Mike Tidmus : Blog (Free subscription) | 11/24/2009
O’Reilly and Coulter embrace faith-based fascism (video: Media Matters for America) Yes, indeedy! Coulter’s book — each and every one of them for that matter — and the Manhattan Declaration have everything in common. They’re both steaming piles of merde intended to pave the way for ChristoFascism, which just loudly knock-knocked on America’s door, as Sinclair Lewis...
Classically Liberal (Free subscription) | 11/16/2009
There are flaws, in fanatical religion, which have been well known for centuries. Jesus referred to it in the religious leaders of his day when he said: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.” This moral hypocrisy was something...
Tativille (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
Marcel L'Herbier's legendary L'Argent (1928), which screens November 14th and 15th at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and which was released in a two-disc, region-2 DVD set by Masters of Cinema for its eightieth anniversary in 2008, updates Emile Zola's eponymous, anti-speculatory serialization (1890; novel published in 1891) within the persuasive américanisme of post- Spirit of St. Louis ,...
"Let's Not Talk About Movies" (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
" Dodsworth " ( William Wyler , 1936) "Why are Americans always such snobs?" asks David Niven 's snobbish Capt. Clyde Lockert. Well, the answer is that there are two kinds of people in this world: people who lump people together with presumptive generalizations and those who don't. And the best place to lump people together is a cruise ship. Just ask the captain of "The Love...
Acephalous (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
It must have been difficult to be a conservative last night. On the one hand, you threw your muscle behind your perfect candidate and he lost a district which last went Democratic back before the Half-Breeds and the Stalwarts fought for control of the GOP; on the other, you got a television show made especially for you! The remake of V is an exercise in allegorical drift-correction: the original series...
Lawyers, Guns and Money (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
It must have been difficult to be a conservative last night. On the one hand, you threw your muscle behind your perfect candidate and he lost a district which last went Democratic back before the Half-Breeds and the Stalwarts fought for control of the GOP; on the other, you got a television show made especially for you! The remake of V is an exercise in allegorical drift-correction: the original series...
TED BURKE, like it or not (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
Steinbeck is of the generation that arrives just after the Muckrakers,Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, who thought that fiction was something of a sociological/anthropological tool in getting at the skewed relations between races and classes in a capitalist economy. Some larger truth, discovered by a focus imagination, could get beyond supposition and provide the correct vision for reform....
Vulture (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
I was not one of the 65 million or so people who watched the original V miniseries when it aired in 1983, and I’m still not sure why: After all, its Star Wars -meets- Invasion of the Body Snatchers -meets- Flash Gordon pitch was right in my then-12-year-old wheelhouse. Tonight, however, I’ll get a second chance — as will the series, as ABC launches a shiny new V reboot. So, as homework,...
The Pump Handle (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
“How can it be safe with this line so fast'” …. “Come to the plant and you will see.” …”when a visitor comes they slow it down and when they leave they speed it up.” “The line is too fast.” “People say their hands hurt a lot.” ….”Many people are injured and then they fire [...]
Boswell and Books (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
So tonight we're reading Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It's an hour or so before we meet. Will I get one person like I did the first couple of months, or will this intrigue many and we'll get 12, our high point for Netherland? The answer is likely somewhere in between. While we did cause a sales pop (we sold 20 copies this year of the book, compared to 4 for the Downer Avenue Schwartz...
Boxing the Octopus (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
Just in time for Halloween, a few ghosts who might startle you--bestsellers, Pulitzer, Nobel, and Oscar winners--writer's writers who moonlighted... Katherine Anne Porter In 1962, Porter's novel Ship of Fools sailed to the bestseller list and in 1966, she won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award for her Collected Stories . But her first published work was My Chinese Marriage by Mae T. Franking, a memoir...
Fighting in the Shade™ (Free subscription) | 10/27/2009
In 1935, the avowed socialist Sinclair Lewis' novel "It Can't Happen Here" was published. At the time, Germany's NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) had been in power for two years with its party leader, Adolph Hitler occupying the office of Reich Chancellor. The policies put in place by the German government were already generating outcries in western societies and the title...
The Writing Life II (Free subscription) | 10/18/2009
"A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man." e. e. cummings "Politics is pissing in public." Norman O. Brown "A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth." Adlai Stevenson "We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." Aesop "Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups,...
2 Blowhards (Free subscription) | 10/16/2009
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I recently wrote that California's time as national lodestar might have passed. If that assessment is correct, then what areas might replace California as America's goto place (figuratively and maybe even literally)? Perhaps there's no single replacement area. As observers such as Terry Teachout have been noting, culture in the USA is becoming increasingly...
Ambling Along the Aqueduct (Free subscription) | 10/12/2009
I see that over at the Sci-fi Wire , Paul Di Filippo is asking Why does the jury that awards the Nobel Prize for Literature hate us? By "us," I mean, of course, hardcore writers and partisans of fantastika, people unafraid and unashamed to boldly identify themselves primarily with the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, rather than with mainstream, mimetic literature. I think I...
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