I want to thank everyone for your movie suggestions. As of today, you'd recommended more than 500 different titles, of which I'd seen fewer than 200 — so I've got some work to do updating the bottomless Netflix queue.
Thanks also for the many suggested additions to the blogroll. I've bookmarked more than 70 of these, so look for some upcoming revisions to the list on your right.
(I probably won't be adding My Neighbors Are Hoors to the blogroll, but I was grateful for the link since, like everyone, I've always wondered what it would be like to live upstairs from a Scottish brothel.)
Disagreement, John Courtney Murray said, is an achievement. I'm not quite sure that we've achieved disagreement in our "taxation is theft" thread, but this latest mostly civil go-round (Round No. 3,948 or so) is at least distinguished for being, for once, on topic. Such robust, feisty discussions are what democracy looks like. Thanks to Scott and everyone else for playing along.
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Fundraiser. One word. The Associated Press Stylebook has finally caught up with the standard usage in the nonprofit/philanthropic world since … well, for as long as there have been fundraisers.
I'm even happier about this than I was last year, when the AP finally conceded that "teenager" was one word.
Next, I hope, AP and Webster's will acknowledge that a "hotline" is not simply a line that is hot. Newspaper references to "hot lines" are jarring and odd. Insisting on keeping this as two words requires an additional definition for the adjective "hot" that would capture this sense, and the English language affords no such definition. Hotline is a single term for a single thing and should be a single word — as is the practice for nearly every operative hotline.
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Via TBogg (a while ago): "10 reasons why gay marriage should be illegal."
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Adam Gopnik discusses C.S. Lewis in The New Yorker in "Prisoner of Narnia."
In a recent post I compared Lewis' abstract and inhuman The Problem of Pain with his far superior — and less smugly certain — A Grief Observed. The latter, I wrote, "has become one of those books that people give to others who are dealing with grief and suffering. Nobody does that with The Problem of Pain — that would be cruel."
Gopnik makes a similar comparison. Regarding Pain he writes, "This kind of apologetic is better at explaining colic than cancer, let alone concentration camps." By contrast, he says, Grief is "one of the finest books written about mourning."
Lewis, without abandoning his God, begins to treat him as something other than a dispenser of vacuous bromides. “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think,” he wrote, and his faith becomes less joblike and more Job-like: questioning, unsure — a dangerous quest rather than a querulous dogma. Lewis ended up in a state of uncertain personal faith that seems to the unbeliever comfortingly like doubt.
Gopnik illuminates an odd contradiction in Lewis' life and writing. Lewis is revered by American evangelicals primarily because of his apologetics and arguments — the cold logic of his case for "Mere Christianity." Yet his own conversion, and his own faith, was formed less by such logic than by the numinous experience of something transcendent — what he called simply "joy." He seemed to think that the rational arguments of Mere Christianity provided grounds for others to convert, yet his own experience had more to do with something Roger Waters described, "When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse / Out of the corner of my eye."
Gopnik appreciates the joyfulness of Lewis' Narnia stories. They are Lewis' best books, he says, and the clearest example of his unresolved tension between didactic logic and transcendent joy. The books occasionally stumble, Gopnik says, because "[Lewis] is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or, at least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just what it’s supposed to say."
Metaphor is the stuff of art, but it can also be frightening. After all, as Lewis might have said, it isn't a tame lion.
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"Why the hell not?" That's the question on Kinky Friedman's "Kinky for Governor 2006" site.
Sen. Joe Biden (D-MBNA) has apparently asked himself the same question about running for president, concluding that "Nothing tells me I can't." So now we know that Joe doesn't read blogs.
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Nick Cave… dark and creepy. You're a bi-polar
genius, with equal passion for the most
degrading aspects of humanity, as well as the
beauty & wonder of God and Heaven.
Which fucked-up genius composer are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
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From "Journalism, R.I.P." by Marty Kaplan over at the Huffington Post:
All the media can do is cover tactics, politics, the melodrama of thrust-and-parry. The rare reporters who have attempted to create a useful scorecard are battling their weasel-minded editors’ insistence on a bizarre postmodern notion of balance. You know the CYA drill: if you say a good word about Darwin, ya gotta juxtapose it with some intelligent design whackball’s counterquote; if you say Cheney lied about the Saddam connection to 9/11, you’ve still got to dredge up every nutjob’s assertion that the Atta meeting in Prague can’t be disproved.
"Bizarre Postmodern Notion of Balance" would be a great band name.
I wish it was a band name, then I could buy the band's T-shirt and wear it to work to tick off my weasel-minded editors.
(Then again, maybe BiPomoNoBa should be the name of the first album from the band "CYA Drill," whose T-shirt I would also gladly wear.)
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