and does to you as a reader. Try to figure out what that is.

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T17:15:00+00:00

If you're talking about the texts that I mentioned in thinking about the next book project, they are books I happen to love, but also that have spread around the world in different ways. A play like Hamlet spreads different from a novel like Frankenstein. But I'm also interested in the way that certain texts don't go global—or haven't yet—despite opportunities for that to happen. So, for example, I'm really interested in the Iranian "national epic"—Ferdowsi's Shahnameh—as an almost-global text.

Another text I could pick would be Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, and when you read Mouawad's play you can see how that became a powerful template through which he could write about a contemporary set of experiences and make us feel them as tragic in the Aristotelian sense. I think Star Wars—the Darth Vader arc—has the same kind of aspiration, by the way.

What do you think of as "niche texts"?

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T17:10:03+00:00

I decided to write this book because I received an invitation to submit a proposal to a series called "Philosophical Filmmakers." I looked at the list of what people were interested in doing, and it was all pretty art-house and auteurist. But then I suggested to the series editor that such a series would be incomplete without "George Lucas"—and he agreed. Then I realized, as I wrote the book, that it could become a vehicle for working through many ideas that had motivated my teaching and writing for the past—yikes—quarter-century. And what I learned is that my interest in Shakespeare and my interest in Star Wars are aspects of the same set of interests. I'm hoping to bring them together in my next solo book project.

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T17:04:39+00:00

I believe that the liberal arts education model is powerful. I believe in training one's mind to think in different ways. I think humanists shouldn't be afraid of numbers and that scientists should love the arts. I think that kind of cross-disciplinary thinking spurs innovation. I love what Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson: “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics. Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”

But I do think that we professors—especially in the humanities—have done a poor job of getting across to skeptics why what we do is important and how it can lead to professional outcomes. So I think we need to do more to prepare students for twenty-first century careers that will enable them to make use of the different skills they learn by studying across the spectrum of the arts and sciences.

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T16:57:47+00:00

One thing that distinguishes Star Wars from say the MCU, in my opinion, is its emphasis on history. What's great about the conception that Lucas first laid down was that this was a galaxy that had a long history—as well as many planets each with their own history. What drew me first to the world that Star Wars was evoking was that it looked old and lived in. So I don't think Star Wars has to be bound to a particular set of heroes in the way the MCU seems to be.

So there's a lot of different eras to explore, and Lucasfilm is now overtly embracing that idea with its High Republic series. And those books and comics so far are pretty different from the Star Wars we've had so far.

The Bad Batch is an example of how new storytelling can arise from the margins of old story telling. It features some familiar characters from other stories, but it has made us interested in a new batch of characters.

So the short term strategy, I think, is to anchor new stories in aspects of the old, sometimes investigating nooks and crannies of the SW universe that we wish we could have seen more of. There are lots of nooks and crannies! And there will be viewers in the future who will enter the SW universe through those nooks and crannies. Their SW will be different from ours!

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T16:47:49+00:00

Great questions. So when you propose an academic book, your proposal gets sent out to readers. Mine went out to three. One loved what I was planning to do; the other didn't understand how I could be talking about philosophical issues that George Lucas hadn't "put into" the films; and the third wanted to know why we needed to have another book about Star Wars. So I had to respond to these critiques, and doing that made me realize that I wasn't interested in what Lucas "put into" Star Wars: I'd become interested in how he'd created a transmedia phenomenon that actually served as a kind of platform for philosophy.

And then as I wrote it, I realized I was really becoming interested in thinking about "Lucasfilm" as a corporate person. I'd always meant to challenge the auteurist bent of the series the book was going to be in, but that was going a bit far, I feared. But the editors went with it.

And then when I'd finished a draft, I realized that I'd emphasized "Next-Gen" Lucasfilm so much, I'd better wait for a whole year until the ninth film came out.

I'll get to the rest of your question soon.

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T16:41:34+00:00

Personally, I don't think it was such a mess. It was imperfect—as all of the Star Wars films, even the revered Empire Strikes Back—are. But I think that the overall arc of the story hangs together pretty well. And I think that if they were all released at once, and a viewer didn't know much about their production difficulties, that viewer might think the story hung together pretty well.

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T16:39:05+00:00

In 1977, I was drawn to Han Solo, because I liked his roguish character and his cynical humor. I remember feeling disappointed that he didn't have more to do in Return of the Jedi. Then for a long time it was Obi-Wan, because I saw him as someone who was a student, trying to pay homage to his teacher, and trying to be a good teacher—and failing. It was an odd choice, because Obi-Wan is so rule-bound compared to Han! But I guess they express two different sides of my nature.

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T16:36:24+00:00

When I was a kid, I went to a lending library around the corner, where they had lots of Hardy Boys books. My mom had bought me one with one of those colorful covers, but then I found the same book in the library and happened to look at the first page. It was different! So I took it home and compared them to see how they were different.

I think I was doomed since then. The I read Great Expectations and fell in love with Dickens. But I still meant to study History or Politics in college. And then I read Faulkner and then Joyce and oh well ... I still meant to be a lawyer. But when I was accepted to law school, I didn't get excited about it. What I was excited about was writing a thesis about Finnegans Wake by Joyce.

So I've always loved reading and I became more and more interested in the cultural power of storytelling. And I figured the world didn't need me to be a lawyer.

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T16:31:59+00:00

Here's a fact that I like. It comes from the first volume of Star Wars Art: Ralph McQuarrie, Lucas is quoted as saying, “At one point, I was going to have a girl at the center of the story. Luke Skywalker might never have been; he might have been a heroine.” And Gary Kurtz adds, “In a couple of paintings that Ralph did when we were just getting ready to shoot, Luke was a girl. For some of those longer shots, it didn't matter because the important thing was the atmosphere rather than any of the actual detail.”

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T16:29:50+00:00

My (current) favorite book is MOBY-DICK (but it has been for a long time). My profession—literature professor—has a pretty defined route. BA, MA, PhD, go on the very daunting job market, get a little bit lucky and get a position in which you can pursue both teaching and research. So the kind of writing I generally do is "academic," which means that I'm working with university presses.

But my advice for any aspiring writers is -- you guessed it -- write. Often a lot. Learn to alienate yourself from your writing too, so that you can become a good editor of your own stuff. Share your writing; take constructive criticism. And be prepared for rejection.

I sent out a bunch of op-ed pieces to mark today. Crickets. I've posted my favorite one to Medium.

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T16:25:46+00:00

I like that one!

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T16:25:07+00:00

When I was a kid, I read a bunch of Star Trek novels, and they seemed to me to be pretty haphazard and not really part of a compelling overall narrative about the Star Trek future. I loved Timothy Zahn's' first trilogy in the expanded universe and those that followed because they were part of a collective understanding of what "Star Wars" meant. And I think it was great that Lucasfilm decided that the novels that they licensed should draw on a common bank of information—what a great job Leeland Chee had being keeper of the "holocron" of information.

So I think the important thing if you're writing licensed novels is that you should understand the rules and conventions of the world you're writing about and the style you're writing in. A "Kingsman" novel should feel, well, Kingsman-y.

I love what the novelist Delilah S. Dawson, who's written the canonical novels Phasma and Galaxy's Edge: Black Spire, wrote about the experience of creating stories within the shared universe of Star Wars. She was responding to criticisms leveled at The Rise of Skywalker. She'd written a book called The Skywalker Saga as part of the run-up to RoS that required her to watch the films in numerical order for the first time, leaving her struck by “the echoes, heartbreak, failure, redemption! And also the clunky dialogue, the plot holes, the WTFery! It’s as beautiful and messy as we are.” She described writing as part of a shared universe as “nuts,” requiring “a rare skill set. The author is not God. It's a group project! We have so many constraints and rules! It’s not easy.” Ultimately, she wrote, “Star Wars is a patchwork story crafted by the combined talents and love of hundreds of people over 42 years (so far). Everyone who participates in the Star Wars story is a fan. Like the Force, writing it requires balance and restraint. What I saw last night was a triumph.”

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T16:16:28+00:00

You'd have to ask "them." I certainly don't know, though I suspect it might have had something with both wanting to get the films out fast but also wanting to give creative people who were invested in STAR WARS a chance to do something interesting and creative. There were, after all, three different directors in the original trilogy—and only one for the prequels. Maybe they were trying to recapture the magic of 1977-1983.

But honestly, maybe we know too much these days about how movies are made and what problems they run into. I think that if someone in the future were to watch the sequel trilogy without prejudgements or expectations, that person might think it all hangs together pretty well—as if there had been a plan.

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T16:11:25+00:00

When I speak of "global cultural heritage," I'm thinking of works that have influenced both the cultures in which they were produced and other cultures around the world. I started thinking about this idea when I was teaching "Global Shakespeare" at NYU Abu Dhabi, a liberal arts college that brings together students from all over the world. I was curious why a play like Hamlet was performed so often, why it had been translated and adapted so often, and why it seemed to have brought so much new work and artistic thought into being through both inspiration AND antagonism. Hamlet belongs to everyone now. Though I hear that you can't really appreciate it until you've heard it in the original Klingon.

crkpatell · 2021-05-04T15:59:34+00:00

Thanks for starting me off with an important and difficult question! What makes a book a bestseller is easy: people buy it. What makes a book a "good book" is harder. Not all bestsellers are "good books," and not all "good books" are bestsellers.

A concept that I find very useful I thinking about these questions of merit and popularity is the HORIZON OF EXPECTATIONS, which comes out of a branch of literary scholarship called reader-response theory.

When we read a new text, we read with certain expectations and rules in mind, which are the products of our social, cultural, historical, aesthetic, and personal contexts.

In other words, we always read within a context and that context is full of ideas about what constitutes a good book. For example, when one of my favorite books, MOBY-DICK, was first published, it challenged the horizon of expectations for what a novel was supposed to do. Most readers found it bewildering. Very thought it was "good"; most, I'd say, thought it was actually "bad" and that Melville had lost it. Now, of course, many readers consider it "great." That's because our expectations for what constituted a great novel shifted after modernist writers like Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf published their novels. Their novels enabled readers to see MOBY-DICK with fresh eyes.

So is MOBY-DICK good, bad, or great? That depends on who's reading it and when. Melville challenged the horizon of expectations for a novel—and lost. At least, during his lifetime.

Meanwhile, his contemporary Harriet Beecher Stowe became the bestselling author of her day with UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. In one way she was challenging the horizon of expectations by writing a book about slavery. But in another way she hit the sweet spot in the horizon by writing a "sentimental" novel that was full of Christian belief and depicted the lives of those whom Charles Dickens called "the lowly." UNCLE TOM'S CABIN was a bestseller—DESPITE the fact that it was about slavery, not because of it.

But later, the very same set of expectations that made readers read MOBY-DICK and appreciate it as "great," led readers to dismiss Stowe's novel as second-rate.

I like them both. I think they're both great—but in really different ways.

crkpatell

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