Saul Bellow

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

I Wasn’t Talking To You

There is a story from the Johnson Administration which has PBS journalist Bill Moyers, at the time LBJ’s communications director, praying before a meal. With many guests attending, Moyers was at one end of the table and the Leader of the Free World at the other. As Moyers said grace, President Johnson said, “I can’t

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Tubercular Dude

Did not know this until just now but a few weeks ago was World Tuberculosis Day, which honors the date the TB bacterium was discovered in 1882. The CDC says no ‘celebration’ until it is eliminated. The discovery came with its own pandemic, killing 1 in 7. From the safety of 140 years thence, this

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I’ve Said Too Much

There’s a danger of saying too much. There’s always that. I wrote previously and succinctly about stories. Here’s a longer exploration I’ve been working on, off and on, for about a year. * Every true story starts with realizing something is out of place and involves people asking who they are in a world where things (they now see)

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Baseball-O-Matic 9000

Farrell took Price out in the bottom of the 9th and the Angels beat the Red Sox in Anaheim. I like Farrell, Price, and the Red Sox. I have no bones to pick there. I also have no set demand that pitchers always throw more than 100 pitches — Price had thrown 109 through eight. My thesis

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