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Continue reading →: Singles – 6/24
This week’s singles and links to my reviews, with 1 the lowest and 10 the highest score. I found Trey Songz’ hit cuter than everyone else did, but I’m aware of the half-life of cute. As for Sade, I can’t believe I liked her single more than the sick beat…
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Continue reading →: Avarice and ambition — Brit edition!
One of Tom’s best posts. He’s illuminating on the phenomenon of Bros, the English boy band that mesmerized their country for a couple of years in the late eighties. I’ve no idea what if any stateside MTV exposure these blond schemers got; we had the Boston fivesome to worry about…
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Continue reading →: Deferring judgment
Stanley Fish on the peril of student evaluations. I’ve never minded them, despite getting more than my share of responses criticizing my lack of “clarity” and “not explaining assignments,” which are usually buzzwords for “He won’t tell me exactly what I need to do to pass the course.” Or, in…
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Continue reading →: Two cheers for ambiguity
I suppose it’s tempting to credit E.M. Forster’s rather non-committal attitude towards his homosexuality for the querulousness and fussiness that make his fiction charming, daft, and, in the wrong mood, unwelcome, like a sweet old lady in the supermarket checkout lane who insists on talking to you; but that would…
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Continue reading →: José Saramago – R.I.P.
Official. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was the only one of his many novels whose execution matched its grand conception, but Blindness and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis are near masterpieces of allegory; the savagery in those novels had a distinctly pre-Enlightenment bite, worthy of Swift…
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Continue reading →: Singles 6/17
I’ve a lot of time for Ms. Braxton’s nineties singles. “Another Sad Love Song” and “You’re Makin’ Me High” injected sensual juice into Babyface’s increasingly perfunctory productions, while “Un-Break My Heart” and “Breathe Again” represent the sine qua non of R&B tastefulness — what a less sensitive critic than I…
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Continue reading →: ‘The triumph of their brazen bells’
Smug after a spring drenched in The Waste Land, I could handle Ulysses. Without knowing the significance of the day, I started on or around the third week of June. About three quarters of it went over my head; I read with Stuart Gilbert’s book in my left hand. Now…
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Continue reading →: Game changing
A close friend who works as a low-level political appointee in a Cabinet office recommended Mark Halperin’s Game Change this weekend. “You’re on the [DC] Metro and you look around and I counted at least four different people reading it.” The jejune behavior of the McCain-Palin ticket, the nastiness of…
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Continue reading →: Disintegration: I almost believed it was real
As a Cure fan in high school who couldn’t stand Disintegration, I’m surprised by how few impressions Joe Gross and I share. Sure, its singles were ubiquitous “modern rock” and MTV presences in 1989 and most of 1990, but even at the time Disintegration sounded stolid and ugly, like one…
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Continue reading →: “Hatred alone is immortal”
From one of the most edifying essays I’ve ever read, William Hazlitt’s great “The Pleasures of Hating”: Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool,…
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Humanizing The Vacuum 