In her Oct. 16 message, Bacon said that working from far away, as Gwynn had done, was “not ideal” and that West Chester would now search for someone “local-ish.”
But it was never intended to be merely “local-ish.” It was, from the start, “international-ish.”
The Guardian recently had a pretty lousy one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s latest book. The Times does seem to have succumbed to the predictability of much contemporary American journalism. The Pos still surprises occasionally.
Adams continued to issue bold predictions throughout the election cycle, a spooky number of which actually came true, including the most important one: Trump’s victory. Adams was arguably the most accurate pundit in the last election. Cashing in on his new fame, he has written Win Bigly, analyzing the election and detailing his theories of persuasion.
Almost every time I read an article, post, etc. on politics, I anticipatorily steel myself for the note, somewhere in the article, or if there are comments, there, about how people like me are problems to be solved. Even in our peaceful world at Books Inq., a link to Camille Paglia's latest leads to her ignorant proclamation on the nature of trans people, or a link to poetry and the Super Bowl Coke commercial that included trans people and somehow isn't a good thing because somehow it is political. It's not political, it's life. My life more to the point. Blessed yet cursed with a brain anatomy that tells me, as surely as your brain tells you what you are, that tells me that my brain and soul is female even though I was born with a male body. Being trans is not madness, nor sexual deviancy, nor moral degeneracy of me or society, nor a mortal sin, nor a red flag to waive in the eyes of the body politic, no matter how ignorant. It's simply the way my brain was made, "Before you were in the womb I Knew you." God says. And here is a link to neuroanatomical studies on trans brains if you want to look at the science of it. So if you think that people like me should be returned to the world "that used to be" where everything was good, especially if you are a white male (but really never was, even for them, and certainly not for anyone who wasn't a white male) or if we are the bleeding edge of what is wrong with today's world, remember the science and this is how we are made, and we are people who are real and hurt, and the fact that your life really won't get better at all by calling me and people like me sub human.
“I have a certain contempt for people who write autobiographical characters that are really likable, always do the right thing, and are just so virtuous. I think, how dumb,” he said. “I’m pretty comfortable taking a personal avatar and making him or her do awful things. I get to do them in my fiction, and maybe that’s why I don’t do them in my life.”
I position myself as an agnostic. I don’t see evidence for any kind of supernatural being or intervention, but also understand that we are partially blind to what’s out there and hence should show some humility. I see atheism as being inconsistent with the scientific method, as it is, essentially, belief in nonbelief. It does not offer any proof of nonexistence as that would be literally impossible through science. Atheism elevates belief to a rational argument that is very ill-founded epistemologically. You may not believe in God, but to affirm its nonexistence with certainty is not scientifically consistent. If you are nonbeliever, the only position consistent with science is agnosticism.
Anecdotal Evidence has many of the strengths of Cope’s older work; it is concise, accessible, and sincere. Its poems are very good, just different from the treasured pieces of the ’80s and ’90s. An example is “Naga-Uta” (a Japanese form of alternating five and seven syllable lines — a sort of extended haiku), which begins with some quietly Anglo-Saxon alliteration and then settles into the sparer Japanese imagery associated with the form. Another example is the musically lilting “Lantern Carol,” the best of several poems in which this nonbelieving poet longs for the solace of religion.
As I told Dave in an email, I have no beef against advertising. Both Dave and I are admirers of L.E. Sissman's poetry, and Sissman worked in advertising. Dana Gioia, one of our premier poets, revived the fortunes of Jello when he worked for General Foods. Ad copy done in verse sounds like a promising idea. But I don't want my Coke served with "inclusiveness, identity, individuality," and I don't like my poetry soiled with politics.
“When you review old pieces, you have a double-sided response: On the one hand, it’s ‘Gosh, how was I so smart? How could I write such a beautiful sentence?’ On the other hand, it’s ‘Gosh, what a piece of crap! How I could I be so banal, so jejune, so ignorant?’ The combination of legitimate pride and legitimate embarrassment is a standard one.”
How do you feel about white artists doing black music?
I'd bite off the Beatles, or anybody else. It's all one world, one planet and one groove. You're supposed to learn from each other, blend from each other, and it moves around like that. You see that rocket ship leave yesterday? We can maybe leave this planet. We gonna be dealing with aliens. You think black and white gonna be a problem? Wait till you start running into motherfuckers with three or four dicks! Bug-eyed motherfuckers! They could be ready to party, or they could be ready to eat us. We don't know, but we've got to get over this shit of not getting along with each other.
So yes, Lafferty is at last getting his due as a great writer in all but one crucial way: as a Catholic novelist. Most of Lafferty’s elite fans like him despite the fact he was Catholic. They don’t yet grasp what the cranky old man from Tulsa really meant with his electric sentences and blood-drenched tales.
The burning question that was asked at the time, and it is a question that glimmers to this day, was why Wilde had not taken advantage of the chance to flee the country that was tacitly offered to him by the authorities on that fateful day—the adjective is unavoidable—April 5, 1895, when a warrant for his arrest on charges of homosexual crimes was held in abeyance for an hour and a half, time enough for him to take the steamer to Calais and immunity from prosecution. Even his mother had urged him to go, but go he would not. “I decided it was nobler and more beautiful to stay,” he told the love of his life, Lord Alfred Douglas. “I did not want to be called a coward or a deserter.” To the end he connived in and embraced his own downfall.
But the bigger question is this: We have more government, at all levels, than we’ve ever had before. Yet failures like this keep happening. The FBI, after all, missed the Tsarnaevs (who committed the Boston Marathon bombing) despite being warned by the Russian government. It missed the 9/11 attacks even though it was investigating Zacarias Moussaoui — agents investigating Moussaoui hit so many roadblocks that they joked that Osama bin Laden must have had a mole in the Bureau HQ. And, of course, the San Bernardino shooters and Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen escaped the net as well.
If memory serves, a friend of ours told us once that Updike's father once visited one of his classes in high school once and made a very nice impression.
Ian McKellen, in his one-man show Acting Shakespeare did a bit of Macbeth using the original Elizabethan accent. That was a great show, by the way, as you can see.
After sitting next to Robert Lowell at a dinner party, Fainlight said that he had “infuriated” her with his dismissive attitude towards the idea of female poets.
God, I don't know where I'd be without female poets. I fell in love with H.D.'s poetry when I was about 15, having come upon "Pear Tree" one day at the Holmesburg Library. Then I fell in love with Denise Levertov's poetry. Along the way there was Sara Teasdale, Amy Lowell (a relative of Robert Lowell), Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, Marianne Moore, Gene Derwood … I could go on, but you get the idea. By the way, as I recall, Robert Lowell claimed to have been influenced by Elizabeth Bishop, so maybe he was just putting Fainlight on.
I almost added this in the post below about reusing posts for environmental reasons and Bored of the Rings ... "I was looking for another link to put here for a review (don't click on it, it's a fake link) but couldn't really find one."
Below Frank posted to a list of the 30 Funniest Books. The Funniest Book Ever is Bored of the Rings, a parody of Lord of the Rings by the Harvard (later National) Lampoon people. I can't really find a good review to post here, but one statement in one customer review on Amazon caught my attention: "Probably have to be 55 and older to appreciate it."
The Enlightenment may seem an ambitious topic for a cognitive psychologist to take up from scratch. Numerous historians have dedicated entire careers to it, and there remains a considerable diversity of opinion about what it was and what its impact has been. But from this and previous work we get intimations of why Pinker thinks he is the person for the job. Historians have laboured under the misapprehension that the key figures of the Enlightenment were mostly philosophers of one stripe or another. Pinker has made the anachronistic determination that, in fact, they were all really scientists - indeed, "cognitive neuroscientists" and "evolutionary psychologists."
In short, he thinks that they are people like him and that he is thus possessed of privileged insights into their thought denied to mere historians. The latter must resort to careful reading and fraught interpretation in lieu of being able directly to channel what Enlightenment thinkers really thought.
It doesn’t take much parsing to conclude that protecting all and sundry from the terrible experience of having your feelings hurt is the end of free speech altogether. Since nowadays “you can’t argue with what people feel,” umbrage is freed from rational justification. Given that the better part of the human race is crazy, stupid, or both, there’s nary a thought in the world whose airing won’t offend somebody. Doesn’t Darwin offend creationists? Furthermore, in granting so much power to woundedness, we incentivise hypersensitivity. If we reward umbrage, we will get more of it. We do reward umbrage, and we’re buried in it by the truckload.
The surprises began almost as soon as a camera was lowered into the first borehole, around December 1. The undersides of ice shelves are usually smooth due to gradual melting. But as the camera passed through the bottom of the hole, it showed the underside of the ice adorned with a glittering layer of flat ice crystals—like a jumble of snowflakes—evidence that in this particular place, sea water is actually freezing onto the base of the ice instead of melting it.“It blew our minds,” saysChristina Hulbe, a glaciologist from the University of Otago in New Zealand, who co-led the expedition.
A rather parochial list, it seems to me. No Beerbohm. No Peter Peter De Vries. No Flann O'Brien. How about Waugh's Decline and Fall? Or Anthony Burgess's Inside Mr. Enderby? I didn't find A Confederacy of Dunces even interesting, let alone funny — though I know many other people did. I guess humor is in the individual funny bone.
Like students of today, Greeks who lived within the Roman Empire often toiled under real threats from their schoolmasters as they learned Latin. But unlike today, these ancient Greeks were not drilled in word endings in the hope of being able to translate the most famous works of Latin literature. Quite the opposite, actually: these Greeks memorized bilingual dialogues to learn to speak Latin in the marketplace, in the law courts, in the army, and in their business dealings.
Encountering Princess Shikishi's waka after reading "Heaven-Haven" was purely a matter of coincidence, but I always harbor the notion (an overly romantic notion, no doubt) that, when it comes to reading poetry, such coincidences are placed in our path for a reason.
Kadare is still mapping out the boundaries of Albanian, a relatively recent literary language, where everything is new and newly sayable. He is the first of its writers to achieve an international standing. But how to describe something beyond words? “Better if you don’t know” is a repeated phrase in the book, along with variations of “it’s complicated.”
Zagajewski’s recent essay collection Slight Exaggeration, a long meditation about exile, displacement, dispossession, memory, and literature, is extracted from a life that seems penciled into a historical moment—that is, postwar Central Europe. However, he makes the particular universal when he writes: “Loss alone touches us deeply, permanence goes unremarked . . . . The displaced live in times of peace but carry the war within them. Everyone else has long forgotten, but not they.” The displaced “carry secrets, they bear a loss, an abyss, a longing within them,” he repeats. “The displaced may suffer, but a certain secret order governs their lives.”
… for Pinker there are no bad Enlightenment ideas. One of the features of the comic-book history of the Enlightenment he presents is that it is innocent of all evil. Accordingly, when despots such as Lenin repeatedly asserted that they engaged in mass killing in order to realise an Enlightenment project – in Lenin’s case, a more far-reaching version of the Jacobin project of re-educating society by the methodical use of terror – they must have been deluded or lying. How could a philosophy of reason possibly be implicated in murderous totalitarianism?
I didn’t know Auberon Waugh at all well, though at different times we both wrote for this magazine and I used to see him at Private Eye lunches. He called me (one of his favourite invented words) ‘a homosexualist’: Bron had a lifelong antipathy towards people who turned a disposition into a cause. But one could never get indignant about his sallies, even though I disagreed with his conservative theology, his derision of the anti-smoking lobby, his instinctive and contrarian twitting of almost anything you could call socially progressive, and his snorting dis-regard towards Margaret Thatcher.
One of my sayings is, “if your life is not a spiritual adventure, you’re doing it wrong.” It applies to music as well. I feel connected to the Holy Spirit when I’m in the zone composing.
Which author (living or dead) do you think is most underrated?
Thomas Sowell, an eighty-seven-year-old African American economist, has written more than thirty mind-expanding books. These include hisCulture trilogy which (among other things) anticipated Jared Diamond’s ideas inGuns, Germs, and Steel and explains the ubiquity of anti-Semitism;A Conflict of Visions, which identifies the rival theories of the human condition underlying left-wing and right-wing political ideologies;The Quest for Cosmic Justice, which compares this quixotic pursuit with the quest forhumanjustice;Intellectuals and Society, an uncomfortable exposé of the follies of all-star intellectuals; andLate-Talking Children, which anticipated Simon Baron-Cohen’s work on the extreme male brain. Sowell is a libertarian conservative, which makes him taboo in mainstream intellectual circles, but even those who disagree are well advised to grasp his facts and arguments.
Stalin’s innovative contribution to mass terror was to blur the lines separating prisoners from guards, the guilty from the not guilty, traitors from loyal Soviet citizens.
I agree that this dust-up was avoidable. On the other hand, the exhibition just got more notoriety than it would have otherwise. God works in mysterious ways. Cava should say a prayer of thanks
On the question of the world as a whole, science founders. For scientific knowledge the world lies in fragments, the more so the more precise our scientific knowledge becomes.
Gowing frames Vermeer’s achievements by observing that this painter, unlike his 17th century Dutch peers Gabriël Metsu and Jan Steen, eschewed line and overt modelling work. Vermeer’s purity as an artist emerged with his curious pursuit of diffuse light at all costs. He remained quite impartial about how light spilled into his scenes.
I bought a used copy of the red Faber edition of An Experiment With Time in 1991, at Abacus Book Shop on Gregory Street in Rochester, New York. Abacus has since moved to Monroe Avenue, but according to Dunne’s theory the bookshop still exists in its old location inside one of the matryoshka dolls of universal Time, with the unbought copy of his book still waiting on the shelf. I didn’t get very far in the book. Dunne writes, of his theory: “Serialism discloses the existence of a reasonable kind of ‘soul’—an individual soul which has a definite beginning in absolute Time—a soul whose immortality, being in other dimensions of Time, does not clash with the obvious ending of the individual in the physiologist’s Time dimension.” His dream prophecies and “Master-minds” and “Superbodies” bewildered me—really they seemed like a fancier way of talking about sibyls and angels and the hierarchy of heaven. And the pseudogeometrical figures, reminiscent of drawings in paperback explications of Einsteinian space-time, seemed—not to be rude—quite nutty.
What seems nutty to me is finding the book wanting after not getting very far into it.
Most of The Darkening Age reads like an underachieving college sophomore's term paper. Nixey stacks up superlatives for Romans, Greeks, and their culture as well as hate-drenched words for early Christians and their culture. She includes long paragraphs in the passive voice that make the reasoning impossible to follow, and even makes the bizarre observation that “thoughts were policed.” She footnotes inconsequential statements, but almost never footnotes the most sweeping (and usually false) claims. She uses words incorrectly (“assure” for “ensure” and “breathless” for “breathtaking”). She even has trouble with complete sentences, mixed metaphors, and noun/verb agreement.
Why would anybody publish something this bad? Because anti-Christianity is currently fashionable.
Hmm. Samuel Johnson said that "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." He was a pretty good writer, and people still read his stuff. Of course, as Max Beerbohm sagely observed, "Only the insane take themselves quite seriously."
Where should one begin with Millay? She had a famed predilection for Petrarchan sonnets and rhyming couplets, at odds with prominent experimental modernists of the era, such as TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens. But Millay expanded the scope of these poetic forms, presenting a bold, sexually charged vision of the female experience. Her verses serve as a kind of elaborate architecture, housing the fickle, frenetic movements of the heart that falls in love and then out of it. Renascence and other poems (1917), which includes the 200-plus line poem that brought her acclaim, also boasts six sonnets, all of which are outstanding in this respect.
She also wrote the libretto for Deems Taylor's opera The King's Henchmen, which was quite a hit, though long a victim of our cultural amnesia.
A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that ... he is going to be a beginner all his life.
To see this epidemic as simply a pharmaceutical or chemically addictive problem is to miss something: the despair that currently makes so many want to fly away. Opioids are just one of the ways Americans are trying to cope with an inhuman new world where everything is flat, where communication is virtual, and where those core elements of human happiness — faith, family, community — seem to elude so many. Until we resolve these deeper social, cultural, and psychological problems, until we discover a new meaning or reimagine our old religion or reinvent our way of life, the poppy will flourish.
I’m basically nuts. I sit by myself every day, most days, eight hours in this little room. It feels like either a torment or an adventure. The only way I can still the torment or appreciate the adventure is to write it down.
“We’ll be living in small ghettos, far from where celebrities dwell, and yet in every generation there will be a new delivery of minds that will love long and slow thoughts and books and poetry and music, so that these rather pleasant ghettos will never perish — and one day may even stir more excitement than we’re used to now.”
“Slander” is the story of Robinson’s strained relationship with her mother. “With a little difficulty we finally reached an accommodation, an adult friendship,” she writes. “Then she started watching Fox News.”
Robinson seems more than a little like her character, the Rev. Robert Boughton, whom I described in my review of her novel Home as "self-righteous and self-centered." She is, after all, talking about her mother here. She may say that “democracy is my aesthetics and my ethics and more or less my religion,” but for her democracy and religion seem to be defined in a strictly partisan manner.
You must be patient, you must wait for the eye of the soul to be formed in you. Religious truth is reached, not by reasoning, but by an inward perception. Anyone can reason; only disciplined, educated, formed minds can perceive.
There are other signs of the end of civilization, according to the article, among them the election of Donald Trump and the vote on Brexit. This means that what stands between us and the collapse of civilization—or one of the things—is the European Parliament and the European Commission. I thought I was pessimistic, but this takes pessimism to a stage well beyond even mine. If one of the only things standing between us and the new Dark Ages is the European Commission, then all I can say is that those new Dark Ages will be very dark indeed.
i don’t think it is possible for the demons to wholly sever our connection with the gods; though they are certainly trying and have thus far succeeded, by installing people like Theresa May, Angela Merkel, “Pope” Francis in order to destroy what remains of the traditional European religions and races.
A recent DNA test gives me reason to believe I have a drop of two of American Indian blood. The overall impression from the test is that my late brother was right when he said we were Heinzes — 57 different varieties.
I take cabs a lot these days, thanks to my increasingly gimpy knees, and as often as not the cab driver is an immigrant, a legal immigrant. I have talked to a lot of them, and their take on the subject of illegal immigration is aptly summed up by the fellow from India who told me that “they should all have to go through the same crap I went through.” I often wonder why The Inquirer has never bothered to seek out the many legal immigrants in this city and solicit their viewpoints. I guess because it wouldn’t harmonize with the paper’s editorial platitudes.
The days when long, difficult poems were read by more than the tiniest and most eccentric minority, or when strange and wonderful pictures could divert any appreciable number of eyes from the vacuous spectacles of the popular media, are long past. But it is encouraging to see Jones receiving even a small measure of the attention he deserves.
One can almost smell the distinct air of the stake burning as the story advances.
In the end, the Templars fell short in sainthood and knighthood. Victims of both success and failure, the order’s spiritual virtues were undone by temporal vices—their own and others. Despite the dark corners of conspiracy theory and occult interest in which the name of the Order of the Temple is too often whispered, the truth of the Templars still resonates. At a recent Catholic Men’s conference in Phoenix, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia said that knighthood provided the “animating ideal at the core of the Templars: to build a new order of new Christian men, skilled at arms, living as brothers, committed to prayer, austerity, and chastity and devoting themselves radically to serving the Church and her people, especially the weak.” To be a Christian is to be a warrior because, he said, “living the Gospel involves a very real kind of spiritual warfare.”
What was once a gathering of western national security experts, attended by a few scores of military people, civil servants, scholars, and journalists, has mutated into a policy happening attended by a global mob. And the seeming success of this event—its quantum growth in size, the policy stars it draws, the media attention it receives, its ever-growing sense of self-importance—masks its failure as an institution.
It's not often that I read contemporary literature, and it's especially not often that I read literature focused on modern themes: the iPhone, the Internet, gentrification -- these are topics that don't interest me as much as others.
But for a number of reasons, I've recently read Exit West, Mohsin Hamid's novel of migration and dislocation in the modern world. Reading it was an unusual experience -- if for no other reason than I felt I was re-reading the news. For me, this was fundamentally depressing: for while the novel endows that news with a human quality, with people and places, the story it told was familiar. Sure, this shouldn't be held against its author, but for me, it didn't provide enough of an escape.
Which is not to say that I target science fiction or fantasy: indeed, I don't. But thinking about it, I do target novels which chart a different space, which uncover a different way of seeing, of being. Often, these spaces, these worlds are set in the past -- they might, for instance, be Victorian. Regardless, there's something about them -- in their strange qualities, in their distance from the contemporary -- that holds my attention, that serves as a mirror for our experience today.
I was talking with a friend about Exit West and she argued that while the story is familiar (in the sense that we continue to read about migration from the Middle East and North Africa), the novel has the potential to attract a different sort of attention to the crisis: it has, as I say, the potential to humanize the sorrow -- and in so doing, inspire action.
All of this, of course, I agree with: there's no doubt that novels like Exit West cast a light on horrific stories, on stories that need to be told. But at the same time -- for me, at least -- they do that in a way that can be generic, almost rushed: the characters in Hamid's novel, for instance, show and share emotion; they do it, though, without the sort of intensity or detail I might have expected. The same goes for their motivation: Hamid makes it clear why they're on the move, but the way they process this change, as fictional entities, felt limited.
Ultimately, Exit West was most successful, I felt, when posing questions about the idea of "home." What is it? How do we construct it? And what does it take to leave it? These questions were at the heart of the novel and helped reorient my approach to "the news." When seen as a quest for home, contemporary migration becomes a fundamentally human journey. There's no looking away when it comes to building a home: we all share the desire for rootedness, even as we exit our native land.
John Aubrey records that a year before the King’s decapitation, Charles’ son then living in exile in Paris asked the metaphysical poet Abraham Cowley to divert his own sorrows, writing that his friend offered “if his Highnesse pleased they would use ‘Siortes Virgilianae,’” as the poet, of course, “alwaies had a Virgil in his pocket.” This time, instead of letting the book fall open, Cowley rather took a pin and pushed it into the soft pages of the Aeneid, the prick arriving at the proper prediction for the royal estate. Both father and son, as it turned out, arrived at the exact same line regarding the Stuart family fortunes. What of Charles’ lot, and that of the prince, which so distressed both of them? Book 4 of the Aeneid, line 615, which is Dido’s prayer against her former lover, reading: “Nor let him then enjoy supreme command; / But fall, untimely, by some hostile hand.” In 1649 Charles would stand as upon the scaffold at Westminster, wearing his extra heavy shirt and quoting his Sidney, awaiting the regicide’s blade on his neck. Virgil may guide everyone to the truth, but that doesn’t mean that the truth will always set one free.
In school we were taught to be curious. Whenever we asked a teacher what something meant, we were told to "look it up in the dictionary!" We never thought of this as a punishment. On the contrary: With this command we were given the keys to a magic cavern in which one word would lead without rhyme or reason (except an arbitrary alphabetical reason) to the next.
Poets are not prophets or journalists, but artists of a visual language, words their medium. Fear of being misunderstood is the greatest obstacle, so one inevitably begins to write for an audience rather than for oneself. Working in this manner only creates predictable and static poetry, obsessed in getting our message across, as if this is the poet’s only pursuit, but the inner voice is the only voice the poet can truly trust.
Ideas freeze. Their proponents become harsh-minded and dictatorial. Many of the ideas the left affirms now grew out of ’60s radical politics. Then they were vital and life-endowing. Now it seems that, though still worthy on some level, they are tired. Their proponents have no humor, no brio. They do not like to laugh. Emerson tells us that we need to pass beyond frozen, once-worthy ideas — or at least break them up and reconsider.
Or, as Max Beerbohm sagely observed, "only the insane take themselves quite seriously."
I grew up in the '50s watching TV when it was supposed to be a vast wasteland (you know, crap like a dramatization of Boswell's life of Johnson starring Peter Ustinov on Omnibus). Today, about the only thing I turn it on for is to watch a movie. I did watch some episodes of Amazon's Mozart in the Jungle, but wasn't impressed.
… when it spreads beyond the target of combatting discrimination and oppression, it is an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values, including, ironically, the pursuit of justice for oppressed groups. For one thing, reason depends on there being an objective reality and universal standards of logic. As Chekhov said, there is no national multiplication table, and there is no racial or LGBT one either.
“…the photographer knows he’s getting the last shots of those wharves, steamers and warehouses before they are replaced by imagined hotels and marinas, the proto-blueprint for the new world dominated by leisure, tourism and heritage replicas. These post-dockland utopias are soon to be upgraded into big business steel and glass, craven monuments of late capitalism. The future was in a distant haze, just around the corner.”
The collaboration between O’Hara and Schifano is fully realized in the eighteen-page-long Words & Drawings, just published in its entirety in a beautifully designed and printed edition by the Archivio Mario Schifano in Rome (unfortunately, in an edition of just 300 numbered copies, plus fifty hors de commerce, which means that it still won’t be as widely seen as it should among admirers of the poet and the artist; though it is a step forward considering that, until now, just four pages had been published in an obscure journal from Palermo.)
If you reside in America and it is dinnertime, you have almost certainly broken the law. In his book Three Felonies a Day, civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate estimates that the average person unknowingly breaks at least three federal criminal laws every day. This toll does not count an avalanche of other laws — for example misdemeanors or civil violations such as disobeying a civil contempt order — all of which confront average people at every turn.
… I have sung the praises of puddles -- those World-reflecting wonders -- in the past, and I will do so again now. At the beginning of last week, on my afternoon walk, I was marveling at how the beauty of bare branches set against a cloud-dappled blue sky becomes deeper, more profound, when seen on the surface of a humble puddle. But that is not the end of it: the beauty takes on yet a different aspect as you begin to walk. All of the intricacy, color, and depth moves along with you, at your feet, as you pass beside the bright water -- an entire upside-down World in motion.
It’s a ceaseless tide, I suspect, a ceaseless back and forth. It’s also the subject I seem to keep veering toward (just now I’ve decided to commit myself to it, once and for all), a subject that already wakes me up in the morning and tucks me in at night. “Hybridity,” it might be called. Or genre mixing, “register” mixing — the shaking up of categories, the alchemical stirring together of “high” and “low.”
Just as the movie is built as a long flashback, Eastwood works out his story in reverse, looking at the American society in which the three heroes were raised and seeing particular tendencies that allowed their characters to flourish, even as they floundered, before they had any accomplishments to show for themselves. It’s here that Eastwood crafts a distinctively American tale: a story of second and third chances, of alternate schools and the right to own guns, of casual employment and easy credit, of loose families with tight bonds. If you want a society to produce these types of men, the film suggests, you’d do well to start with this set of conditions.
To the people that died in the horrific school shooting in Florida. Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
