The Year of the Flood

I just finished Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. I was surprised after I began reading it to find that it is a companion piece to Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and it includes many of the same characters and the same events only from different perspectives. Honestly, I think Oryx and Crake is a [...]

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Heard on the radio

Wow. Last night listened to crotchety old man Harold Bloom on npr about the decline of the humanities. Translation: people study books and poetry that he doesn’t like. However, if like me you like literary criticism and you have the stomach for listening to him (he is quite amusing actually) then here is the link. [...]

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Are there no workhouses?

I was reading a blog the other day that used the above title as a sarcastic jab at the Salvation Army in Houston who reportedly was requesting social security numbers to prevent non-citizens from getting toys. Working in Information Technology, you learn that collecting social security numbers is by far the stupidest thing you could [...]

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A Description of a City Shower

One of my favorite English classes at college was 18th-Century English literature. I found I really liked Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and other satirists. I guess I just really appreciated a time when people talked about serious things but in no way took themselves seriously. Jeni, if you’re reading this, what was the name of [...]

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Just heard this at the office

Limericks are not that sophisticated. Discuss.

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The man who would be Emily Dickinson

With all of this talk about someone forging a Kenyan birth certificate for Obama, I was reminded of a fascinating article I read many years ago in the Guardian. Mark Hofman was a really good forger. He conducted careful research and he chose his victims well. They were people who bought the forgeries because they [...]

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Quote for the day

Amazon is being sued for deleting e-books from their customer’s Kindles when Amazon found out the e-books were pirated copies. The lawsuit said Amazon never disclosed to customers that it “possessed the technological ability or right to remotely delete digital content purchased through the Kindle Store.” No shit. I didn’t know that about the Kindle [...]

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Miss the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on Sotomayor?

Not to fear. Here’s a fun summary in Haiku via Slate. And a teaser. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. What Sonia has done Is so very impressive So I am impressed Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. A wise Latina Would set aside her bias She just can’t do it

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My precious raisin

With the sad news of Frank McCourt’s death, I thought I’d post one of my favorite passages from Angela’s Ashes. The young children in a Irish school find a raisin in their food. I think Paddy likes me because of the raisin and I feel a bit guilty because I wasn’t that generous in the [...]

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Karamazovi

I saw Karamazovi at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) last night. It uses a similar formula to Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street in that you are watching actors rehearsing a play. The drama is in the performance, yet you get these outside glimpses into real life (or are they real?) in between the [...]

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Don’t listen to philosophers

No really, don’t. Remember Nietzsche, Marx? Not a good idea. Besides, lack of government intervention is what got us in this mess.

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Pride and Prejudice Comic Book

This is not to be missed.

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Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths

Jake and I are still on our Jean Gabin kick. We recently saw two film versions of The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky. One by Jean Renoir starring Jean Gabin and the other an Akira Kurosawa film with Mifune. The star of both films is Gorky’s play. There really isn’t anything in this world quite [...]

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Of Switzerland

In light of UBS’s decision to pass on data about secret Swiss bank accounts, I thought I’d post this excerpt from Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, a book about Antigua. I always think of this passage when I think of Switzerland. Cuckoo clocks be damned. (These offshore banks are popular in the West Indies. Only [...]

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Quote for the day

Regarding the “personal triumphs” of Kate Winslet’s character in the Oscar nominated The Reader: What, exactly, was the Kate Winslet character’s “personal triumph”? While in prison for participation in an act of mass murder that was particularly gruesome and personal, given the generally impersonal extermination process—as a death camp guard, she helped ensure 300 Jewish [...]

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Want to write a John Irving novel?

Here’s a convenient chart for you. To see the full chart, see Wikipedia.

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Eat Drink Man Woman

Here’s a clip from another favorite food movie: Eat Drink Man Woman. I have to admit, Ang Lee films are hit and miss with me. Eat Drink Man Woman is actually my favorite of all of his movies. Brokeback Mountain was a good movie though not a great one, and I really didn’t like Sense [...]

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Quote for the day

From pandagon.net regarding Joe the Plumber: Bob Owens compares Joe to Stephen Crane, dynamo war correspondent and author of The Red Badge of Courage.  Because as we all know, The Red Badge of Courage was written after a highly publicized week-long publicity junket where Crane stood around and asked bizarre, pointless questions with his mouth [...]

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The Voysey Inheritance

When the story about Bernard Madoff first broke, I immediately thought of the Nineteenth Century Playwright Harley Granville Barker. His play The Voysey Inheritance begins with a son finding out from his father that the family business is no more than a Ponzi scheme. The son is asked by the father to inherit the business [...]

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Whitewashing Stalin

I was telling a friend a rather embarrassing story of me telling a Georgian diplomat that of course I knew that Georgia was a country: “I know, Stalin’s home,” I said. To my surprise my friend launched into a speech that Stalin wasn’t really that bad. My friend is Chinese leading me to believe his [...]

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Annie Proulx and Wyoming

The LA Times has an interesting article about Annie Proulx and how she fits in with the locals in Wyoming. I’ve never been to Wyoming, but I somehow doubt that in the tourist shops you’ll find a copy of Open Range. Or maybe I’m wrong. Of course you see The DaVinci code at the Louvre [...]

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The mob in To Kill a Mockingbird

I was thinking of the passage in To Kill a Mockingbird where an angry mob is diffused by the accidental wisdom of a child. I had this thought because of the mob-like mentality we’ve seen at the McCain/Palin rallies. Just as I was about to laboriously type the passage into wordpress, I found that someone [...]

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The not so discreet charm of the literati

A few years ago I got into an argument of historic proportions over H. Rider Haggard. To call what was inflicted on me verbal abuse would grossly underestimate the level of this argument. The fact that it was over a difference of opinion over that pulp writer made no difference. It therefore comes as completely [...]

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2 nations divided by a common language

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Quotes about change

I was looking for a good quote the other day to represent what I was feeling and I found it in a quote about change by John Ruskin. Looking at the list of quotes, I noticed so many things said about change in the Victorian era. Surely our Victorians were aware of how different the [...]

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