Check one off the bucket list: Last night I had the chance to ask a sex columnist what she thought of vows of life-long chastity. "And the answer I'm looking for sounds less like 'If that's what makes them happy then they should go for it,' and more like 'No, Emily Dickinson...
Monday, September 29, 2008
Saturday, September 27, 2008
A Change is Gonna Come
[Pomocon]: I Found It Out in a Book (And She was Such a Pretty Dictionary).[Pomocon]: If Sophistry is the Game, Two Can Play.[Pomocon]: Postmodern Conservatism: Rum, Socrates, and the Lasch.[Pomocon]: Today, We are All Blind Korean Masseurs.As some of you have already noticed,...
Thursday, September 25, 2008
A Political Narrative Grows in Brooklyn
For those in the New York area, two events worth hitting this Sunday: a panel at the Brooklyn Museum on "The American Hero and the American Dream: Reflections on Our Contemporary Political Narratives" in the afternoon, and this month's Lolita Bar debate, "Is Modern Sex Good...
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
What Gives This Mess Some Grace Unless It's Fictions?
I've always said that there's something rabbinic about the way the my favorite undergraduate organization operates. In the Talmud, a verse like Ecclesiastes 10:8 (He who breaks a fence will be bitten by a snake) is sometimes deployed as honest advice about keeping safe by staying...
"I can get you photographs of Dwight MacDonald reading..."
What was I thinking, posting on the way female intellectuals are fetishized without throwing up a link to Woody Allen's "Whore of Mensa?"Allow me to correct the error:"Hi, I'm Sherry." They really knew how to appeal to your fantasies. Long, straight hair, leather bag, silver...
Hadley Arkes, You are My Stephen A. Douglas.
It's only fair for me to flip my cards at the very beginning: I have the utmost respect for Hadley Arkes as a serious Catholic thinker and, moreover, a man of great heart and geniality. That being said, he has no love at all for the Yale Political Union, an institution to which...
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
A Brief, Ill-Advised Defense of That McDonald's Coffee Ad
Bill Deresiewicz (who, to my great delight, is everywhere) once said in lecture, "Put away any dreams you have of being a writer, and replace them with dreams of writing." The easy defense of the much-ridiculed ad for the new upscale coffee menu at McDonald's is to say, very...
Self-Promotion (II)
[Ladyblog]: Top Ten Conservative Pop Songs.Join me as I take High Fidelity Tuesdays to Ladybl...
The UNDP's Vitamin D Deficiency: A Problem We Can Live With?
Stories of corruption at the United Nations are usually so many dogs biting men, but Nicole Kurakawa and Matthew Lee have both seen fit to give the matter some attention this week, and Kurakawa in particular has raised an interesting question: if everyone knows that corruption...
Monday, September 22, 2008
Reading Recommendation: Vincent Rossmeier on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
No, really: "If Seinfeld was about nothing, It's Always is about nothingness—the void created when individuals give in completely to their most solipsistic desires." Mo...
What do you mean Sorkin-esque patter doesn't fly in Red States? Haven't these people seen Sports Night?
The most interesting line from Aaron Sorkin's NYT piece:The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.Too much has already been said about bicoastal elites and the Real Americans who love...
Between the end of the Chatterley ban and Yeasayer's first LP?
Joseph Knippenberg asks the perennial question about kids today:. . . I learned a long time ago—I’m old, you see—that the original great exponent of youth politics was Niccolo Machiavelli, who was the first to celebrate the political daring and audacity of the young. Audacity...
Sunday, September 21, 2008
If Thorstein Veblen were here, he'd tell you the same thing.
Just as I begin to hear that there might be good news from Whit Stillman someday soon, I come across Whit Stillman's bad news for me:ALICE: It's odd that he knew I drank vodka tonics. I never told him.DES: It's uncanny.ALICE: You mean it's a complete cliché? All women recent...
Saturday, September 20, 2008
"Carthage Didn't Burn Hot Enough"
I've been following the career of Karmen MacKendrick for a while, mostly because she and I both hold the unpopular opinion that, in the words of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, "life would be quite unbearable without suffering." It turns out that those of us who walked away from...
"It's a documentary about weird Southern music, weird Southern religion, and how they're indistinguishable."
Speaking of theologically interesting premises, I recently came across this minute-long Youtube clip from the documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, which I have posted on before. The transcript doesn't do justice to the man's Appalachian accent:"Why can't flesh go...
Deconstructing Fallen Angels, and Other Postmodern Conservative Pastimes
When I finished Ted Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God," I thought I would have a hard time coming up with enough of an angle on it to justify a post. "Hey Catholics, here's a short story with a theologically interesting premise" isn't much of a hook. All praises to God for...
Friday, September 19, 2008
It builds character.
As I boarded the 4:42am train into New York this morning, I was reminded of a colorful explanation a friend of mine offered for why he supported Mike Huckabee: "Most politicians are fake as a drag queen's [...], but there are two kinds of character you can't fake: getting up...
Louisiana Governors: Crazier than Anyone Who's Better, Better than Anyone Who's Crazier
Earlier in the week, in the course of meeting a couple of new faces from the conservative blogosphere, I fell into a strange debate: who's crazier, Buddy Cianci or Marion Berry? The real answer, of course, is that either way nobody wins, but it was generally agreed that the...
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Style, Russian Short Stories, and "Wine's Litigious Imperatives" (not about the Estonian vodka pipeline)
I've already blogged today about revisiting the books of one's childhood, but if you thought that meant you were finished reading about reading, you need to study harder before the exam. As nice as it is to return to books that have mattered, it's even nicer to rediscover a...
"Speculative Ethnomusicology?"
If I'm remembering this correctly, the conversation began with a stupid question of mine: is the demolition of Chávez Ravine a story that the man on the street would recognize? Noah said that it might or might not be, but that it was the go-to example for anyone making the argument...
Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Passionate Readers (Well, Okay, You Can Let Them But Don't Try to Force It)
I've been hearing the pitter-patter of little feet more than is typical for the blogosphere: Camassia and Eve want your children's book recommendations; Papercuts has returned to the subject of "gateway literature" (the first hit is always free); even Alex Massie has put aside...
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Move Over, Michael; There's a New Traveloguing Palin in Town
The vice presidential candidate's travels will take her to the UN this Tuesday; no word on whether BBC will broadcast the results as Sarah Palin's Hemingway Adventure.Post continued at Ladyblog . ....
"Our parents emulated Roosevelt and Farley, but we just wanna grow up to be like Ev and Charlie!"
The recent mini-flap over Westbrook Pegler reminds me of two things: the time that a well-intentioned friend warned me that paleoconservatism was a "fever swamp," and the happier memory of the first time I heard the song that became my arch-ironic anthem. Youtube does not offer...
Monday, September 15, 2008
Does the key to unlocking Oscar Wilde lie in the books he read?
Yes, but isn't that true for everyone?I see via Literary Review that the newest biography of Oscar Wilde is framed as the story of Wilde the omnivorous reader. I'll save up and get a copy, of course, but the review is hardly promising. The author makes a great deal out of the...
Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
A New York moment from Saturday: I see a man descend the stairs down to the Borough Hall subway station. He encounters a police officer, has a conversation with him that I can't hear, and then turns around. As I meet him on the stairs, I ask him if they're turning people away.He...
Bookbag: Murmur by J. Niimi
This edition of Bookbag comes courtesy of Continuum Press's 33 1/3 series and is dedicated to Nick, both for being himself and for this life-changing alert.R.E.M. didn't expect their single to succeed (Buck says that they only hoped just to make one great single before they...
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Sarah Palin/Anne Hutchinson follow-up
Mr. Bottum has a point:Sally Quinn—and what made the Washington Post imagine this gossip columnist was an expert on American religion?—points out the hypocrisy of conservative Protestants both promoting male headship and cheering for Sarah Palin.To which Helen Rittelmeyer replies...
Even ze orchestrated architectural conformity eez beautiful.
Conor Friedersdorf thinks he knows why suburbanites refuse to walk even when their destinations are embarrassingly walkable:1) It’s boring to walk in suburbia! This is especially so in Irvine, where draconian zoning codes mean that every house, condo and apartment looks exactly...
In comes Romeo, he's moaning, "You belong to me, I believe." Someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend. You'd better leave."
Joyce the Ringer Brit once tried to explain what it was like for a godless atheist like herself to take a class at the Yale Divinity School. "We were doing Plato," she said, "but the professor kept making weird assumptions about students beliefs. I remember him saying, 'I'm...
Friday, September 12, 2008
Ladies is prim, too...
The lesson of box-office flop The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)—besides "John Cullum is still alive!"—was that whatever magic had been behind the original Bettie Page phenomenon failed to last into the twenty-first century. We still like high-heeled boots, but, sometime between...
When "It doesn't quite fit" doesn't quite fit.
Brian Doyle on rejection letters:One of the very best: a rejection note sent by the writer Stefan Merken to an editor who had rejected one of his short stories. “Please forgive me for not accepting your rejection letter,” wrote Merken. “At this time I cannot accept a rejection...
Thursday, September 11, 2008
How about a compromise: middle-class men and Marxists both trend totalitarian.
From Michael Weiss's Democratiya piece on Edmund Wilson's politics, an interesting question about totalitarian tendencies among socialists:Was it his fundamental middle-class nature, as Marx would have argued, or his socialist instinct for despotism, as Flaubert had it, that...
UN symposium for victims of terrorism proves controversial.
To read Reuters on the UN's "victims of terrorism" symposium is to get the impression that it was a feel-good photo op with one routine dark cloud making a brief appearance:. . . Ban brushed aside reporters' questions on why no victims of "state terrorism" or speakers from Iraq,...
Where has this pun been all my life?
Thanks to Millinerd for this. It's better than every Nacirema joke put togeth...
Move Over, "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah."
Philip Weiss has posted a report on this week's Yale Political Union debate with guest John Mearsheimer ("Resolved: End America's special relationship with Israel"). Go here for the substance; the punchline I post here for your convenience:There had been one funny speech. Matt...
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
What Anne Hutchinson teaches us about Sarah Palin
[Ladyblog]: Sarah Palin, a Modern Anne Hutchinson?Minus the ability to hear the voice of God, presumab...
Christopher on Graham Greene
. . . As much as Pinkie despises Rose, they share a similar outlook as self-identified "Romans," or Catholics. To Pinkie, who even Rose admits is explicitly evil, there is nothing so disgusting as a woman like Ida, who cannot be reduced to either good or evil because she is...
Norman Geras means I love you?
I have to admit that I find the idea of an Ivy League anti-sex blogger pretty intriguing, all the more so for being based out of notorious abstinence hotspot Princeton University.Hi everyone and welcome to my first post as the Anti-Sex Blogger. Though it's often said that college...
Moose-killer? Big deal.
I can't believe it has taken this long for someone to make this joke, but that's why Dan Koffler is a hall of famer. On a related note: in the genre of Christian jokes, "That Bible would have gone through my heart if it hadn't been for that bullet" outdoes previous title-holder...
Soft Eugenics and Autonomy: "Didn't you get amnio?"
Dylan Matthews objects to the use of the word "eugenics" to describe the overwhelming frequency with which Downs Syndrome babies are aborted:As practiced in the United States, eugenics involved the forced sterilization of grown women, without their knowledge, with a disproportionately...
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Lady, blog.
[Ladyblog]: Living in Suburbia without a Car: It Can Be Done.Further reading on public transportation can be found here. "A third of the cost of a new commuter rail in the St. Paul suburbs comes from fulfilling unnecessary federal construction regulations, [St. Paul mayor Chris]...
Monday, September 8, 2008
Stuck inside of Mobile with the elseblogging blues again.
[TakiMag]: Does veneration really wither on the pavements?A previous post on rural "conservatism of the heart" can be found he...
Sunday, September 7, 2008
George F. Will appendix
From David Bromwich's Politics by Other Means:For a columnist even more than for other writers, mannerisms are an index of character, and Will's writing from the first has been notable for two: the ventriloquized gruffness of a downright Oxford slang ("Moynihan's basic point...
George F. Will is a Sophister and Calculator
John McCain, who is in what Macbeth called "the sear, the yellow leaf" of life, has revived an oldie from seven elections ago with a campaign commercial asserting: "We're worse off than we were four years ago.". . . We do, unfortunately, live, as Edmund Burke lamented, in an...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)