For obvious reasons, I’ve been obsessing about India and Pakistan for the last two days. To use the language of Joe Biden, it looks like Pakistan will be Obama’s first big foreign policy “test.” We don’t know whether the terrorist attacks in Mumbai were sponsored by the Pakistani intelligence services or not. But there is a sense in which this [...]
Archive for November, 2008
What to do about Pakistan?
Posted in U.S. Politics, tagged India, Mumbai terrorist attack, Pakistan on November 28, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Talking Comics with Ho and Diana
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Popular culture, tagged Diana Tamblyn, Ho Che Anderson, Martin Luther King on November 28, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Ho Che Anderson’s King.
Last month, right before the America election, I went to MIT where I gave a series of talks on comics. The main event was a session where Ho Che Anderson, Diana Tamblyn and I talked about the relationship between politics and comics. Ho has done many celebrated graphic novels and comic books, including a [...]
Talking Comics With Seth and Chris Ware
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Alternative comics, Chris Ware, Seth on November 27, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Last weekend I took part in some comics related events in the Kitchner/Waterloo area, where local museums are showing art by Seth. On Saturday I moderated a discussion between Seth and Chris Ware at the University of Waterloo. Fortunately the film maker John Minh Tran was at hand to take some remarkable photos, a sample [...]
The Case Against James Wood
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature, tagged James Wood on November 24, 2008 | 2 Comments »
William Deresiewicz has a thoughtful essay on James Wood online at The Nation. Wood is often characterized as the greatest literary critic of his generation, the heir of New York intellectuals such as Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. In the course of discussing Wood’s book How Fiction Works, Deresiewicz allows that Wood is a gifted [...]
Conrad Black, Radical
Posted in U.S. Politics, tagged Conrad Black, prison reform, Tom Wolfe on November 24, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Irving Kristol famously said that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. Tom Wolfe neatly inverted this ugly sentiment by observing that “a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.” We can see the wisdom of Wolfe’s statement when we consider the case of Conrad Black, a very conservative tycoon who [...]
Kipling and the “Ungrateful” Iraqis
Posted in Uncategorized on November 19, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Matthew Yglesias and other bloggers are chortling at the complaint made by Andy McCarthy that the Iraqis are being “ingrates’ for not appreciating Americans more. Here is what McCarthy wrote in National Review Online:
Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely. And [...]
Bambi Versus Godzilla: The Economic Edition
Posted in U.S. Politics, tagged George Will, Paul Krugman on November 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
George Will is a standard-issue right-wing blowhard, notable mainly for his outfit (tweedy in a 1950s academic way) and prissy demeanor. Paul Krugman is a Nobel prize-winning economist. So when the two men spar it’s hardly a fair fight, much closer to Bambi v. Godzilla than Ali/Frazier.
In this clip, Will offers the [...]
Epitaph for a War
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, tagged Rudyard Kipling, World War I on November 11, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Rudyard Kipling was a great fool and a great poet. He was a blustery war-booster who stupidly pushed his sight-impared son off to join the Irish Guards during World War I, a move that insured the young boy’s death. Yet Kipling also wrote the best short poems about that War, his “Epitaphs of the War”. One epitaph brought together [...]
