Image from Poltergeist
I am pleased that Jason Blake, who teaches English at the University of Ljubljana, is becoming a regular contributor to this website. As an English speaker living in Slovenia, Jason is particularly sensitive to questions of language. In the following essay he triggers memories for me when he talks about how television, which [...]
Gustave Dore, Don Quixote
An e-reader has entered our family. Here’s how it happened.
My son Toby is studying for his English Ph.D preliminaries and wanted to spend a month reading 19th century British works in the family Maine cottage. He was accompanied by his girlfriend Candice, who is writing qualifying essays for her dissertation. There wasn’t [...]
Sometimes, it seems, we have to be deprived of literature to learn how powerful it is and how much we need it. Yesterday a colleague wrote about a former Chinese student of hers who, along with other Young Pioneers, discovered a secret treasure trove of books from the west during the dark days of the [...]
Sports Saturday
This past week my novelist friend Rachel Kranz was visiting after having busted out of the World Series of Poker tournament in Las Vegas. She made it to Day 4 (out of 9), which was pretty good considering that she has only been playing for three years. Still she was upset, as good competitors [...]
Christopher Hitchens
I confess to bristling when I hear the name Christopher Hitchens. The intellectual provocateur has been in the news recently, first for publishing his memoirs and second for contracting throat cancer. Although he is smart and well read, he has always struck me as a self-righteous intellectual bully, one who is more interested in [...]
Sports Saturday
I’m still trying to process the Ghana and Brazil defeats and will write about the World Cup in the next two Friday posts. For the moment, I’ll take a breather and turn to tennis.
Trust Wimbledon, the classiest of the tennis tournaments, to work poetry into the occasion. I wrote last year about how the [...]
Film Friday
There were no good adult movies in town last weekend so Julia and I went to see Toy Story III. Any superlatives thrown Pixar’s ways are well deserved. Toy Story III is a gem.
Like any good children’s story, it articulates a number of basic childhood fears, especially that of being abandoned, and then creates an [...]
Soledad Villamil (Irene), Ricardo Darin (Esposito)
Film Friday
Warning: The following essay contains spoilers.
Today I sing the praises of The Secret in Their Eyes, the Juan Jose Campanella film from Argentina that won the 2009 Foreign Film Oscar. It is more than a gripping film about investigating a murder, although it is also that. It is a [...]
