Night City was like a deranged experiment in Social Darwinism designed by a bored researcher with one finger permanently on the fast-forward button.–William Gibson, second sentence of Neuromancer, entirely from memory thus perhaps misremembered. The point is that you could remember it if you wanted to! Read more

THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE: I just finished this novel, in which the Axis powers win WWII. It takes a very long time to figure out what’s up here. For a while it just feels like, Yeah, this is an interesting psychological picture of how Americans would have reacted if we’d lost, but what else you got? It doesn’t feel that way once you finish it. My first thought, on slowly closing the book, was whether TMITHC would be... Read more

MAY THE FOURS BE WITH YOU: (…Sorry.) Amy Welborn tagged me for a meme I’d been avoiding precisely because I had no interesting answers. So instead, I will craft a hand-woven, unique meme just for my fabulous readers. Because it’s all about me, me, meme. Four movies I could watch over and over:The Last Unicorn. Love is regret. Sublimity, resignation, and the one character every child should know: Molly Grue. Grosse Pointe Blank. “You’re a handsome devil. What’s your name?”... Read more

The weight of my cross began to make itself felt very soon after my Baptism. During my earlier life as a gay Christian I had agreed to help a friend, Chris, establish a small monthly newsletter magazine called Malchus. Malchus, in the Gospel of St. John, was the high priest’s slave who lost his ear to St. Peter’s sword when the crowd arrived to arrest Jesus. Further, St. Luke’s Gospel records that, though Malchus is not named, Jesus healed his... Read more

POETRY THURSDAY: Jorie Graham, “Mind.” The slow overture of rain, each drop breaking without breaking into the next, describes the unrelenting, syncopated mind. [clipped] Read more

PLAYING PIANOS FILLED WITH FLAMES: In Ramallah tonight, in the coffee shops and falafel stands of the city, its people are talking over politics, attempting to make sense of a political reality where certitude lies only in that all is changed utterly. Tonight, as in previous nights it had been Fateh’s, it was now the turn of Hamas’s supporters to parade through the streets after dinner, under green flags and to shouts of Allahu Akbar. Today, the stock market declined... Read more

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.–Wilde; via Ratty. Apply to current events as needed. Read more

PSA: “How do I tell if I’m an alcoholic?” Forthright and sensible; from a LiveJournal with a lot of recent posts about the James Frey mess, probably easiest to find if you scroll down from here. Read more

Your coming back to me is against the blogsAnd that’s what I’ve got to watch… The Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club has an enormous roundup of Deus Caritas Est news and views. Via Amy Welborn. Colby Cosh: Wonderful meth-war news from Iowa: threatening pharmacists and browbeating their customers has led to a reduction in the local supply of pseudoephedrine, and meth labs are closing left and right, with a corresponding drop in burn-centre traffic. The big winner? Mexican drug cartels, according... Read more

Yet eros and agape–ascending love and descending love–can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized. Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other,... Read more