That’s Kenneth Tigar on the right, and he plays the old man who will not kneel to Loki in the following exchange:
Loki: In the end, you will always kneel.
Old Man: Not to men like you.
Loki: There are no men like me!
Old Man: There are always men like you.
Reading an article in the new New Yorker, I came across this doozy of a sentence (bold-faced) in a doozy of a paragraph:
By many indicators, Greece is devolving into something unprecedented in modern Western experience. A quarter of all Greek companies have gone out of business since 2009, and half of all small businesses in the country say they are unable to meet payroll. The suicide rate increased by 40 percent in the first half of 2011. A barter economy has sprung up, as people try to work around a broken financial system. Nearly half the population under 25 is unemployed. Last September, organizers of a government-sponsored seminar on emigrating to Australia, an event that drew 42 people a year earlier, were overwhelmed when 12,000 people signed up. Greek bankers told me that people had taken about one-third of their money out of their accounts; many, it seems, were keeping what savings they had under their beds or buried in their backyards. One banker, part of whose job these days is persuading people to keep their money in the bank, said to me, “Who would trust a Greek bank?”
Taking a cue from Percy’s philosophizing at the beginning of The Second Coming, at what point do these statistics on depression and suicide become a concern? Obviously they’re way past that point in Greece, but we shouldn’t be surprised to see those numbers tick steadily upwards in the years ahead—if, as they say, we really are going the way of Greece. The existential crises faced by nations do not happen apart from the existential crises faced by citizens of those nations. Suicide isn’t just an indicator of a crisis; however poor, it’s a solution.
I’d also like to take credit for predicting, in a typically drunken ramble, the devolution to a barter economy at one of the summits a few years ago. Here’s another prediction: in five to ten years, after Washington state and California has crumbled into the sea, survivors will begin migrating to places like Wisconsin and Texas to take part in secession movements and constitutional conventions.
Well, not really. I just wanted an excuse to play off of Chris Isaak. But seriously – Friend of Korrektiv Duffy wrote a bit on the manosphere, and all hell broke loose in the comments.
A nod to Kierkegaard and Walker Percy: existentialist tomfoolery, political satire, literary homage, word mongering, a year-round summer reading club, Dylanesque music bits, apocalyptic marianism, poetry, fiction, meta-porn, a prisoner work-release program.
Conflicted in early life between his desire to be a weatherman for local community access cable stations and a man who wears pants in July, JOB took the middle road and now writes poems between every waking moment. [Read More …]
All you need to know is that I'm a lady, understand?
Behave yourselves accordingly. [Read More …]
Doubt as an Avenue of Communication
I want to hang onto this comment of Angelico’s and the passage he quoted from Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, because I see it as key, possibly, to the unique character of Korrektiv. I re-quote it here as a placemarker for further consideration.
Could this serve as a formative piece of that Korrektiv Press manifesto or mission statement we’ve been casting about for? The fine print at the bottom of that gravestone?