Category: Literary
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Our fetish for stuff ~ Wallace Shawn and Karl Marx give you the shirt off their back…
The Fever One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep — Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn’t understand…
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Jason Bourne and identity — who am I?
Who are you? Are you the sum of your experiences, your actions, your memories? Are you your dreams, your plans, your aspirations, the person you’ll someday become? Are you your past, or your destiny or your present? The best films in any genre are always the ones that touch on essential human questions. What is…
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Desert Dragstrip ~ Zen and the Art of Observation at any Speed
In 1974, Robert M. Pirsig published Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an extraordinary book about an extraordinary journey. The bit about touring around the U.S.A. on a motorcyle is good too. This novel captivated me in my early 20s. The mystical philosophy of ‘goodness’ Pirsig explores fascinates me. It’s not a perfect book,…
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To Kill a Mockingbird: the courage of Atticus Finch
It’s the 50th anniversary of the publishing of Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and I’ve got the film paused, just after the scene in which the verdict is handed down. Guilty. Both the film and the book resonate very deeply with me, in all the themes they touch upon. Family, community, love, goodness,…
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Quotes and notes regarding Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram
A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, we call the dream a nightmare. ~ Gregory David Roberts Shantaram
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Peter Gabriel & Ken Follet: Fear, the mother of violence
A while ago I was reading Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth. Set amidst the brutality of the English middle ages, it’s interesting to see how all Follet’s characters experience fear, and more interesting how they respond to it and how, oftentimes, they are controlled by it, particularly the most violent of them, and…
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Fugitive Peace
I watched the film adaptation of Anne Michaels’ novel, Fugitive Pieces today. One of the most achingly beautiful love scenes I’ve ever seen is followed, closely, by Michaela picking up Jakob’s journal, holding it, looking at it, quizzically, curiously. she seems to be asking of it, “what else might you reveal of the man I…
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Beauty, Cathedrals, Purpose: The Pillars of the Earth
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It wasn’t very far into Ken Follet’s, The Pillars of the Earth before I understood what might be enthralling the people who’ve been telling me I should read it. “Because it will be beautiful,” Tom the Builder answered Prior Philip.
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Contact: When science learns faith…
Following is some dialog from the film Contact, a film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s sci-fi novel of the same name. I had… an experience. I can’t prove it. I can’t even explain it. All I can tell you is that everything I know as a human being, everything I am — tells me that it…