The morning Lull Report …

… courtesy of Dave Lull:



… Highly recommended: Nigeness: Inside Llewyn Davis: Flippin' Brilliant.

The film is cleverly structured and scripted, looks just perfect for its time and place (the Greenwich village exteriors simply are the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan), the music is spot-on, and the Brothers manage to make you care for a guy who can be thoroughly obnoxious and is aptly described at one point as 'King Midas's idiot brother' - everything he touched turns to ordure.

… A beautiful mystery: Asher Lev’s Gift to Me.

In the opening pages of the novel, Asher Lev tells the reader, “I will not apologize. It is impossible to apologize for a mystery.” He has voluntarily left his community, so as not to cause more pain and embarrassment to the ones he loves. He will not, however, turn his back on what he is in order to return.

 … Hmm: The Unbearable Truth.



Would I lie to save an innocent person's life? I should hope so. As for Bush and Iraqi WMDs, Mr. Martin should read the Duelfer Report. The problem is a little more nuanced than he knows. Also being wrong in what you say is not necessarily to lie. To lie is to say what you know is not true.



… The elusionist: BET THE FARM.

Throughout his life, Frost moved into things so he could move out. He does this in language, too, veering toward certainties in order to evade them. He knew, like his “Oven Bird,” how “in singing not to sing.” Frost can be trying company, but he is company: no modern poet draws us so close, though what he does to us at close range is often impolite. 

… Finding his own way — George Weigel on Micahel Novak: American and Catholic.

… in more than a half-century of scholarship, journalism, and public service, Novak has applied his philosophical and theological skills to virtually every consequential aspect of the human condition. He has not followed a preset itinerary but has deliberately charted previously unexplored territories and terrain. That choice—to break out of conventional patterns of thought and become one’s own intellectual GPS—has not always made for an easy life.