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The Discipline We Demand, The Price We Pay
The idea that people in Western society are extraordinarily disciplined may be surprising. Yet few societies have ever asked for as much discipline as ours. It’s a burden not everyone can bear. For these people, the freedom of liberal society is a literal hell, and the help of the welfare state just another ball-and-chain.
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Midnight Run
Charles Grodin displays immense actorly patience, letting you warm to his character oh so slowly. His blank, backward-staring gaze – not De Niro’s fire, humor and despair – dominate Midnight Run. Then come the moments when he confiscates “counterfeit” bills, slams the train door on De Niro, and turns out, gloriously, to be a pilot.…
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How to Think About…the Trump Indictments
Our times seem to demand partisanship. While there is very little to be for (Biden/Trump anyone?), there is a great deal to actively hate. It is a situation that makes partisanship easy. Nor is it easy to resist the demands of partisans, loaded as they are with the undeniable proof of the sins of their…
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The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
As straightforward an account of the problem of transformative experience as you will ever find, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar tells the tale of man who, in the experience of acquiring a difficult skill, finds his preferences and values so changed that his original purpose for wanting the skill no longer applies. Children’s books,…
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It’s Quieter in the Twilight
Fifteen billion miles from Earth, the Voyager spacecraft glide outward into the vast of interstellar space. They are still working, still communicating, but with power levels in a long, slow decline toward final dysfunction. While in Pasadena, a dozen or so aging engineers, programmers and scientists – the sort of people one NEVER sees on…
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Hello Boredom, My Old Friend
The one ill no one would expect in our society is boredom. Our lives might not be good, but surely they are too frenetic and occupied to make boredom a problem. Yet people are bored and the evidence is everywhere – not least in the immense value we place on entertainment and distraction. What boredom…
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A Tale of Two Doctorow’s
Without planning or malice aforethought, I found myself reading books by two Doctorow’s – E.L. and Cory – at the same moment. This felt rather like a literary Mr. Shuffle (where two songs randomly played off my Apple Playlist happen to have some odd relationship). There is, after all, nothing to tie their work together.…
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The Story of a Life: The Novel and Biography
If novels are the essential artistic expression of transformative choice and decision-making, biography (auto and non) often has similar interests. Reading The Story of a Life, Russian/Ukranian Konstantin Paustovsky’s very literary autobiography is a reminder of how much biography may resemble the novel both in ethical purpose and literary form. After all, the novel is…
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The Eight Mountains
The journey from book to movie is arduous and fraught. It is exceedingly rare for a movie to flatly exceed its source (e.g. The Godfather) and perhaps even less common for the movie to be a perfect distillation of the novel. The Eight Mountains is that. It brings every scene and every character to life…
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Annie Hall
As in most great movie romances, the lovers in Annie Hall do not end up together. Jane Austen may assure us that well-suited, rational lovers can live with as much chance of happiness together as it is possible to have, but we tend to believe that the essence of great romance is in its loss.…
We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational
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