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Tuesday, January 14, 2003
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Old Words on War Stirring a New Dispute at Berkeley: "In an unusual showdown over freedom of expression, university officials have refused to allow a fund-raising appeal for the Emma Goldman Papers Project to be mailed because it quoted Goldman on the subjects of suppression of free speech and her opposition to war. The university deemed the topics too political as the country prepares for possible military action against Iraq. In one of the quotations, from 1915, Goldman called on people "not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them." In the other, from 1902, she warned that free-speech advocates "shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next-door neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open." Berkeley officials said the quotations could be construed as a political statement by the university in opposition to United States policy toward Iraq. Candace S. Falk, the director of the project and author of the appeal, acknowledged that the excerpts were selected because of their present-day resonance. But Dr. Falk said they reflected Goldman's views, not the university's policies."
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Wednesday, January 01, 2003
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Sunday, December 29, 2002
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Who's Afraid Like Virginia Woolf?: "Interweaving flashbacks from Woolf's life as she was writing "Mrs. Dalloway" with scenes from the lives of Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a Southern California housewife and mother in 1951, and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a New York book editor living in contemporary Greenwich Village, their stories blend into a lofty, mystical theme and variations on Woolf's novel... Clear eyed and austerely balanced... magnificently written and acted. "
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Saturday, December 28, 2002
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Thursday, December 19, 2002
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Untypically, a Rockefeller Tells the Story of His Life: "David Rockefelle, at age 87, has become the first in three generations of Rockefellers to publish an autobiography, breaking a century-long habit of fierce privacy instilled in his clan by his grandfather. "Memoirs," a candid account of Mr. Rockefeller's life at the busy intersection of global banking, family business and unofficial diplomacy, made its debut from Random House yesterday."
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Monday, December 16, 2002
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The Never-Ending Wrong June 1977 - Katherine Anne Porter - "For several years in the early 1920s when I was living part of the time in Mexico, on each return to New York, I would follow again the strange history of the Italian emigrants Nicola Sacco a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti a fishmonger, who were accused of a most brutal holdup of a payroll truck, with murder, in South Braintree, Massachusetts, in the early afternoon of April 15, 1920. They were tried before a Boston court and condemned to death about eighteen months later."
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US historian stripped of gun book prize: "A US historian whose book on the origins of gun culture caused a furore has been stripped of a prestigious prize after being accused of "unprofessional and misleading work". Columbia University announced that its trustees had voted to rescind the Bancroft prize awarded last year to Michael A Bellesiles for his book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. "
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Wednesday, December 11, 2002
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A Terrifying Video Becomes a Best Seller: "ANSON W. SCHLOAT, the president of Human Relations Media, has an unexpected hit on his hands, a 26-minute video called "Dying High: Teens in the ER," which has become the hot teaching tool in Westchester County."
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Thursday, December 05, 2002
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No more going it alone for Uncle Sam: The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the 21st Century By Charles Kupchan. "claims American primacy in global politics will end before the decade is out. The transition to a multipolar world is the paramount issue of international relations, but recent events (read: war on terrorism) only obfuscate it. If the US is wise, it will "design" a liberal world order to accommodate rising powers such as Europe and China. But if America "defaults" and remains a "great power adrift," the consequences will be dire: an aggressive China and Japan; a resurgent Russia; a remilitarized Europe; and the hungry, angry masses of the developing world."
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Monday, December 02, 2002
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Arguing That Historians Can Be Scientists, Too: THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY How Historians Map the Past, By John Lewis Gaddis " the author of several distinguished books on the cold war, both pays homage to Bloch (and with more conditional admiration, to the British historian E. H. Carr) and addresses the challenge of postmodernism. He does all of this in an urbane and eloquent little volume that, in its way, might even be what Bloch himself would have written had he lived."
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Seeking a Vision of Truth, Guided by a Higher Power: "I believe creativity is a votive gift, presented arbitrarily by the hand of God, and those who possess it are simply its vessel... I also had to learn that the gift or obsession or neurosis that compelled me to write was one that required a discipline that did not allow exceptions"
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Saturday, November 30, 2002
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'One World': The Moral and Practical Challenges of Globalization: "Peter Singer's timely and thoughtful book, ''One World: The Ethics of Globalization.'' A professor of bioethics at Princeton University and one of the most provocative philosophers of our time, Singer writes, ''How well we come through the era of globalization (perhaps whether we come through it at all) will depend on how we respond ethically to the idea that we live in one world.'' "
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Wednesday, November 27, 2002
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What Did Poe Know About Cosmology? Nothing. But He Was Right.: "Departing from conventional wisdom of the day, which saw the universe as static and eternal, Poe insisted that it had exploded into being from a single "primordial particle" in "one instantaneous flash." "From the one particle, as a center," he wrote, "let us suppose to be irradiated spherically -- in all directions -- to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space -- a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.""
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Monday, November 25, 2002
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'Reversible Errors': Presumed Guilty: "''Reversible Errors,'' the latest addition to the Turow oeuvre, may well offer us the richest blend yet. At the center of ''Reversible Errors'' is a confession made by a suspect, Rommy Gandolph, that results in his conviction in a murder case. The plot of the novel moves along on two converging tracks: the events of 1991 leading up to Gandolph's conviction, and the events of 2001 involving his new lawyer's attempt to save him from imminent execution."
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A Pig Returns to the Farm, Thumbing His Snout at Orwell: "An American novelist has written a parody of "Animal Farm," George Orwell's 1945 allegory about the evils of communism, in which the exiled pig, Snowball, returns to the farm and sets up a capitalist state, leading to misery for all the animals. The book, "Snowball's Chance" by John Reed, is being published this month by Roof Books, a small independent press in New York. And the estate of George Orwell is not happy about it. "
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Saturday, November 23, 2002
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Shooting Magda, by Joshua Sobol: "Shooting Magda tells the story of Samira (Robin Kacyn), a young Palestinian woman who has fallen in love with an Israeli law student and whose life is now being captured by an Israeli film crew. Benesh (Brad Schwartz), the film's director, has helped Samira draft a semi-autobiographical script but, as budget issues force a marathon, 24-hour shoot, differences of vision -- both personal and national -- begin to arise. "
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Monday, November 18, 2002
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British Star Speaks Up for 'Quiet American': "Greene's story, about a middle-aged British correspondent in Saigon who loses his very much younger Vietnamese girlfriend to a seemingly naïve American aid worker (played by Brendan Fraser), casts a harsh light on well-intentioned United States meddling in Indochina that led to bloodshed and war. So the days after Sept. 11, when the United States and the world were rallying around the American flag, seemed an inopportune time to release such a film. Why the film was still being delayed a year later puzzled Sir Michael [Caine].... The Quiet American" premiered at Toronto in September and not only drew a standing ovation but also spawned a series of glowing reviews about Sir Michael's performance that overnight made him among the front-runners for an Academy Award nomination. "
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Thursday, November 14, 2002
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In the middle of 12th century | csmonitor.com: ""Baudolino" is a richly rewarding novel, as satisfying as it is stimulating. War and peace, belief and skepticism, false dreams and true, the pleasures of storytelling, and the mysteries of love: Eco handles these themes with an exhilarating blend of profundity and lightness. Long though it is, this a novel that keeps getting better, gathering irresistible force as it sweeps toward its brilliantly inevitable conclusion."
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Guardian - Interview with Michael Moore he says, the money is about more than status. He leans close. "Back home we call it fuck-you money. OK? What that means is, the distributor of the film can't ever say to me, 'Don't you dare say this in the interview or you better change that in the movie because if you don't, you're not going to get another movie deal.' Because I already have my home and my family taken care of, and enough money from this film and book to make the next film, I'm able to say, 'Fuck you.' No one in authority can hold money over me to get me to conform."
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Update on 'Arming America' - The Nation: "Michael Bellesiles, the historian accused of research falsification in his book Arming America, a study of gun culture, announced on October 25 that he was resigning from Emory University, citing a "hostile environment" [see Jon Wiener, "Fire at Will," November 4]. His resignation, effective at the end of the year, came the very afternoon that Emory released the report of a three-person external board that had been asked to review some of the charges.... if Bellesiles is right in his reply, then those distinguished historians are guilty of some of the same sins they accuse him of committing: suppressing inconvenient evidence, spinning the data their way, refusing to follow leads that didn't serve their thesis. "
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Wednesday, November 13, 2002
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Silver swindle?: "hallmarked Sterling silver jewellery (925 fineness) being hawked at major US retail outlets and even prominent jewellers is probably little better than stainless steel... nearly everything clung to his magnet for dear life. Sterling silver doesn't do that."
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Saturday, November 09, 2002
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Salon | The respectable cult: "The respectable cult A new book asks why Christian Science has gotten away with the kind of paranoid, secretive practices that usually push religions into the kook bin. "
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Friday, November 08, 2002
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The unlikely career of one of American's most loved poets | csmonitor.com: "Lucille Clifton is often surprised by the reception she gets from audiences. In September, at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Ms. Clifton received two standing ovations -- the first for simply walking onstage. "I don't understand it," she says without any pretense. "I just try to write clearly and directly. I try to appeal to the whole human." "
they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and I keep on remembering
mine
["why some people be mad at me sometimes"]
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The Saudis' Brand of Islam and Its Place in History: "THE TWO FACES OF ISLAM The House of Saud From Tradition to Terror By Stephen Schwartz" The 4,000 members of the Saudi ruling family are, as he puts it, "a vast mafia of princely parasites." He holds the Western oil companies, especially the Aramco partners and "the American political and media elites that have served them," responsible for "the continuation of dishonesty and injustice in Arabia." Contrary to the standard view of him, Mr. Schwartz writes, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Wahhabi extremism and actually represents "the pluralist face of Islam."
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Friday, November 01, 2002
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The New York Review of Books: Love in a Time of Revolution: review By Stephen Kinzer of The Country Under My Skin: A Memory of Love and War by Gioconda Belli. "Belli has written the first literary memoir by a Sandinista woman. It tells two stories. One is about a rich girl in a poor country who was carried away by political and physical passion. The other is an account of what went on behind the public façade of the Sandinista regime. They merge easily. Belli's progress through her various love affairs mirrors Nicaragua's history during the same period. "
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Thursday, October 24, 2002
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Films With War Themes Are Victims of Bad Timing: "After Sept. 11 the wait was significantly longer for several independent films... Among the independents in limbo were "The Quiet American" and the dark military comedy "Buffalo Soldiers." Their already provocative themes became even more so after the attacks and the war in Afghanistan, and distributors fretted that audiences would hardly be in the mood for such sobering offerings... the film made moviegoers uncomfortable because its title character, a charismatic intelligence officer played by Brendan Fraser, sponsors terrorist acts that kill scores of innocent Vietnamese. "There will be people who are sensitive about seeing the American point of view presented as less than sympathetic," said Sydney Pollack, a producer of the movie. "
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Saturday, September 14, 2002
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Wednesday, September 04, 2002
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch: UMSL still plans to open arts center next year: "The departure of its executive director has left the nearly finished performing arts center at the University of Missouri at St. Louis without a staff, an operating budget and a schedule of events.... A big setback for the center has been the state of Missouri's refusal so far to produce the $1 million in operating funds UMSL had been counting on to help plug the building's projected annual operating deficit of $1,245,000."
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Give WU a first-class performing arts center: "Washington University is the richest educational institution in the region. Its endowment (more than $4 billion before the stock market tanked) consistently ranks among the Top 10 for universities in the nation. It has a wealthy alumni base whose members give generously when called on. Its building projects provide seemingly nonstop work for construction companies. One would expect the university to have a performing arts center to match its business school, its law school and its other fine facilities. One would be sorely disappointed in that expectation. Many suburban high schools in the area have better setups."
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Friday, August 23, 2002
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Scene of the Crime (Gene Santoro): "Everyone knows what happened thirty-seven years ago when Bob Dylan fronted an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival, which is why August 3 saw 100 scribes from all over the country merging into a crowd of 10,000"
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Wednesday, July 03, 2002
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Sex as a Cosmic Joke, as Demons Are Routed: "[Margaret Cho's] writing is exceptionally lean and accompanied by body language as honed as her verbal delivery. ... She is also a formidable character comic who brings a refined sense of caricature to voices that range from a macho man to an insufferably chirpy colonic hydrotherapist. But her greatest creation is her mother, a proper, devoted know-it-all who refers to herself as Mommy and who delivers her unlikely pronouncements in a half-choked broken English with an oracular pomposity. Ms. Cho's most damning humor is reserved for racism and the insidious stereotyping of Asian-Americans as passive, agreeable servants. "
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Monday, July 01, 2002
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'follow the reader' in global giveaway with online tracking "random acts of literary kindness, leaving books in public places for strangers to find and then tracking the book's fate online. ..What started a year ago in Kansas City, Mo., as a way to share books for free has grown into a virtual community of book releasers and finders who would love a world littered with free literature. More than 10,500 people, who call themselves "bookcrossers," have been united by a love of reading, serendipity and sleuthing. Setting books free is being likened to a modern-day message in a bottle. By word of mouth, the Web site BookCrossing.com -- which doesn't charge a fee or accept advertising -- has become the nation's fourth most popular online reading site"
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Wednesday, June 05, 2002
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Quarantine
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
Eavan Boland, Against Love Poetry;
also see her essay at W. W. Norton Poet's Workshop
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Monday, May 27, 2002
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An Academic Ready to Take the Plunge Into Novelistic Success: "Stephen L. Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, tall, slender, elegantly dressed in his beautifully cut sports jacket and silk tie, is so good he could be boring were he not the author of one of the season's biggest novels, "The Emperor of Ocean Park," a legal thriller about black upper class America, to be published next month.... [In his first book] "Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby"... he criticized affirmative action in college admissions for mainly benefiting middle class blacks and being "racial justice on the cheap," enabling whites not to confront poverty and racism directly. He criticized the idea that it promotes diversity, saying that one black cannot represent all. But he supports affirmative action as a device for combating inequality.
"
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Saturday, May 25, 2002
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'Ralph Ellison': Unfinished Business: "RALPH ELLISON Emergence of Genius. By Lawrence Jackson. - Jackson beautifully contextualizes Ellison, whether in Oklahoma, Alabama or New York, where he finally fled in 1936" - the first biography of Ellison
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Pilfering from Publishers: Have You Hugged an Indie Press Today?: "Borders Group Inc., the country's second-largest book retailer, has told book publishers that they have to attend expensive "marketing seminars" if they want to see themselves on store shelves. Moreover, they're putting the foxes of the publishing world in charge of the book store farm. According to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, Borders' new plan is modelled on one that's used by grocers. The chain will choose publishers to co-manage each of 250 categories in their stores. These "captains" will be involved in determining which titles will be carried, displayed, and marketed, says Borders. Random House, for example, has been made "captain" of books for younger readers. " - sounds like it's time for a boycott of Borders.
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Thursday, May 23, 2002
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The War Is Long Over, but Vietnam Continues: Review of "Vietnam Passage" - "through unfamiliar and revealing archival film and photographs. These focus on the Vietnamese experience of the war and its aftermath, including the country as it appears today, looking remarkably capitalistic but still exotic. The stories include wartime tragedy and triumph but also the less dramatic process of rebuilding families and lives in altered circumstances."
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Wednesday, May 22, 2002
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A New Imprint Is Dedicated to Black Readers: "Harlem Moon will be different in that all its books will be stylishly designed trade paperbacks rather than hardcovers. This will make them economically accessible to more readers, book publishers having awakened only relatively recently to the fact that there's a growing black population ravenous for reading material relevant to them. The new imprint will also publish a line of black classics that are now out of print, many in the public domain."
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Monday, May 20, 2002
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Friday, May 10, 2002
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Pavarotti and Borrowed Time: "for at least 15 years, Mr. Pavarotti has been woefully undisciplined. Though he still did some remarkable singing, he coasted on his popularity and blithely counted on the intense work he put in during his early career to keep him going. Joan Sutherland, his closest colleague in opera, has been hinting publicly for several years that he should retire. In addition to chronic struggles with his weight, he has grappled in recent years with knee and hip surgery that sapped his stamina and hampered his mobility. Last season at the Met he sang some unfortunate performances as Radames in "Aida." He had to be propped up, not just musically but physically, with arms and stools, by the rest of the cast....
He would spin one phrase with pliant bel canto grace, then stun you in the next with a viscerally powerful, dusky-toned outburst. Another mark of Mr. Pavarotti's singing, less widely acknowledged, is the seemingly natural way he binds the round vowel and sputtering consonant sounds of the Italian language to the sounds of the voice. This is not just a matter of good diction but the essence of the Italian vocal heritage, of which he has been one of the best exponents, perhaps one of the last. That he learned the tradition so thoroughly is remarkable, considering that Mr. Pavarotti's early musical education was virtually nil. "
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Thursday, May 09, 2002
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Florida Footsteps of a Harlem Great: "Hurston was born in Alabama in 1891 but grew up in the central Florida town of Eatonville. It was an extraordinary place, incorporated and populated entirely by blacks, and her father served for a time as its mayor. The Hurston family lived on five acres dotted with orange, tangerine, grapefruit and guava trees. She later described the town as having "five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse." Eatonville was remarkably prosperous and free of racism. Living there as a child gave Hurston an experience that was close to unique among African-American writers, and it led her to focus on black achievement rather than oppression."
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Ellen Ullman / Programmer turned novelist talks about computers, writing and the world we live in: "Technology remains dynamic, with its own excitements and dangers. What has lost its luster is the market philosophy that invaded the tech world.... After about 10 or 15 years, most programmers move on to other things. I really do think that programming -- the intensely narrow, detail-of-the-problem viewpoint -- is not sustainable as one gains experience.... I don't think I can write both novels and code -- code is too hungry; it eats you up....
the more restricted range of interactions the robots provide will change the way children interact with other kids, other humans... [Quoting Turkle:] "Why get better and better at fooling people [into thinking these devices are alive] when we already have perfect companions -- other people?" "
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Wednesday, May 01, 2002
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The New Left, From Fiery to Fading: movie review - "A Grin Without a Cat" tells the story of the New Left, from the movement's birth as a byproduct of the Vietnam War to the ouster of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973....a work of extraordinary journalism, but it is also a work of deft and subtle poetry, visual (in the rhyming of gestures and shapes across images and sequences) as much as verbal. Mr. Marker is a great spectator as well as a great filmmaker.
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Tuesday, April 30, 2002
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'Desirable Daughters': The Cross-Culture Wars: " novel of grace and shrewd intellect, Bharati Mukherjee's most absorbing book to date. Tara serves as tour guide to her surprising family history, to her tangled relationships with her sisters -- one in Bombay, the other in Upper Montclair, N.J. -- and to the undeclared war of Westernized Indian women with their country's traditional concept of a wife. The marvel of ''Desirable Daughters'' is that even as its story flows into deeper and deeper pools of Indian history, religion and intrigue, it stays convincingly anchored in the wry, self-deprecating voice of a West Coast woman with a spiky, agnostic curiosity about the world, "
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Renegade View on Child Sex Causes a Storm: "Ms. Levine [argues]... that the fear of pedophilia is overblown and that the age of consent should be lowered in certain circumstances. Ms. Levine tries to separate what she sees as real risks-- H.I.V. infection, unwanted pregnancies and sexual violence -- from risks she calls exaggerated or even invented. She argues forcefully against abstinence-only education and what she sees as a pervasive tendency to view all manifestations of childhood sexuality as dangerous or disturbing."
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'The Horned Man': Fear of Blushing. In James Lasdun's novel, a feminist professor dreads that spontaneity could make him a criminal.... quick and addictive read. But it is also an evocative meditation on the male terror that a misstep might mean being first a creep, and then a criminal.
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Tuesday, April 23, 2002
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St. Louis Who'll step to the podium?: Hans Vonk's stepping down - "Of the 25 largest orchestras (in North America), over half have either installed a new music director this year, are in their final year of an old music director, or are actively searching"
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Wednesday, April 17, 2002
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Prime Palaver #3: Baen Free Library online - "It does not follow that simply because a copy is available for free that sales will therefore be hurt. In fact, they are more likely to be helped, for the simple reason that free copies-call them "samplers," if you will-are often the necessary inducement to convince people to buy something."
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Friday, April 12, 2002
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Vonk's role at Symphony may change: "Hans Vonk, music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, has asked to redefine his role with the orchestra because of health concerns, according to Symphony sources"
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Saturday, March 30, 2002
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Tuesday, March 26, 2002
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Improving His Average to One in 16: "When Randy Newman finally won an Academy Award for best original song on Sunday night, putting 16 nominations and 15 losses behind him, he couldn't resist a little mockery. "I don't want your pity," he teased, and went on to thank the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for giving him so many opportunities for humiliation. Receiving the award, for "If I Didn't Have You" from "Monsters, Inc.," was a capstone to a career that has followed, in its odd way, a classic trajectory: the brilliant bohemian iconoclast who ends up going back into the family trade"
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Saturday, March 23, 2002
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Friends and mortal enemies: "Michael Frayn is at the centre of a fierce controversy over his play, Copenhagen, based on the 1941 meeting between atomic scientists Niels Bohr, a Dane, and the German Werner Heisenberg. Newly released letters shed fresh light on an encounter which was to haunt both men for the rest of their lives " - very long essay
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'The Black Hearts of Men': Abolitionist Absolutists: "account of the relationship of four radical abolitionists ... a story of politics, religion, sin, guilt, passion, murder and expiation. It begins in innocence and good intentions and ends in bloodshed and madness. Frederick Douglass and James McCune Smith, two blacks, and John Brown and Gerrit Smith, two whites"
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Survivor and Humanist, Celebrating con Brio: "Rostropovich ... an ebullient survivor of Soviet repression, and a steadfast friend to artists ostracized by the system, ... his spirited conducting and his cello mastery. Known universally by his nickname, Slava, he is stunningly fit and active, crisscrossing the globe with little sleep but remembering with a watchmaker's precision the dates, addresses, details of where things happened and who said what to whom more than half a century ago."
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Sunday, March 17, 2002
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Killer Songs: "Simon Bikindi is Rwanda's most famous musician. He is also one of the country's most famous accused war criminals.... accused of inciting genocide with his songs. "
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'A Beautiful Mind' Meets Ugly Oscar Tactics: " John Nash says he is not an anti-Semite. He says he is not a homosexual. Nor, he says, did he try to conceal any of his deficiencies as a father or any humiliating episodes in an attempt to glamorize his life. To combat those rumors, Mr. Nash, a Nobel laureate whose triumph over schizophrenia is chronicled in the Oscar-nominated film "A Beautiful Mind," feels obliged to go on national television: he will appear on Sunday's edition of "60 Minutes.""
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Columbia Soothes The Dogs of War in Its English Dept.: "14 years since the outbreak of civil war in Columbia University's English department, a war that sent some professors scurrying for more congenial settings, turned feminists and multiculturalists against traditionalists and left a fifth of the permanent positions in the department unoccupied. "
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Friday, March 15, 2002
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BuzzFlash.com Interviews Michael Moore: "after September 11th, your publisher was going to deep-six the book unless you took out critical comments on Bush. You held firm. Is it true that the librarians of America came to your defense and saved the day? MICHAEL MOORE: That's what it looks like.... They are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. You know, they've had their budgets cut. They're paid nothing. Books are falling apart. The libraries are just like the ass end of everything, right?"
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Sunday, March 10, 2002
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Alamo Redux: A Mission Impossible: "The script for the film is being written by John Sayles, who a few years ago wrote and directed a contemporary Western called "Lone Star," in which the Anglo and Hispanic descendants of Texas pioneers quarrel over the continuing significance of the Alamo. At the end, one character decides that the best strategy is to simply "Forget the Alamo." By the time the inevitable dust-up over the new movie has died down, Mr. Sayles may wish he had ended up taking his own advice."
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Friday, March 08, 2002
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Beam Us Back, Scotty!: "the first season of the latest Trek vehicle, Enterprise,... takes Star Trek so far backward that it's like Buffy becoming a sex slave chained to a bed for the rest of her television career. ... the interplanetary politics seem to have been framed by Pat Buchanan. Though there are two token humans of color on the ship, humans are heavily coded as white and male. All the previous Star Trek series, over three decades, have been about becoming progressively more catholic, more aware of the astonishing diversity of the galaxy, the provincial limitedness of one's own assumptions and one's own potential to harm people who are different. The newest offering is a frank vehicle for white male suprematism and resentment. "
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Thursday, March 07, 2002
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Novelist Arundhati Roy Convicted of Contempt: "jailed Wednesday after the Supreme Court convicted her of criminal contempt for suggesting it was trying to ``silence criticism'' of its approval of a hydroelectric project."
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Jazz Diva Follows Sound of Her Roots: "Cassandra Wilson, the jazz singer.. talking about was home. "Mississippi," she said, "has the freest and meanest women in the world." Ms. Wilson, 46, grew up in Mississippi but has lived for the last 19 years in New York"
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Monday, February 25, 2002
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'Enemy Women': Odyssey in the Ozarks: "Paulette Jiles's first novel tells the story of southeastern Missouri during the Civil War, a place and a time when enemies were friends, friends were enemies and betrayal was common currency"
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Sunday, February 24, 2002
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THE MAN IN BLACK EXPOSES LIFE'S MANY SHADES OF GRAY: Johnny Cash at 70 - "two of his most famous albums .. in California's Folsom and San Quentin prisons in the late '60s. These recordings are daring, powerful masterpieces, emotional statements that manage to move even the most hardened proponent of harsh correctional facilities to a point where the prisoner regains a sense of humanity. Cash, who at his core is a true law-and-order guy, is also a human rights kind of guy. And the prison system back then, in his view, was in violation. "
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Friday, February 22, 2002
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Mark Twain on War and Imperialism: "The materials assembled here provide samples of his scathing satirical writings on imperialism, from an early satire on the government's plan to buy the island of St. Thomas through his last writings on the Philippines, China, South Africa, and Russia, and document his ten-year involvement with the Anti-Imperialist League."
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Wednesday, February 20, 2002
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Justices to Review Copyright Extension: "The Supreme Court agreed today to decide whether the 1998 law that extended the duration of existing copyrights by 20 years was constitutional. The court's action took the world of copyright holders and users by surprise and held the potential of producing the most important copyright case in decades."
Case Could Shift Balance in Debate on Public Domain: ""If those who defend the public interest in copyright can win this battle," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of information studies at the University of Wisconsin, "that means the Supreme Court will have once again clearly defined that copyright is supposed to work for the public and not a small set of corporations.""
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Tuesday, February 19, 2002
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SojoNet : Lord of the Rings review: "We think we wear the ring, but with use it wears us. Ok, so we all know the cliche "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." But do we recognize that it is not only the exercise of kings and presidents and mullahs, but also the power of one person, lording one's will over another?"
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Monday, February 18, 2002
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