Recent
Ensamples
Among the worst things about The Slap is how it has fed self-righteousness in all but the two participants, and they already had it or it wldn’t have happened. But there is Solzhenitsyn, again, with the line between good and evil that cuts through every human heart, and there is Dostoevsky, always, reminding us via
Lipstick
Pig is revelation. Revealing is when what’s here is hidden then seen. It’s really many individual ones, though widely considered they’re the same, and all the individuals are related, perhaps only proximately at first, but also in ways they themselves don’t initially see. + Key is it’s here. Problem is we don’t see it. Action
Not For Teacher
There’s an unfortunate instructor-y thing where the guy on stage [I’ve found it’s usually a male doing this] asks a question he already knows the answer to, one of the people in the audience … err, classroom … is the target, the answer given is wrong, and the stagehand just goes and gives the answer
Diminishing Me
You’d think a guy’d remember if it was the first time he’d seen a body but I didn’t not at first. [Hadda chance to graduate from college into one of our acceptable wars but didn’t, into the war that is, and no shot at a medical profession: left HS Chem as it had only 28
Random
Centurion Prayer Day One
Going to start a little experiment. Well, it’s not terribly small, given that it will take nearly a third of a year that’s already one-fourth done. I’m calling the idea Centurion Prayer. I already like the name, so don’t try to change my mind. The idea is 100 days of prayer, and it’s not a
Too Old For This
You know the line. Usually spoken by an ersatz Bruce Willis type, it is well past cliché, sliding in safely but awkwardly beyond its years to self-parody, as predictable as the pablum in which it appears. [And note, I like every other Die Hard movie.] And yet, here I am: Too old for this. I
The American Poet
In evangellyfish circles there used to be a joke thus — Let us now turn to Malachi, the Italian prophet. The joke works if you say chi the way we’re supposed to say Qi if it’s the Chinese thing. And it works, though my Italian wife will die on the bruschetta with a hard “k”
In the Beginning Were the Words
Alpha and Omega 1:1 In the beginning were the words. The words were the poet’s, and later the priest’s. And the words the poet wrote were that Malcolm Bodwell was, “rapacious and repulsive and a fat gloating suet goat of a boy (not man) engorging himself on peat and stone and dregsy water