Otto and Maria Jelinek had left Prague with their parents, settling in Canada when the Russians took over Czechoslovakia. They were scheduled to compete as members of the Canadian team in the pair skating event [at the 1962 World Figure Skating Championships, held in Prague]. According to Czechoslovakian law, every male citizen was required to serve in the army, and any male who had fled the country was still considered to be a citizen and subject to army subscription, and... Read more
aka my to-do list, am I right? Anyway, this is a request for help with three possible long-term projects. Email me at [email protected] if you have any thoughts. 1. What are the best novels you’ve read with depictions of attempts to make amends, or attempts to extend forgiveness? I’m looking for everything–botched attempts, ill-conceived attempts, gritted-teeth attempts, attempts that succeed beyond the penitent’s wildest dreams, attempts whose success only creates new problems, etc etc. Send me whatever comes to mind.... Read more
Sorry, Dad, but like have you forgiven your enemies? Your father and all of them? All his lifetime of hurt. I must have (grin). I don’t think about that now. more–via Wesley Hill Read more
I mean the interview itself is really neat, but check out the comments! The big question I was worried atheism wasn’t going to handle was how I had access to moral law. If eyes respond to light, ears to sound, etc, what is it that conscience responds to? I didn’t think the answer was “nothing in particular” or “cultural norms, which are themselves arbitrary” or something like that. I’d been a moral realist for a long time, thinking of it... Read more
“Photos of 1960s US Prison System Attempt to Show that Inmates Are Us”: Lyon’s images are an echo of an earlier time, a time when uniforms were white and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was doing time. But the photos also serve as a dark omen, of a prison-industrial complex that would only grow more hungry, more unjust, more powerful. “The prison changed me a lot, and not in the way I could have predicted,” Lyon said. “There is an expression... Read more
I continue to believe that since November is the month when Catholics especially remember our dead, I get to watch lots of horror flicks. DON’T JUDGE MY SPIRITUALITY. Also, I couldn’t help but notice that the first four of these movies include a scene with a woman peeing. They’re all doing slightly different things with it, but is Ladies Pee Too the signature of ’10s indie horror? If so, can we get a different signature? Contracted: A new-fledged lesbian with... Read more
Over the weekend I discovered a new artist: the Swiss-Haitian painter and sculptor Pascale Monnin. Monnin’s sculptures were what struck me most. She uses raku, a technique in which glazed clay is taken from the kiln and immediately plunged into water, creating cracks across the sculpture’s surface which are then filled with smoke and soot. So her faces have turquoise veins across their delicate pale skins, and the soft curves of nose and cheek are contrasted to the forking raku... Read more
Really fantastic: via TheShrillest Read more
So while everybody else was celebrating Scary Movie Season, I was mostly at AFI’s Noir City DC festival. This year the theme was “marriage” so you know that it was like they got chocolate in my peanut butter. Let’s start before the festival, though, with 99 Homes. The plot here is that evil developer Richard Carver (Michael Shannon) personally supervises the foreclosure of beleaguered working-class single father Dennis (Andrew Garfield). Then the rapacious rich man, who is named Rich Carver... Read more
is very generous: Now Tushnet has published her first novel, Amends, which is about a group of young alcoholics participating in a reality-TV series about rehab. Apart from their addiction, the six protagonists would seem to have little in common. They come from different backgrounds, have different personalities and tastes, and react to their new sobriety regime in very different ways. At its most sociological, the book is satire, providing the reader with miniature tableaux of contemporary campus culture, jock... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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