Archives for January 2010
Why?
January 31, 2010 by at 2:15 pm
Because screamin’ semen, that’s why.
Geez.
Why, he asks. This guy.
My bigamist boyfriend tricked me into marrying him in Africa
January 30, 2010 by at 3:08 pm
When Julie Stead arrived to visit her boyfriend’s family in Gambia, she was pleased to be given an elegant cream and white outfit.
She wore it on her birthday a few days later, believing she was going to a party. But she soon discovered that the big event was her own marriage – and there was nothing romantic about it.
Her boyfriend threatened to leave her stranded in Africa if she refused to go through with it. Only after reluctantly agreeing did 28-year-old Miss Stead discover that her ‘husband’ was already married to a Gambian woman and had two children. Yesterday, as he was jailed, she told how she had been targeted by a serial conman as a means to live legitimately in the UK.
Miss Stead, a carer from Bridlington, East Yorkshire, met Ahmed Jobe, 31, at a nightclub in the seaside town in 2006.
Jailbreak
January 30, 2010 by at 7:14 am
“Come on, ladies! Over the wall!”
Ten minutes later, they were, indeed, over the wall. The chickens are restless.
It was comforting to know the neighbors had stopped speaking.
January 29, 2010 by at 9:22 am
The Wisconsin Poet sends along a link to a bit of genius hilarity: Unhappy Hipsters.
Exchange
January 29, 2010 by at 7:12 am
Me: Look at this tree I saw today. There’s not a leaf on the thing.
The Wife: It’s like the California version of Charlie Brown’s tree! It’s…it’s like your career!
Me: [bitterly searches for right turn of phrase involving being stunted and sad and yet somehow, hilariously, fruitful; gives up; goes to sleep weeping softly]
From the comments section of The Awl.
January 28, 2010 by at 10:56 am
liz [#3108]
Updike: 1/27/09
Salinger: 1/27/10
!!
🙁
1:49 PM REPLY
True Religion
January 28, 2010 by at 7:55 am
This review of Gene Yang and Derek Kirk Kim’s The Eternal Smile at The Comics Journal is smart, perceptive, and well-written, and yet I couldn’t disagree more with its conclusion: “this is a strong, well-executed, but modest work that feels like a warm-up for more ambitious future comics.”
I think the book is kind of genius, and anything but modest, seeing as it takes careful aim at the unhealthy escape from reality that can be sought in both comics and religion, two things which are both hugely important to the writer. I’d call that pretty ambitious. The central story, Gran’pa Greenbax and the Eternal Smile is a flat-out amazing (and sort of harrowing) story of the uses and abuses of faith, and contains this wonderful, stammering speech from an abused employee:
“You know, I used to come here wh-wh-whenever I felt op-opressed by my – uh l-life. Seeing the Eternal Smile w-w-would g-give me hope – hope that maybe, j-just maybe, the underlying p-principle of the universe isn’t m-m-monotony or fear or c-competition, but j-joy. I’d w-wonder if the Eternal Sm-Smile was the sm-smile of existence it-itself. And if existence itself c-could sm-sm-smile, then m-maybe s-s-someday I would too.”
The review calls it a “satire of organized religion (somewhat surprising, given the devout Catholicism expressed in Yang’s previous comics)” Or, you know, not so surprising.
Oh, and I should add: that Gran’pa Greenbax story is about a whole lot more than the uses and abuses of faith. It’s about man’s creations (tech and wealth) obscuring his heart’s true desire even as they approximate it. It’s about how even our sad little conceptions of the divine may still be aiming us toward the real thing. It’s about lots of things.
Today in Porn, Fox News Edition
January 28, 2010 by at 7:50 am
Oopsie, Mr. Garrett. Gotta watch those links. Nice job blaming bit.ly, though. Naughty technology! Later, he called the naughty linkage “an innocent mistake.” Well, sure – the mistake was innocent…
File under: nobody cares about your stupid grammar.
January 28, 2010 by at 7:40 am
I just got an email from Wine Enthusiast, which sells glasses and openers and such. Apparently, they’re selling a new sort of glass for Port, and they have decided to use the first line of a customer review as a pitchline:
From: newsletter@email.wineenthusiast.com
Subject: ‘You haven’t really drank port until you drink it from these glasses.’
Date: January 28, 2010 7:41:45 AM PST
But, I wonder: Can you say you haven’t really drunk Port until you’ve drunk it from these glasses?
Or is it dranken?
Or maybe I’m just drunken?
Must be something I drank.
So good.
January 26, 2010 by at 4:57 pm
Ibraheem Youssef designs posters for Quentin Tarantino movies. Design is not dead. It’s just working the edges.
[Via Gorilla Mask]
Bookmark
January 26, 2010 by at 10:12 am
“Tarrou has some comments on the sermon preached by Paneloux: ‘I can understand that type of fervor and find it not displeasing. At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth – in other words, to silence.'”
– The Plague, Albert Camus
Some days are harder on faith than others.
January 25, 2010 by at 4:26 pm
This collection of people trying to contact Mel Gibson via the comments section of a guy’s blog post makes me very sad. It’s not just people with screenplays. It’s people with messages from God, people with troubled marriages, people who need money, people who want jobs, people who want a Noah’s Ark movie with dragons and giants, people who have a strange spiritual connection to Mr. Gibson that they cannot explain, people who want help suing a hospital, people who want him to speak at their church, and on and on. Possibly the most heartbreaking: “take me seriously, please.”
In other news, the guy played Hamlet. I think now he may be ready for Lear.
Updike’s Personal Rules for Literary Criticism
January 25, 2010 by at 12:49 pm
The previous post led me to the Wikipedia page for John Updike in my search for my favorite novel of his (and I’m not so sure it really is Beauty of the Lilies), where I found his personal guide for Literary Criticism. It strikes me as eminently sound, perhaps even conservative:
1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give enough direct quotation—- at least one extended passage—- of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never… try to put the author “in his place,” making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
What a writer.
Percy’s Thanatos Syndrome is #5
January 25, 2010 by at 11:58 am
… on National Review’s “list of ten great conservative novels, written by Americans since the 1950s.” John Miller has written an article for the latest issues on these novels, including a short review of each one. A discussion leading to the formation of the list can be found at Miller’s own website.
I count myself as a fairly serious reader, and I hadn’t even heard of two of the novels, The Time It Never Rained, by Elmer Kelton, and Shelley’s Heart, by Charles McCarry, but the Kanton looks especially good and I’m putting it in the queue. And I never did get around to John Dos Passos’ Midcentury or Mark Helprin’s Freddy and Fredericka. And I won’t be too unhappy if I never do.
On Miller’s website there is a fair amount of discussion as to whether Percy should be considered a “conservative” novelist at all, which of course depends on your discussion of conservative. I suppose so, or at least I think a good case can be made that he was conservative by the time he wrote Thanatos Syndrome. Trying to extrapolate from this whether Percy would have voted for McCain or Obama in the ’08 election was a kind of floating around this website in the runup to the vote, with fairly dismal results (in my estimation).
I think a clearer case for conservatism can be discerned in the novels of Tom Wolfe and Dos Passos, but the real problem with the list is that it leaves out so many great novels … Gravity’s Rainbow, Operation Shylock, Beauty of the Lilies … the list goes on and on. And why politicize novels that aren’t intended to be political? I recall reading in NR, numerous times, that the disinclination to politicize everything under the sun was a conservative position. Which may well be true, making such a list as this unacceptably liberal. Don’t even read it, or your mind will be poisoned.
I cannot believe, that in today’s society, with record numbers of people taking record numbers of anti-depressants…
January 25, 2010 by at 11:17 am
…and with the general admixture of helplessness and hopelessness that hangs like a fog about modernity, that no one has snapped up sigh.com.
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