Literature, both high and low.
I’d finished my scone and was having a second cup of Turkish coffee when I saw him. The No. 73 Express bus from the University District had come in a few minutes before, and he was peering in one end of the café window, the end nearest the anarchist bookstore, …
And now, a review of the trailers I saw tonight prior to a screening of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. Wish You Were Here: This Australian mystery/thriller seems to revolve around two identically scruffy-looking numbskulls, one of whom disappears while on Holiday. At first this makes his girlfriend and the other …
1. Imagine you are having dinner with Abraham Lincoln. You have the ability to warn him in advance that he is going to die, but it might result in the North losing the Civil War if he lives. Do you think you could get him to admit he was gay? …
“Good even, gentle patrons: welcome all who span the Globe to see me here withal. Tonight, a treat not meat or meal, but words awaits you here: this Winter’s night, a tale shall spread before you, not…” “Not fit for man nor beast, you mean? Not fish nor fowl nor …
ATLANTIS. First of all, it’s Atlantis. Not Atlantis City. The minute you guys open your mouths and say “Atlantis City”, we know you’re just some fish-gilled, gawking tourist from Lemuria or something. Second, we don’t have gambling here. That’s Atlantic City. METROPOLIS. There’s more to see here than fucking Superman, …
GENESIS CHAPTER 2 19 And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and even the plastic representations thereof for display in the windows of Japanese restaurants; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called …
(from the Irish Times‘ ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ column) You must keep this strictly under your hat but I received an invitation to be in attendance at 86 St Stephen’s Green last Thursday evening to hear a ‘paper’ on…guess?…’The Function and Scope of Criticism’. It interests me as a scientist that there is …
Suicide, as a tactic of war, seems to hold a particular horror for us. Because it is so seemingly foreign to the West (although, really, it bears little distinction from the kind of hopeless charges entirely common to the era of modern warfare), we tend to cite it as a …
Auteur theory has been taking it on the chin lately. Never especially strong in this country — as opposed to Europe, where it has even been allowed to influence matters of copyright, in a shockingly communistic example of art being given primacy over commerce — it’s really taken a beating …
Expressing these class tentions, there was a tradition of plebeian anti-clericalism and irreligion. To go no further back, the Lollards carried a popular version of John Wyclif’s heresies into the sixteenth century. Lollard influence survived in a popular materialist skepticism which makes one feel appreciably nearer to the age of …
For reasons I don’t enjoy being yelled at enough to go into, the subject of violence has been much on the minds of my fellow Americans the last few months. The current way of thinking seems to be that certain types of violence exist as a sort of protected category, …
So far this Noirvember, we’ve looked at an incredibly dark noir novel masquerading as a domestic drama centered around a dance contest, and a non-fiction noir that frames a series of historical mass murderers as perfect little short stories. And today, having moved from crypto-noir to non-fiction noir, we’re going …
The notion of a non-fiction noir isn’t hard to understand — the resonance of noir fiction, after all, comes from how easily we recognize the patterns of spiraling violence, inescapable fate, and the darkness of the human soul from our real lives — but it’s rather difficult to find examples of. True crime …
“I’m not lecturing,” I said, “but you ought to change your attitude. On the level. It affects everybody you come in contact with. Take me, for example: before I met you I didn’t see how I could miss succeeding. I never even thought of failing. And now — “ “Who …
“Critics (of books or drama) often use two rather singular arguments. The first consists in suddenly deciding that the true subject of criticism is ineffable, and criticism, as a consequence, unnecessary. The other, which also reappears periodically, consists in confessing that one is too stupid, too unenlightened to understand a …
