AJ Leibling

Recent

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

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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

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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;

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‘Round Here

Imagine someone, potentially anyone, even you, perhaps, but let us, in any case, say. Yes, you. You pull into the diner – Earl’s, Norm’s, Dinah’s, something like that. A sort-of Googie architecture … but maybe not quite, as if it’d been a little late for the Space Age, and late is the one thing you

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Random

You Da Man

   A Good Friday And petulant Pilate as if triumphant — What I have written, I have written! Finally a decision.    

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Whispers and Words

My dad died in my sleep. 2:35 AM in an upstate New York hospice; 11:35 PM in a Southern California house. A text saying to call and two voice mails I still haven’t listened to and speaking was as a sunrise. New but not unexpected. * Who’s the dust in this scenario? Remember, O Man, that thou art but

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Get In The Boat

You’re in this boat. I’m going to say the boat is our life in Christ, though over time the boat image, the water metaphor, has done yeoman’s work for pastors immemorial — it’s our body, our life, our church, our baptism, our faith, our death. You get the idea. Now imagine you’re the first guy

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Meme! Meme! Meme!

Memes are perfect for the extremely limited things they can do. Or as my Da usedta say, prolly swiping from mid-20th century comedian Benny Youngman Berle, they’re in pretty good shape for the shape they’re in. If they weren’t limited they wouldn’t be easy and if they weren’t easy they wouldn’t be common and as

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