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
Pray Attention
… am reading Ron Hansen’s Hotly in Pursuit of the Real and so for a moment do you then read with me. The title is from a line of Flannery’s I didn’t know but that is no matter; I didn’t know of Hansen’s book until a week or so ago, nor his A Wild Surge of Guilty
It’s Alright, I Am A Jerk
Don’t drive angry. And don’t drive ignorant. That’s the lesson of the Bill Murray movie, eponymous to the name of yesterday’s Punxsutawney festivities. The movie is now 20 years old, and still has an 8.1 ranking at IMDB from nearly a quarter million users. Watching the movie is a ritual now, like “Elf” or “A Christmas
Everyman’s Death
It’s legit unseemly. Our being ‘gutted’ and whatnot by the deaths of people we don’t know. Still, there is John Donne and there is continuity and there is in the end … us. Well, there ought to be but we usually skip not to the end — that bell tollling for we. + Also unseemly
Kim Possible
All the while watching Mad Men seemed to me the question was ‘Would Don Draper be redeemed?’ Breaking Bad was running roughly concurrently and the same question with an otherly alliteration was being posed: ‘Would Walter White be damned?’ The answer to the first was quintessentially postmodern, exquisitely childish, and thereby perfect — neither. Or, as an actual