“Have you tried not being a blogwatch?”

Apparently this is the cussin’ blogwatch. Makes sense. I’m in no fit mood.

Burke to Kirk defends the agrarians (and manages not to cuss). If you take the agrarians as an aesthetic movement, that’s certainly better than taking them as a political one… but it still seems a little too much of a muchness, like those pomo art pieces that win the Turner Prize. A rejection aesthetic that thinks it’s a recovery aesthetic. Not that I would actually know, since I am deeply uninformed on this subject and have only my rough impressions to go by, so take this with even more salt than usual.

Relapsed Catholic finds proof that Christopher Hitchens can still, occasionally, score a point (last para.).

The Rat quotes an excellent bit of The Counterlife; fans of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men may be reminded of one of my favorite scenes from his run, in the issue “Some Angels Falling”….

I’m only ten minutes into the Beckett on Film version of Endgame, and it is already terrific. I only really know three SB plays well enough to have an opinion on them; Godot is good, Krapp’s Last Tape is really desperately not my thing–too much a stunt, but Endgame is my favorite. (What an odd word to use to describe a Beckett play.) You want to be enticed to it, read Harold Bloom’s chapter on Beckett in The Western Canon.

UPDATE: Have watched whole thing now. It’s really, really excellent. Stars Michael Gambon and David Thewlis, thus proving to me that the Harry Potter franchise really does know how to pick (adult) actors. They were both ferocious. Seriously, you should see this.