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
The Simple Art of Murder (Excerpt)
Raymond Chandler In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not
No It Won’t
I don’t think that quotation means what we think it means. Beauty will not save the world and anyway Dostoevsky didn’t say it and anyways he didn’t mean it neither. The line that’s led to our clichéd abuse of the idea’s akin to ‘Eskimos have 418 words for snow’ and ‘it takes 21 days to
The Fat Guy and Buffets
The word is buffet, and it is 300 years old, from the Old French, of “obscure origin” as the kids say, if the kids wrote etymological dictionaries. Obscure origin, but the word is more than making up for it three centuries later. They are everywhere. Everywhere the Fat Guy lives, and everywhere he has been. I
Christ on a Postage Stamp
Got to thinking on postage stamps today bec hadda mail a book to a friend and when you go in you hafta say to the guy, no matter what your actual business is that day, and of course you’re already saying it if you went in for this purpose — ‘What first class stamps d’ya have?’ It’s