Last year I wrote this really scattershot, unsatisfying post about “The Beauty of Obedience,” rescuing obedience as a positive term and a category you’re allowed to care about. I recognize that that post was not the tightest thing I’ve ever written, and in fact, I’m still kind of flailing around trying to talk about what a positive vision of obedience might look like, but here are yet more extremely scattered thoughts. I’ve been thinking about that terrific phrase, “the mask... Read more
Joseph Skvorecky’s Two Murders in My Double Life basically does what it says on the tin. It’s two intertwined stories in two different genres, one per country. There’s a college satire set in Canada, full of bed-hopping and lady sleuths; and then there’s a dark, sad, realistic story of the aftermath of totalitarianism, in which a Czech newspaper publishes a list of those who informed during the Communist years. Hingeing the two tales together is an emigre professor whose students... Read more
for AmCon: Leave it to the Nazis to make charity posters into advertisements for power-worship. In the late 1930s the Nazi regime created a traveling exhibition which contrasted Fuhrer-approved artworks with “degenerate” works produced by modernists, New Objectivists, and other riffraff. The exhibition was a bizarre contrast to the book-burning and art-destroying we might expect from a totalitarian regime. Instead of preventing people from seeing the art at all, the Nazis encouraged them to view it—but sought to control the... Read more
Fantasist (and mackerel-snapper, if we’re counting) Tim Powers does high-concept tales in which hard-bitten characters struggle to learn to love one another and escape complex, unforgiving systems of magical dark forces. Last Call is probably my second-favorite of his fantasies of salvage–the greatest is Declare aka “the one where demons fight the Cold War”–and as I reread it I loved it even more than I did the first time around. The high concept this time is “war for succession among... Read more
Powerful stuff. Read more
Man writes article against internet-as-parish, fills it with links to intriguing websites: …It is unhealthy to have more co-religionist friends online than in your own parish. I have seen this happen to some converts who first encountered Orthodoxy online—an increasingly common phenomenon—and therefore naturally built their new identities around people and ideas from the Internet. The parish, characterized by creative chaos, is by definition a place to practice humility, patience, and brotherly love, and to be challenged by how others... Read more
celebrates: Why is this Sandwich Monday different from all other Sandwich Mondays? In honor of Passover, I introduced my non-Jewish colleagues to the wonders of the Passover lunch. It’s not the Seder meal, but what I might have brought to school for lunch back in the 1970s, when the affluent Jews of suburban New Jersey ate tasteless food to remind themselves that thousands of years ago, they didn’t have nice professional jobs like being an lawyer, or maybe a CPA.... Read more
I went to Stars on Ice last week and I loved it! But I really wish I could go to this show, on May 31: …American Ice Theatre’s goal is to make artistic skating and ice theatre accessible to everyone – both skaters and audiences. “It is a model that can extend the life of a skater and allow for more career opportunities. There are talented national and world level skaters that don’t make the Olympic team yet are beautiful... Read more
ehhhh image removed under penalty of law–look it up! via the extraordinary Monster Brains Read more
on white supremacy as a form of “I like thinking about it” addictive denial. All the racial stuff in this book is really fascinating. IMO this specific passage gains power from the cartoonishness of the black characters–they’re fantasy figures dancing through the sickened imaginations of the (also cartoony) white man–although at least one of the black characters in AFN is only as cartoonish as the whites. Anyway there’s so much in this passage about the nature of white racial fantasy,... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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