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Non-Nonfiction
Wednesday March 5, 2008
For the past two weeks now, I have been mulling over my pledge for this entry to discuss three recent major novels that I liked (and in the case of two, loved), but which also illustrate the narrative laziness that seems to characterize a lot of contemporary fiction. In case you’ve been racked with curiosity, they are...
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Our Bodies, Our Selves?
Tuesday March 4, 2008
"Bodies...The Exhibition" has come to Cincinnati, along with its usual train of controversy. Ever since the German anatomist, Gunther von Hagens, began marketing his plastination process for permanently preserving corpses, his work has attracted fierce criticism and equally dogged support.
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That Is the Question
Monday March 3, 2008
In the final moments of the German film, The Lives of Others, the former Communist Minister of Culture, Bruno Hempf, makes a provocative speech to the playwright Georg Dreyman. (Hempf had bugged Dreyman’s apartment back during the bad old days.) “You’ve not written since the Wall fell?” Hempf asks. “That’s not good. After all our country invested in you...."
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Conservative Elegies
Friday February 29, 2008
Within just a few weeks of each other, America has lost two of its finest sons—William F. Buckley, Jr. and E. Victor Milione—both seminal figures in the modern revival of political and intellectual conservatism. It may seem odd that in a blog devoted to the relationship between art and faith that I would choose to eulogize two figures from the realm of political conservatism. But I have my reasons.
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On The Wire
Thursday February 28, 2008
“They’re dead where it doesn’t count,” says Fletcher, a newspaperman, in an episode of the current and last season of HBO’s The Wire, which I saw recently. I don’t subscribe to HBO, so I was watching at a friend’s. And I was jumping ahead; since discovering the series on Netflix six months ago, I’ve spent the winter catching up with Seasons 1-4, which portray the tragic complexity of a decaying industrial city. In this case, it’s Baltimore, but it could be anywhere.
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Current Issue
Issue 57
The sculpture of Richard Serra, Franz Wright on the Gospels, interview with Ron Hansen, fiction by Pinckney Benedict
Good Letters: The Image Blog
