Walt knows it.
We’re a nation of puss cakes…
May 8, 2012 by at 1:46 pm
Walker Percy in The Avengers
May 5, 2012 by at 12:32 pm
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.
Beat Writer’s Block with the help of the Chomskybot
April 18, 2012 by at 8:41 am
It must be emphasized, once again, that the systematic use of complex symbols is necessary to impose an interpretation on a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired utterance test. With this clarification, a descriptively adequate grammar is rather different from a descriptive fact. However, this assumption is not correct, since relational information cannot be arbitrary in the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. By combining adjunctions and certain deformations, most of the methodological work in modern linguistics appears to correlate rather closely with the strong generative capacity of the theory. Conversely, an important property of these three types of EC is not quite equivalent to a parasitic gap construction.
Here – you can play, too!
And as long as we’re talking about robots, Dave, perhaps you’d enjoy this:
I kind of want the “You Been Dragooned!” team to remake this video.
Some Inspiration for the Author of Raskolnikov
April 17, 2012 by at 11:55 pm
First, this clip from one of Woody Allen’s funnier movies:
Then, this poem by Vladimir Nabokov:
On Translating Eugene Onegin
1
What is translation? On a platter
A poet’s pale and glaring head,
A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I traveled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose–
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.
2
Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana’s earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man’s mistake,
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task–a poet’s patience
And scholastic passion blent:
Dove-droppings on your monument.
Catholics in Hollywood!
April 12, 2012 by at 9:47 am
Remember how Joe Eszterhas came back to his childhood faith and wrote a script for MPower about Our Lady of Guadalupe? Yeah, those were good times. Well, it seems he hooked up with Mel Gibson on a project based on one of those Catholic books of the Bible. It was all downhill from there.
[Language alert!]
Connexions
March 17, 2012 by at 9:23 am
A little bit ago, I mentioned Philip Barry’s play The Philadelphia Story, and Cubeland Mystic allowed as how he thought well of the play, or at least the movie version of the play. Anyway, last night I was reading a bit more of New Yorker theater critic Brendan Gill’s memoir A New York Life: Of Friends and Others, and I found these paragraphs about Barry:
“Given the ease and agreeableness of Barry’s life in the late 1920s, it is at least superficially ironic that he spent the last summer of that decade in Cannes writing the sombre Hotel Universe. It is a play beautiful as well as sombre; many students of Barry consider it his best work. The setting, borrowed from the Murphy’s Villa America, is a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. On the terrace are gathered half a dozen attractive men and women of varied backgrounds; at first glance, they would seem to be among the most fortunate people alive, but one soon perceives that something dreadful has happened: a malignancy no more palpable than air has put them in jeopardy. Death hovers all around them, not so much a threat as a temptation. Only recently, death seduced a delightful young acquaintance of theirs, who smilingly dove into the sea and committed suicide.”
Change the setting to the American South, and this could be a paragraph about Walker Percy, what with his great themes of death-in-life and the lure of oblivion in the face of material happiness. And it goes on:
“Barry has given the play the appearance of a drawing-room comedy, and it is no such thing. On the contrary, it is a fantasy, whose theme is existential despair and whose subject matter concerns the grim fact that people’s lives often come to an end before they die. All those nice people on the terrace in Hotel Universe – like all those nice people on the Murphys’ terrace at Cap d’Antibes? the Scott Fitzgeralds, the Robert Benchleys, the Ring Lardners, Dorothy Parker? – are engaged in a desperate struggle to find themselves by finding meaning in their lives, or, failing that, by finding meaning in the universe. This was a struggle that Barry remained a party to until his death. Despite the skepticism that he felt in regard to the church and its conduct in the world, he was never not a Catholic; he was bound to the church by emotional ties that no reasoning could loose. Once, when long after Barry’s death I was talking about him with his old friend Katharine Hepburn, she told me of an occasion on which he had confessed to her that he would find it impossible to get up out of the chair in which he was then sitting if he weren’t able to believe in some sort of God – some divine principle, however little aware of man – at work somewhere beyond us. Hotel Universe was one of the several attempts he made to give philosophical speculations a dramatic form; that he was able to provide the play with a happy ending is a tribute not only to his ingenuity as a playwright but to his courage: he would live with his doubts as other men live with an incurable malady.”
Astonishing.
Dry
March 12, 2012 by at 11:16 am
“In the 1940 classic movie The Philadelphia Story, the reliable character actor John Halliday plays Katharine Hepburn’s reprobate father, who has returned home unexpectedly on the eve of her wedding. Standing on a terrace in the early evening, he mixes and pours a dry martini for himself and his deceived but accepting wife (Mary Nash) while at the same time he quietly demolishes his daughter’s scorn for him and some of her abiding hauteur. It’s the central scene of the ravishing flick, since it begins Tracy Lord’s turnabout from the chilly prig Main Line heiress to passably human Main Lain heiress, and the martini is the telling ritual: the presentation of sophistication’s Host. Hepburn had played the same part in the Broadway version of the Philip Barry play, a year before, which also required that martini to be mixed and poured before our eyes. Sitting in the dark at both versions, I was entranced by the dialogue – only Philip Barry could have a seducer-dad convincingly instruct his daughter in morals – but at the same time made certain that the martini was made right: a slosh of gin, a little vermouth, and a gentle stirring in the pitcher before the pouring and the first sips. Yes, O.K., my martini-unconscious murmured, but next time maybe more ice, Seth.
“This is not a joke. Barry’s stage business with the bottles and the silver stirring spoon in one moment does away with a tiresome block of explanation about the Lords: he’s run off with a nightclub singer and she’s been betrayed, but they have shared an evening martini together before this – for all their marriage, in fact – and soon they’ll be feeling much better. In the movie, which was directed by George Cukor, the afternoon loses its light as the drink is made and the talk sustained, and the whole tone of the drama shifts. Everyone is dressed for the coming party, and the martini begins the renewing complications. Sitting in the theatre, we’re lit up a little, too, and ready for all that comes next – the dance, the scene by the pool – because the playwright has begun things right.”
- from “Dry Martini” in Roger Angell’s Let Me Finish.
All That Remains
March 1, 2012 by at 10:01 pm
Via Frank Weathers of Why I Am Catholic
The production blog for All That Remains has lovely photographs and tells of the producers’ visit to Nagasaki. I didn’t know anything about the Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims before and the memorial looks beautiful and poignant.
You can contribute to the production of All That Remains at IndieGoGo.
Today in Porn: Little Children Edition
[And if that post title doesn't cost us the rest of our Facebook friends, I don't know what will.]
I know I’ve already mentioned the Christian haunted-box-o’-porn film Harmless. But what interests me is how many other people have done so. A very cursory look turns up i09, Jezebel, the AV Club, Movieline…why, it’s practically buzz. Anyway, they all make fun of the film’s ultra lo-fi production values, but they also make fun – especially in the comments - of its central thesis: that porn can destroy marriages and tear families apart. What interests me here is that I don’t remember the same mocking hue and cry going up when Little Children came out in 2006. And Little Children made the exact same point. Why does Kate Winslet allow herself to stray? Because she walks in on her husband in the scene pictured above.
Anyway, something something just because Christians say it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.