We watched a film, The Long Good Friday, an Aurora Film Society showing, in company with a room full of other film buffs. Yes, this was a chilling gangster film. The leading man in the tale is Harold Shand played by Bob Hoskins. Harold’s girlfriend, Victoria, is played by Helen Mirren. The film reminded me…
According to the myth of Christianity, the eschaton signals the ending of an old order. ἔσχατος means the end, last, and is often associated with doomsaying that the earth is to ‘end in fire.’ In a manner of speaking, the sky rains fire these days. Circumstances force a choice. Each in his/her heart is…
I offer some lines and phrases from the story-poem Stardust by Hisham Bustani. Tired of turning the dials of history. I LOOK AT THEM: they are motionless and shackled, sap sucked dry, faces covered with imbecilic smiles. Who are these people… (First answer) Physical systems change…from highly ordered to more disordered. Entropy The entropy…
It is snowing outside. It is the first snow of the season to significantly cover everything, and the snowplows are out. Snow covered asphalt reacquaints us with the laws of physics. With a warming climate, winter snow, as it happens, comes later, and less of it. I can remember the blinding snowstorms of many…
Thanksgiving, the day after. Around 8AM and this Starbucks is getting busy. It seems absurd to me that you’d attempt to go out today, especially to do shopping. If you’ve viewed television lately, commercials that focus upon “the holidays,” a period of 3.5 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, are presented one after the other….
It is a Sunday morning. The first day of our week in some traditions is designated for mindful attention to divine reality, to put it plainly – for worship. The timing could not be better for a story, an ancient tale of exchange between humans (we clever dwarfs) and the “gods” who by comparison…
We watched a 2023 film entitled Poor Things. This is a fantasy, steampunk Frankenstein takeoff, that picks apart default moral assumptions of cultured society. Bella Baxter is brought back to life. Bella, waking with the brain of a newborn, learns to physically function as an adult female. The twist of this tale is Bella’s…
References to the macabre are hyperbole it seems to me, in relation to our Halloween. American kids look forward to scoring a bagful of free candy treats while thinly disguised in the costume of choice. Halloween is by no means as comparably serious as the Dia de Muertos in Mexico that features offerings to…
We viewed a film noir, The Killing by Stanley Kubrick. One’s sense of viewing, the take-away from the film hinges as much upon what one brings to the screen, as upon Kubrick’s cinematic composition of the tale of a horse racetrack heist. The mastermind of the theft from the track counting room, Johnny Clay is…
Living is narrating. The human being is an animal narrans, and differs from animals to the extent that, through narrative, new forms of life are brought about. A narrative contains the power of a new beginning. Every action that changes the world presupposes a narrative. The crisis of narration, by Byung-chul Han, page 68…
