F Buechner on the faces we will meet or do not …
T.S. Eliot read by Sir Anthony Hopkins …
Helen of Troy, beauty + danger …
3D-printed face shields …
Melania Trump …
Gangsta …
FDA …
… ah, but we find this hard
Game Face
Recent
Coyotes and Christians
I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,
And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’
Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that
What I Recalled Watching Netflix
[Television is educational.] One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain
Seeking the King
A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do
Random
Pas De Duh
Is ballet a sport? The question is asinine in at least two ways. Of course it is, whether one is asking does it qualify as one or simply based on the assumptions implicit in the question itself. To put it as stupidly, would a Ferrari fit in my garage? Is Rivendell a better deal than
The Fat Guy and Buffets
The word is buffet, and it is 300 years old, from the Old French, of “obscure origin” as the kids say, if the kids wrote etymological dictionaries. Obscure origin, but the word is more than making up for it three centuries later. They are everywhere. Everywhere the Fat Guy lives, and everywhere he has been. I
Dirty Rotten Scoundrel
Some of my best friends have a problem with the dirty poor. These are the folks below the dirt-poor — which describes a financial level not the person himself. These are the dirt-encrusted, unemployed, possibly begging (relying on strangers, kindness, and a fair economy as much as the rest of us, anyway), frequently transient (the weather
Murder, Inc.
In Season One’s “Ransom for a Dead Man” Columbo tells a story about his cousin Ralph. He’s flying in Leslie Williams’ plane and she’s been talking about her husband, whom she’s murdered. By the story he tells after they’ve landed, he enters the murderer’s mind — with a significant stopping point: “I have this cousin, Ralph,
Related
Finding Level
Relationship finds its own level. Generally it looks like we [and others] choose — a boy’s entreatment rejected, an attorney makes partner, 158 million of us vote — but there is a finality to much that we ostensibly do. This is how such absurdities as determinism gain purchase, how authors can talk and be misunderstood
One
Chapter Nine of Peace Like a River — the best novel of the first quarter century of the millennia and yes, I know there are 3 to 4 years left of that range, depending on one’s counting to 100 — is when the Land family hears they now own an Airstream trailer, courtesy of the
He’s the Guy
Those social media posts of ‘this moment in this famous film was totally unscripted!!!’ as if that by itself makes it better miss the point. Moat unscripted material, like most ideas, inventions, ideas, notions, &c … fails — such is the nature of creativity: the best stuff, it is devoutly to be wished, sticks around;
Touch
In Boston in the Back Bay on Boylston the Trader Joe’s looks built for the bite-sized. The storefront is not one-third the size of the usual glass portion of a TJ’s and far less than the width an entire layout usually commands. There is one set of double doors covering both entrance and exit —