Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature, Uncategorized, tagged book reviewing, good prose, John Updike, Wyatt Mason on November 29, 2007 | No Comments »
Great writers make demands on our time and energy which is why, to be absolutely frank, they can be so annoying.
Readers of John Updike will know what I mean when I say that the man, who has all the virtues a writer could want, is just too much. He’s too glib, too polished, too prolific, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on November 28, 2007 | 2 Comments »
OK, not really, but this ad is still pretty funny.
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Media, Popular culture, tagged Finland, Gregorius, Lordi on November 27, 2007 | 7 Comments »
There are now two kinds of people in the world: those who have seen Gregorius on Youtube and those who have not. Those who have know that the Finnish singer’s version of “YMCA” was the breakout viral video of the summer, when it was watched by over a million people online. For a few weeks [...]
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Media, Popular culture, tagged Apocalyptica, Finland, Lordi on November 27, 2007 | 1 Comment »
For part one of this interview, click here.
Above: the opening of Eurovision 2007, featuring Lordi.
After Lordi’s 2006 win, the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest was held in Helsinki, and featured an Arctic Circle Video of “Hard Rock Hallelujah.” While researching this interview, I came across a reference to the Finnish myth of Pohjola, “a [...]
Posted in Philosophy, U.S. Politics on November 26, 2007 | 7 Comments »
The American political blogs are all agog over the issue of intelligence testing and race. Charles Murray, the bad penny of the social sciences, has once again reappeared as the subject of debate for the 1994 book he co-wrote with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve. One way to address this tiresome topic [...]
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature on November 26, 2007 | No Comments »
The job of a novelist is to pay attention to the everyday world, to notice the changes in language and behaviour that make up quotidian existence. In Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844), Charles Dickens had his eponymous hero travel to the United States (a journey closely mirroring the novelist’s own journey to North America). Chuzzlewit notices many [...]
Posted in Film and documentary, Literature, tagged Chris McCandless, Into the Wild, starvation, The Odyssey on November 24, 2007 | 43 Comments »
“There is no such thing as society”, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher once famously declared. This was a cry of capitalist individualism - polemical, to be sure, but true to her outlook. Others have found the opposite: that society is all too real, an oppressive nest of deceits and compromises best kept at arms length. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on November 24, 2007 | 1 Comment »
In 1939, Life magazine wanted to reassure Middle America that baseball star Joe DiMaggio was a perfectly upright citizen despite his suspect Italian ancestry: ”Although he learned Italian first, Joe, now twenty-four, speaks English without an accent and is otherwise well-adapted to most U.S. mores. Instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease he keeps [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on November 21, 2007 | 6 Comments »
Charles Schulz’s favorite movie Citizen Kane is, in part, about the impossibility of writing biography. In the film, newsreel reporters struggle mightily to uncover the meaning of the mysterious last words of the media magnate Charles Foster Kane: “Rosebud.” They interview many who knew Kane but fail to solve the riddle. The movie itself, a [...]
Posted in Animal rights, Arts and Aesthetics, Literature, Popular culture on November 20, 2007 | 3 Comments »
As soon as you write down an idea, you start to realize how it needs to be qualified, expanded, and generally revised. Blogging helps this process along by giving you commentators who jump-start new thoughts. In my earlier post I suggested ways in which science fiction, a literature thematically obsessed with encounters with the alien, was [...]
