Attention to the Next Generation
A great line from Evelyn Waugh, said by a doctor no less, Dr. Puttock: “Some people even think that a disproportionate attention is given to the next generation.” (The End…
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David Backes is…
The lopsided loss that unceremoniously dumped the USA Hockey Team from the 2014 Olympics was unfortunate (although being a fan of Kari Lehtonen, I confess to some ambivalence), but at…
Moths and Snails and Slugs
I recently critiqued the writing style in Swamplandia!; however, there was at least one passage that had a lasting impact on me: “Outside our porch had become a cauldron of…
Cheerios Appreciation Day…?
As we approach the first anniversary of Chick-fil-A appreciation day, when right-wingers boasted their bona fides by tweeting pics of fast-food orgies, another large corporation – General Mills – is…
Inundated with Similes
Karen Russell makes excessive use of similes throughout her book Swamplandia!, at least in the first half I completed. Some are clever or insightful, such as “We were watching the…
Don’t lose your PC badge in the Apocalypse
It was an interesting coincidence that The Simpsons aired their “survivalist” episode “Homer Goes to Prep School” the same night The Walking Dead was wrapping up its third season. I’m…
So I can get a Second Wife in Iowa?
The renewed debates on gay marriage have uncovered a desire by some to relegate (or promote, as Rick Perry would characterize it) marriage to a states’ rights issue, namely that…
Reading “Cholera”
Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, like Midnight’s Children, was a long, hard slog, especially for one with a glacial reading pace. The text lives in thick…
Changing Places
E-books, tablets, iPads, they are flipping the concept of an ending. With DVDs and Blu-rays and VOD, all movies now have trackers, slide bars, countdowns, to tell you when the…
More Borges
A few lines from Borges’ “The Shape of the Sword,” quoted below, have an eerily similar quality to a recently cited line from Midnight’s Children: “Whatsoever one man does, it…