MOVIE MISTAKES now includes movie trivia. Some neat stuff in there. Read more

U.S. YOUTHS REBEL AT HARSH SCHOOL. Update to my “Casa by the Sea/subcontracting child abuse” post. Seriously, keep your eye on this stuff. Tracking the political ties in the US, especially, is something I’d love to assign a reporter to. Link via Matthew Yglesias. Read more

“But we must still consider a few other names and images for that perduring element that continues on after the act of sinning is over. For instance, the tradition speaks of a condition of bondage and imprisonment that the soul has brought upon itself by sinning–a view that seems especially convincing to raw experience. Once more we quote from the journals of Andre Gide, who knows this experience well: ‘The Evil One kidnaps us for his cause and puts us... Read more

THREE WAYS TO REMEMBER ON MEMORIAL DAY. I haven’t investigated any of these places, but the basic idea is great. I’ll also pitch the Special Ops Foundation yet again. Read more

THE BEST OF CRAIG’S LIST. Some of this is hilarious. “to the beautiful woman whose dog i drop-kicked this morning”… Via Kesher Talk. Read more

LARGE AND LINKALICIOUS post from Kesher Talk in re prospects for a liberal-democratic Palestine. Worth your time. Read more

READING RORTY IN TEHRAN: Finished Azar Nafisi’s new autobiography, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Highly recommended. Nafisi was a professor of English literature in Iran, who grew up before the Revolution; lived through the Ayatollah’s rise to power, the Iran/Iraq War, and the aftermath; taught an underground literature class for women; and recently immigrated to the US. The book would be fascinating for her life story alone. Her eye for detail and her sense of pacing (especially noticeable in the first... Read more

IF MY TEMPLATE IS ALL WEIRD AND FREAKY (or at least weirder and freakier than usual), blame Blogspot. Sigh. Read more

CALIFORNIA DREAMING: A ramble through my thoughts on American lit. Please don’t expect coherence–I’m all about the random shards of commentary today. For a while I’ve thought that the best and most American literature arose in opposition to the Enlightenment currents in American life and thought–the innocence/naivete, the exaltation of the powerful and good individual, the optimism and the rationalism. I’m trying to work out whether American literature is unusually obsessed with the Crucifixion (i.e. more obsessed than other national... Read more

THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY: I just started Josef Pieper’s Concept of Sin, and was reminded of this novella. The basic plot is, a young hothead gets mixed up with Aaron Burr and ends up on trial for treason. In the heat of the moment he exclaims, “D–n the United States!” (dashes in the original), incensing the judge, who sentences him to an unusual punishment: He must spend the rest of his life in a kind of floating house arrest,... Read more