Is your community participating in The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts “to revitalize the role of literature in American popular culture and bring the transformative power of literature into the lives of its citizens.” Lincoln, Neb., doesn’t seem to be, though we also have One Book, One Lincoln going [...]
Can one of you explain what this is?
Everyone knows allegorical readings of anything written after 1500 are dull and limiting. They do the opposite of what reading is all about doing, which is to answer questions about a text with further questions, and with mental and associative play. Allegorical readings try to answer every question and they can’t help but look foolish [...]
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Far be it from me to hawk products on this site, but these…
…are a total steal.
For the last fifteen minutes, someone has been double-parked in what might a BMW outside with all windows and the sunroof open, playing top 40 hip-hop radio more loudly than I thought cars could. Just, like, so loud.
Were I an echt New Yorker and not some idiot housesitting for 10 days, I would have shouted [...]
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The semiweekly newspaper is the Virginia Gazette, out Wednesdays and Saturdays. The back of each “Limelight” section includes a universally popular feature called The Last Word. It’s like a blog’s anonymous comment section but antecedent thereto. Typical posts concern unnamed restaurants with bad service, or pleas for drivers to be more careful, or such acute [...]
Some things:
I. His Dark Materials
It’s a trilogy that turns Harry-Potter grads into atheists, have you heard? The overarc(h)ing narrative is the quest to kill God. Here’s the thing: it’s so much more godly and Christian than any other book I’ve written. Even if God dies (spoiler alert) in a terribly anticlimactic scene, all three books [...]
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1. Break into our home while we’re gone. A friend of mine has a key.
2. Tear out the tree on the back patio, tear down the fence (it’s half falling down anyway), and expand the brick about five feet in both directions.
3. Center the table we have, or chuck it out and get an old [...]
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Look closely. S’s roommate is a very big baseball fan. Why is this interesting?
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This morning’s adventure. No, it’s no longer open to the public. Yes, the floor is filthy and unfinished. I want to work in there.
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UPDATE: Yer probably better off headed here
This one wasn’t online for some reason. A capo helped me out. Feel free to play braggingly without one. Oh, and while I can’t hear anything wrong with the first D chord in the intro/chorus, it feels as though the song’s doing something other than alternating between two chords. [...]
It’s called “Summer Thrillers” and I think it just launched today. Maybe last week. For about a year now I’ve paid for (at a reduced introductory rate that lasted 13 weeks, at which time I had to call the Times up to pretend to cancel my subscription so that they’d offer me the reduce rate [...]
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Q: How did Jeanne Tripplehorn become famous?
A (with spoilers): In 1967, Jeanne Tripplehorn was swinging on the swings at a playground in Rancho Cucamonga drinking a YooHoo when a casting agent walked by looking for a strategic place to park the stroller that held his infant son, the better to hit on the vicinity’s single [...]
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Q: Why was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button so dull?
A (with spoilers): I can’t quite figure it out. It has to have had something to do with B.B.’s growing younger and not older, and that like while we know it won’t be easy for him, it makes his life get progressively easier, right? So [...]
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A few things I learned from a hunter and a taxidermist today.
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I. Synecdoche, New York
For a long time while watching I wasn’t with this movie. Not like: I didn’t get it. I didn’t, but didn’t much work at it that way. But I wasn’t with it as it wanted me to be. The situation/drama/conflicts were too synthetic for me to move past the distance I was [...]
