Mark Twain, attr.

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

An Epic For Our Time

Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” is like cram, the bread the dwarves eat for weeks as they explore The Lonely Mountain — and for much longer as men and elves lay them siege. It sustains but does not nourish, providing energy but no taste. But let Tolkien tell it: “I don’t know the recipe, but it

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What We Need

Seek and find We all need something. I need a new power cord. They need to read the Psalms. You need to shop shouting at your kids. Guy on that bus bench needs a sandwich.  Two. Fellow on the couch at this Starbucks needs to stay off drugs. Woman talking to herself, petting a collie

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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

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Events Full

Five weeks ago I gave six-weeks notice at the business journal. It came about five weeks in on the largest weekly increases in initial unemployment claims since the real estate recession. To date we’re just shy of 39 million in nine weeks, with, for me, one week to go. As at least one other person

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