I’m reading Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, about a New Jersey supernerd from the Dominican Republic, his family and the Fukú Americanus (“the Curse and the Doom of the New World”) that plagues them. Díaz’s prose is like machine-gun fire– quick and lethal– and his narrative switches back…
Read MoreA long time ago, as an undergraduate, I took a course on contemporary American literature that included several texts by John Barth, including The End of the Road (1958, revised 1967). I was in the full glory days of my existentialist period at the time, so Barth’s The End of the Road and the twin…
Read MoreLast night at the 51st Grammy Awards, the Recording Academy President Neil Portnow extended a long-overdue appeal to President Obama when he said: “Our finest national treasure is our culture in the arts, so it’s time that we acknowledged that fact with the creation of the Cabinet position of Secretary of the Arts.” How right…
Read MoreAbout a month ago, I started watching the television show “24” from its beginning. I was immediately hooked, as I wrote in my initial post on the subject (“24” Is Like Television Crack), and this week I just began Season 5. My general impression is that the quality of the show declined after the first…
Read MoreSo, there’s a thing going around on Facebook that asks people to list 25 random things about themselves. I usually delete messages like this immediately, but for whatever reason I actually filled out the list this time. I suppose that the point of this exercise is to show something revelatory about what the author finds…
Read MoreDespite my real and abiding passion for the figure of the antihero (see here and here), I had never seen a single episode of the television program 24 before last week. Everyone– and I mean everyone— told me that I should watch it, that I would love it, and that I was really missing something……
Read MoreThere’s an article in the current issue of Newsweek by Joshua Alston entitled “Too Much of a Bad Thing” (without a question mark, but I’ll come back to that later) that claims we are all suffering from “Antihero Overload” and bemoans the fact that “no one on TV can be merely good or evil anymore.”…
Read MoreI wasn’t surprised to find among the list of “local weirdos” featured in the article “How To Be A Local Character: Five Basic Examples” Memphis’ own Prince Mongo (pictured left). Prince Mongo– né Robert Hodges, changed his name to King Mongo, then Saint Mongo– has been a fixture in Midtown Memphis for as long as…
Read MoreOver on KHG’s blog, there’s a really interesting post (Titillating Food) about her experiment with trying to make “caramel sea salt.” Reading it, and amazing at all of the care and thought that went into such a project, got me thinking about that odd-variety of human being that we call the foodie. The foodie differs…
Read MoreA couple of interesting stories that caught my attention this week… and also made me throw up a little in my mouth: First, a book review of Raymond Tallis’ The Kingdom of Infinite Space: An Encounter With Your Head. Tallis– a poet, philosopher and professor of geriatric medicine– considers the relationship between the various operations…
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