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…
Me Read Slow…
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is one of those books that sat unread on my bookshelf for years and years. Admittedly, I read the first few pages several times and then…
The Wisdom of Tobolowsky
Stephen Tobolowsky, in his new book The Dangerous Animals Club, has a great comment on drug use that really deconstructs our fascination with the practice – “[D]rugs create [an] ……
Pull a Pappy
“People like that reform. Maybe we should get us some.” Truer words have never been spoken in a campaign. In this case, Governor Pappy O’Daniel is trailing challenger Homer Stokes…
Meta-ambivalence
Creating a sense of ambivalence within a show is generally a quality of a good show, with good writing, good acting, etc. But what about meta-ambivalence? In “The Walking Dead,”…
Zombie Supreme Court
Over the years, we as a culture have expounded much on the impending Zombie Apocalypse. But one consequence I fear we have not fully appreciated is the effect on the…
If you had a President Romney…
A spokesperson for the Romney campaign recently said, regarding the protests and violence in the Middle East, “…if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a different situation…” Romney…