A Suspension of Mercy reads like an expose of the crime writer at work, a literary hall of mirrors in which reality and fiction are constantly reflected and, ultimately, confused. Sydney is a man seduced by fantasy—the imaginative game of killing his wife, Alicia, carrying her...
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Twee Pop is Also Reactionary.
Peter Suderman meta-endorses "selling out" by way of the band Of Montreal. But we knew they were conservative alrea...
Mental Health Break: Paleoconservative Hilarity (And Not the Inadvertent Kind!)
John Zmirak offers "bumper stickers you won't put on your car":For nostalgic readers of Russell Kirk, who keep their bound volumes of the old NR like a framed photo of Kaiser Franz Josef on the wall of a Holocaust survivor who fled Vienna: Burkeans Do It Reluctantly and Incrementally.For...
Time Flies like an Arrow; Fruit Flies Like Campy 1930's Comedies and Camille Paglia.
[TakiMag]: George Cukor's The Women: Remarry, Remake, Repeat.I omitted from the review my favorite lines from the movie, but I include them here for Tristyn, who continues to insist that her misogyny is only a subset of her misanthropy:"Oh, Lucy, he beat you? How horrible!""Yeah....
"The biggest X-chromosomal chatterbox known to man"
Thus has James Poulos christened Ladyblog, one of three blogs offered by the next big thing, Culture11. Eve Tushnet, Nicola Karras, and I are all in the stable. Check it out.[Ladyblog]: Maybe it was God who made honky tonk angels after all.[Ladyblog]: Hunter S. Thompson, model...
Bookbag: Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith
Mary Highsmith, observing how little Pat was interested in the opposite sex, took it upon herself to find her daughter a boyfriend. Pat and her date would go out for a meal followed by dancing, but when it came to kissing goodnight, the sixteen-year-old girl found the practice...
"Hear then this lesson from the Seller's bag— / You buy a woman when you buy a Jag."
My favorite West Wing moment is from "The Stackhouse Filibuster": CJ asks Sam his favorite writer, and Sam says it's his boss, Toby. It's always interesting when your favorite writer is someone you know. One of mine is my grandfather, who taught English to twelfth-graders for...
Bookbag: "You are my mask."
From Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacy Schiff:In 1945, Katharine White at The New Yorker expressed concern over his taste for obsolete language; she inferred that he had learned his English directly from the OED. For good reason Harold Ross swore he would cut his own throat...
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Nostalgia for 1950's Southern California not pictured
When a post is this good, the only thing to do is post nearly the whole damn thing. I've bolded sentences that I enjoyed thinking extra-hard about. Just think of it as the kind of underlining a ninth-grade girl does to her copy of The Bell Jar:. . . I've been reading Alan Hess'...
I bet capitalism looks good on the dance floor, I don't know if it's looking for romance or...
This post from Feministe takes the line that it's possible for an exotic dancer to be a feminist. I'm essentially agnostic on the question, but the author makes a smaller point that I would like to dispute when she uses her observations at the Magic Carpet (!) to refute Pat...
High Fidelity Tuesdays: Top Five Smoking Songs
Previous entry here.TOP FIVE SONGS ABOUT OR INVOLVING CIGARETTES1.) "Take Me to the River," Syl Johnson or the Talking HeadsThere are two relationship scenarios that absolutely terrify me: breaking up with a boy who retaliates by selling my library to the second-hand bookstore,...
Bookbag: David Bromwich on Edmund Burke and "mercantile interest"
In the course of reading up on Edmund Burke as quintessential "party man," I found this passage from David Bromwich's introduction to his volume of Burke's speeches and letters:What used to obstruct an appreciation of Burke was his unembarrassed apology for high politics. But...
Monday, August 25, 2008
Hitchblogging on Notorious: "I'm not that kind of a girl?" I can't stand women who say things like that!
Previous installments of Hitchblogging here and here.Turner Classic Movies had a Claude Rains marathon last night. Well, it was an Ingrid Bergman marathon, but I only caught Casablanca and Notorious and I prefer to think of it my way. I generally have nothing but love for Hitchcock/Truffaut,...
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.
I have developed a lengthy repertoire of thought experiments over the years (ask me the one about hiring a private eye to spy on your girlfriend*), and I am sad to see two of my favorites violated in one day.First, Matt Rognlie:Say that an all-powerful being walks up and offers...
Just because I burned my Bible, it don't mean I'm too sick to pray.
Barbecue is a family affair for the Rittelmeyers, so I read this Pop Matters article with great interest:Barbecue. It’s the cuisine that most directly satisfies our Promethean aspect, our embrace of the flame. It’s a food at the intersection of race, history, cultural distinctions,...
What's the matter with kids today? Not their reading habits, apparently.
To console Dan McCarthy, who has, among other concerns, a worry that young conservatives aren't reading the right books, here is a paragraph from the editor's introduction to this year's first issue of the Yale Free Press (not yet published; being an insider has perks):. . ....
Elitism versus tribalism: why "latte-sipping" and "gun-toting" are fair game.
I spent last night drafting a sally into the conversation about elitism that popped up in the wake of McCain's price-of-milk moment (1, 2, 3), only to throw it in the cybershredder this morning for reasons that will become clear. It started with a response to Matt Zeitlin's...
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Bookbag: Noel Coward during World War II
The reason that I didn't come back to America was that in this moment of crisis I wanted to be here experiencing what all the people I know and all the millions of people I don't know are experiencing. This is because I happen to be English and Scots and I happen to believe...
Saturday, August 23, 2008
"No humility without humiliation" explained; it has a lot to do with Abraham Lincoln.
I've quoted "There can be no humility without humiliation" several times over the last few months, usually in the context of championing shame culture. I feel like I should take up the sentence on its own merits as a way of answering reader mail—not really any particular piece...
Backwards, in heels, with a highball in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
I found a review of the David Laskin book that I mentioned last week, the one about Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, and the rest of the Partisan Review crowd. The woman who wrote the review seems to belong to the tiny set of people with whom I agree on feminism:....
Wilde File (II)
Oscar Wilde's trial is called a landmark moment in gay history, but it only makes sense to call it that if the trial had some effect on England's perception of homosexuality; this is why The Oscar Wilde File is such an interesting collection. Having read it, I now know that,...
Friday, August 22, 2008
Wilde File
I stopped buying books a little while ago—it'll be years before I finish the ones I have—but I couldn't resist The Oscar Wilde File, a collection of press clippings from the Wilde trial. Here's a satirical dialogue from the front page of Le Figaro (translated):"My dear fellow,...
Punk Rock is Conservative; Conservatism is Punk Rock.
I am stealing this anecdote from Will who stole it from someone else. I would say I'm stealing it shamelessly, but I like shame:I fell in love with Punk Rock when I was 13 years old and snuck into a club because my classmate was sleeping with the bouncer. It was a subculture...
Where there's smoke, there's freedom.
Via a Chapel Hill tipster, this article on UNC's new smoking restrictions:A trip outside for a quick cigarette might soon turn into a lengthy hike away from campus.The Employee Forum has decided to voice support of a proposal by UNC's administration to make the area within 100...
Thursday, August 21, 2008
I mean the International Criminal Court, but the International Cricket Council should probably stay away, too.
[TakiMag]: Why the ICC should stay out of Georg...
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Mental Health Break: Femininity and Eye-Candy
The following images all come from a Helsinki street blog and feature women having fun with femininity. I've been called "very high femme," but I've got nothing on these ladies:Dara and I once fought over whether the third girl ("Purple Mittens") looks benevolent or sassy....
For the last time, I'm not blogging barefoot in the kitchen!
There's a riot goin' on over at the Periphery that began with the Abyss reading Writing a Woman's Life and raising questions about "women who defy cultural scripts for leading 'a woman’s life' and who thus make newer, freer scripts possible." She quotes remarks of mine about...
Bookbag: Richard Sennett
From Conscience of the Eye:In one way, [Henry James's "The Best in the Jungle"] is a parable simply of a modern fear. One has to wait so long to be in a position to be ready, to know what one is doing, to be strong enough to "really live."James intended "The Beast in the Jungle"...
One should either be a work of art or wear a work of art.
I spend a non-negligible amount of time pontificating about the nature of art both on-blog and off, so I was delighted to find these two posts. First, from Pop Matters, In Praise of Ugly Shoes:Fashion and art are now irrevocably intertwined. Gloriously impractical and surprisingly...
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Grvbřdhvnít!
"Grvbřdhvnít" is Georgian for "You (pl.) are tearing us apart," a helpful phrase to know in the current situation. It's pronounced as one syllable; no wonder they're all nuts.Doug Muir has penned a very thoughtful response to my Gamsakhurdia post:. . . That said, if you weren't...
Link Love
1. I don't want virtue to exist anywhere.2. Skilled Trades Seek Workers. "With the shortage of welders, pipe fitters and other high-demand workers likely to get worse as more of them reach retirement age, unions, construction contractors and other businesses are trying to figure...
Two ways in which cigarettes are wonderful
1. Without them, I would have no identity:Outside these walls, in the open air, many of you may feel certain sense of exposure. The best answer to that is pipes, cigars, and cigarettes which leave a familiar mark upon the void. The wearing of a hat is also helpful: I do not...
Abuses of the word "postmodern"
Roderick Long mans the barricades against Charles Krauthammer's assau...
Pronounced like "Graham's Accordian," except not really.
Douglas Muir at Fistful of Euros hates Zviad Gamsakhurdia more than I do. That isn't saying much: I don't hate the first president of post-Soviet Georgia that much, and Muir hates him a lot, although having read the post I'm not sure it's for the right reasons. For instance:....
Follow-up on "happiness libertarianism" and poverty
It was a tough pitch to hit, but Nick connects:UM: Helen:"Suffering is either meaningful or not, either redemptive or simply unpleasant."Helen, three paragraphs later:"Alleviating poverty is a kind of anti-suffering policy I can get on board with; not all suffering is sacrificial/redemptive/awesome."Which...
Autobiographical note
If anyone is wondering why posting has been so sinusoidal around here, the explanation is that, after four years, I finally left New Haven last weekend. I don't want this content-less post showing up on anyone's Google search, so I'll thank everyone pseudonymously: the Delegate;...
Monday, August 18, 2008
If you can't say something nice about a Cambridge don...
I don't have much nice to say about Michael Oakeshott, but here's one: he gets Hobbes:Man, as Hobbes sees him, is not engaged in an undignified scramble for suburban pleasures; there is the greatness of great passion in his constitution.More importantly, he gets the ways in...
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