An exhibit of photographs, called “Architecture of Silence – Cistercian Abbeys of France“
All posts by Phil
Leaving Everything Behind
Here’s a report of trash in the Arizona desert apparently left behind by would-be immigrants crossing the border. I gather the traffickers insist that no one take anything with them–no extra clothes, backpacks, or family photos. I keep thinking that only a few time and location details would need to change to make this an old story about slavery. This looks like evidence of a preparation for their exploitation. Who could defend this?
Many Voices
The MetaxuCafe is discussing and reporting on the PEN World Voices Festival 2008 with some good photos too. A couple notes from the top post: “[Salman] Rushdie is a Harry Potter fan.”
“Rushdie, Eco and Vargas Llosa now began batting The Count of Monte Cristo back and forth, debating whether or not such ‘bad writing’ as this can also be great writing. All three seemed to agree that bad writing could be great writing and that this often happens.”
A Bit of News with Linkage
I wasn’t much of a blogger last week, and I won’t be much of one this week. Part of my busyness will be preparing for Mother’s Day next Sunday. I have a beautiful, enchanting wife, a mother of four, who deserves better from me at every turn, and I want to tell her so next weekend. If I can get around to it.
Anyway, here are some links of potential interest.
“Just last week, The Capital Times, a 90-year-old daily newspaper in Madison, Wis., ended its print version and began publishing only online.” A strong business/technology magazine publisher is working that way too.
Kristen asks about books being made into movies in light of Prince Caspian’s release next week.
The creator of “Family Guy,” Seth MacFarlane, has signed deal with 20th Century Fox TV “that would make him the highest-paid writer-producer working in television.”
Patrick Kurp is reading A Step from Death by Larry Woiwode:
Some of the most moving pages I’ve read thus far in A Step from Death concern the late William Maxwell, the novelist who edited Woiwode’s early work at The New Yorker. They shared another bond: Both lost their mothers while they were still boys – a loss always at the heart of Maxwell’s fiction. When they first speak of the unhealed rupture in their lives, Maxwell begins, “To lose a mother at that age –,” and stops. Woiwode writes:
“It’s all he says, and we sit in the resonance you feel in the air after a church bell rings in the steeple next door, and then a tear slides from a corner of his eye – the right the most prone to spill – and although he has said it to me, I know he’s referring to himself, too, and his mother, who died when he was ten, and he doesn’t say a word more. We attend to the resonance like tuning forks vibrating at the same frequency. He is sixty, resilient, cheerful, the only person I know who can speak with joie de vivre while tears runs, but he’s never been able to accept her death.”
P. D. James on Modern Society
P.D. James discusses life in today’s world:
“Our society is now more fractured than I, in my long life, have ever known it.”
The isolation, she argued, flows from a fear of difference and is fed by the sense, common in our disparate communities, that engagement is not worth the risk.
“Increasingly,” she said, “there is a risk that we will live in ghettoes with our own kind.” Behind the disintegration was a spread of “pernicious” political correctness that made attempts at understanding harder.
“If, in speaking to minorities,” she added, “we have to weigh every word in advance in case, inadvertently, we give offence, how can we be at ease with each other, how celebrate our common humanity?”
…
“Look at those,” she says, pointing to the heavy bars on her windows. “This is how we live now. Behind bars in our own homes. I find it intimidating but I understand that it is sensible. Several of my friends have been mugged. Some of them quite horribly.”
The problem, she says, starts with the breakdown of the family and refusal of men to act like men. (via Books, Inq.)
Mr. Trust, I Presume?
Illinois man wants to change his name to ‘In God We Trust.’
Must I?
Must I be carried to the skies
On flowery beds of ease?
While others fought to win the prize,
And sailed through bloody seas?
Naipaul’s Way of Looking and Feeling
David Laskin reviews one of Naipaul‘s books.
Naipaul calls the book “an essay in five parts,” as if to impose some sort of unity or occasion on what is essentially a collection of musings on random irritants. The early success of his fellow countryman Derek Walcott, Flaubert’s exotic prose opera “Salammbô,” Gandhi’s mysterious hold over the soul of India — these are among subjects Naipaul swirls in his imagination like an after-dinner brandy. But in the end, the laureate leaves us more muddled than intoxicated.
Dunkin’ Donuts Sues Its Own
Here’s an article written by a unique Dunkin’ Donuts store owner in Brooklyn, NY. She’s unique b/c she’s a Jewish woman partnered with a Muslim immigrant. But they are trying to get out of the doughnut business b/c Dunkin’ is suing them.
Cindy Gluck says she wanted a store manager to have a 15% stake in the franchise. She made the offer, checked with corporate, learned it was against corporate policy, and withdrew the offer. Afterward, corporate sued for violation of policy.
Some believe this isn’t about the policy, but about immigration. Gluck says it’s about Dunkin’ Donuts wanting to run small owner-operators out of business in favor of multiple store owners.
Star Trek Medical Device
Maybe the crew of the Enterprise did travel back in time. Charles Q. Choi of LiveScience writes, “New handheld medical scanners coupled with regular cell phones resemble ‘Star Trek’ tricorders and could see what ails you with a push of a button.”