By GLENN STOUT [Verb Plow] – I waited for George at a small diner and when he lumbered out of the car, still smoking a cigarette, and I was both happy and sad to see him. Happy to see that he was the same unkempt, distracted wreck of a guy and sad to see that he was so sick. I had known he was ill but it was still a shock to see the shrunken figure of his face and his clothes hanging so loosely.
He just started talking, like we’d talked a hundred times before, and we ordered breakfast. Actually, George ordered twice, a massive pile of pancakes, extra butter, double butter, double toast, and I got it; he knew he was going to die, but damned if he was going to act like he was dying. This was a not a man who was going to go quietly.
Continue reading “· Cancer v George Kimball: a twelfth-round TKO.” »
By LEV GROSSMAN [Time] – Right now fan fiction is still the cultural equivalent of dark matter: it’s largely invisible to the mainstream, but at the same time, it’s unbelievably massive. Fan fiction predates the Internet, but the Web has made it exponentially easier to talk and be heard, and it holds hundreds of millions of words of fan fiction. There’s fan fiction based on books, movies, TV shows, video games, plays, musicals, rock bands and board games. There’s fan fiction based on the Bible. In most cases, the quantity of fan fiction generated by a given work is volumetrically larger than the work itself; in some cases, the quality is higher than that of the original too. FanFiction.net, the largest archive on the Web (though only one of many), hosts over 2 million pieces of fan fiction, ranging in length from short-short stories to full-length novels. The Harry Potter section alone contained, at press time, 526,085 entries.
Continue reading “· Spinning-off Harry Potter: the ‘cultural dark matter’ created by fans of fan-fiction.” »
By RICHARD NORTHEDGE [Director of Finance Online] – How could part of an international publishing organisation hack into the phone of schoolgirl Millie Dowler? Easily – and justifying the ethics was even easier than mastering the technology. Despite the outcry now we know she was murdered, there is no clear moral code of what newspapers can do.
The consequences of the News of the World’s hacking are now commercial with Ford leading an advertisers’ boycott, executive heads likely to roll and News International’s bid for BSkyB in danger. Continue reading “· What would Wikileaks do with a murdered schoolgirl’s personal messages?” »
By GEORGE WEIGEL [First Things] – The civil rights movement in its classic period was predominantly a Christian movement; its appeals to American traditions of equality and fairness were regularly buttressed by appeals to biblical ideas of justice. The legal movement to end segregation may have been led by lawyers, but the movement in the streets was led by black Baptist ministers and other clergy, and their presence helped give the classic civil rights movement the character of a revival. Continue reading “· America’s civil rights movement as a gospel revival.” »
By CHERYL DIETRICH [Gettysburg Review] – The Flag Code, codifying respect for the flag, was adopted in 1923. It became public law in 1942. It defines proper care and usage of the flag but imposes no penalties for misuse. It is a gentle law.
In 2007, here in Asheville, North Carolina, two flag-related incidents received a lot of press and public attention. In one, a couple was arrested for hanging a flag upside down and attaching political messages to it. Hanging the flag upside down is an international distress signal, which, they claimed, was appropriate as the country was in distress. Technically, they were detained for resisting the police officer who came to arrest them for defacing the flag. They were released almost immediately with the written equivalent of a mumbled apology for the officer’s “overzealousness.” Continue reading “· The ‘gentle law’ of the Old Glory code.” »
By Anthony Howell.
HOWEVER PRIVILEGED HIS POSITION, the libertine remains irrevocably a rebel, and for Albert Camus, the Marquis de Sade epitomises this condition. As Gilles Neret puts it in Erotica Universalis, ‘Sade brought together in a single system the arguments of 18th century libertine thought, creating a titanic engine of war that led directly to the monumental upheaval of the French Revolution.’
But Sade was an armchair terrorist. His excesses were limited to the realm of the imagination. In The Rebel, Camus observes:
An addict of refined ways of execution, a theoretician of sexual crime, he was never able to tolerate legal crime. ‘My imprisonment, with the guillotine under my very eyes, was far more horrible to me than all the Bastilles imaginable.’ From this feeling of horror he drew the strength to be moderate, publicly, during the Terror, and to intervene generously on behalf of his mother-in-law, despite the fact that she had had him imprisoned. A few years later, Nodier summed up, without knowing it perhaps, the position obstinately defended by Sade: ‘To kill a man in a paroxysm of passion is understandable. To have him killed by someone else after serious meditation and on the pretext of a duty honourably discharged is incomprehensible.’ [trans. A. Bower, Penguin Modern Classics, 1953]
Sade demonstrated the extreme consequences of a rebel’s logic. The rebel is ‘in denial’. For Milton, Lucifer was the arch-rebel, exiled for denying God’s omnipotence. These days, it is possible to feel that, rather than the devil, it is God who is in exile. Clearly Al Qaeda feel this way and seek isolated retreats since ‘Farthest from him is best.’ However the ‘him’ in question is now ‘Uncle Sam’ – or the secular order imposed by forces united in the name of democracy rather than the divine order imposed by God. It is the terrorist who seeks to re-establish the power of God. Continue reading “The New Libertine.” »
By L.M. Kit Carson.
TWO THINGS YOU CAN find out from some semi-private time at the Cinema-Jove Film Festival in Valencia, Spain, with Stanley Kubrick’s multi-movie [The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut] final producer Jan Harlan: Continue reading “Two things you can learn about Stanley Kubrick by talking to Jan Harlan.” »
By MAURA STANTON [Cerise Press] – 1919. Then nothing for twenty years
Until her first profession of religious vows
When she changed her name to Sister Joan Frances
Of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
At seventy my cousin published her only book,
Lenin to Gorbachev, a history of communism.
The Telegraph-Herald of Dubuque, Iowa
Records her death in this tiny obituary. Continue reading “· A part-stanza: from ‘Lives of the Obscure’.” »
By ROBERT PINSKY [Slate] – The Christian poet and hymnodist William Cowper (1731-1800) at times in his life believed that he was already and irrevocably damned: damned to hell, and facing the additional doom of carrying that knowledge while still walking around in earthly daylight.
In keeping with our contemporary notion of professional comics as tormented, gloomy souls, Cowper had a distinctive and weird comic gift. One of his poems has the engaging title “To the Immortal Memory of the Halibut, on Which I Dined This Day.” The charming “Epitaph on a Hare” presents what I consider a shrewd version of the role even a surly pet can play in a person’s life: “I kept him for his humor’s sake,/ For he would oft beguile/ My heart of thoughts that made it ache,/ And force me to a smile.” Continue reading “· Going to hell for writing poetry for fish.” »
By ALBERTO MANGUEL [Threepenny Review] – Of all the miracles that pinpoint the histories of our literatures, few are as miraculous as that of the birth of Alice in Wonderland. The well-known story is worth repeating. On the afternoon of July 4, 1862, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, accompanied by his friend the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, took the three young daughters of Dr. Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, on a three-mile boating expedition up the Thames, from Folly Bridge, near Oxford, to the village of Godstow. “The sun was so burning,” Alice Liddell recalled many years later, “that we landed in the meadows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new-made hayrick. Here from all three came the old petition of ‘Tell us a story,’ and so began the ever-delightful tale. Continue reading “· Two vicars, three daughters, three miles up the Thames to Wonderland.” »
Urkom: 'If and only if'.
‘ABSTRACTION’, a group exhibit at The Room, 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, N17, opens 3 July and continues through 2 November 2011. The artists: Bonvin/Eden, visiual artists and former Wallpaper magazine collaborators; Anthony McCall, the British-born American light-and-space artist; Yuko Shiraishi; Stephen Mallaghan; Paul Sibbering; Amikam Toren; Gera Urkom; and Mark Williams.
Continue reading “· Event: ‘Abstraction’ at The Room in London N17, from 3 July 2011.” »
By DIANA SCHAUB [The Claremont Review] – Plato, Epicurus, Cicero, and Seneca all wrote about friendship, but Aristotle is the place to start. Although not regarded as the most affable or approachable of writers, Aristotle does devote one fifth of his Nicomachean Ethics to an analysis of friendship, which is more space than he gives to the virtues of courage, moderation, and justice combined. What accounts for this privileged position?We perhaps get a clue when we realize that the only exhortation to virtue contained in the Ethics is for the sake of friendship. Aristotle says: “everyone should earnestly shun vice and try to be decent; for that is how someone will have a friendly relation to himself and will become a friend to another.” Continue reading “· Metafriending Aristotle on Facebook.” »
From the SOLID SOUND SITE – Levon Helm, Thurston Moore, Pajama Club and many, many others will meet at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts – “the largest contemporary art museum in the country” – for WILCO’s annual Solid Sound arts and music festival. (Plus comedians.)
Continue reading “· Event: WILCO’s Solid Sound in the Berkshires, 24-26 June 2011.” »
A STAFF REPORT [Der Spiegel] – In the past 14 months, politicians in the euro-zone nations have adopted one bailout package after the next, convening for hectic summit meetings, wrangling over lazy compromises and building up risks of gigantic dimensions.
For just as long, they have been avoiding an important conclusion, namely that things cannot continue this way. The old euro no longer exists in its intended form, and the European Monetary Union isn’t working. We need a Plan B. Continue reading “· If it weren’t for the euro, the euro-zone would be in good shape.” »
by CARLA KING [Mediashift] – With big publishing buying only the crème de la crème of books, and more authors turning to self-publishing, many literary agents are getting squeezed right out of the middle.
But some savvy agents are acting as literary consultants to help their authors self-publish, a role that offers up new opportunities and challenges for everybody in the industry…
Ted Weinstein, a San Francisco-based agent who represents non-fiction authors, said that self-publishing “has added one more serious option for my clients when we are looking at all their possible opportunities.” Continue reading “· Need an agent who can negotiate a sweet deal with a vanity publisher?” »
By GLENN STOUT [Verb Plow] – I waited for George at a small diner and when he lumbered out of the car, still smoking a cigarette, and I was both happy and sad to see him. Happy to see that he was the same unkempt, distracted wreck of a guy and sad to see that he was so sick. I had known he was ill but it was still a shock to see the shrunken figure of his face and his clothes hanging so loosely.
