Irish theologian, Kevin Hargaden
While good, this is not the classic comedy that I thought it was but a sad and painful movie about poor people struggling with their mental health and freaking cancer!
Your Correspondent, Sits around the house like a dead weight watching TV, sleeping all day, getting arrested at weddings.
One gets the impression that this two-star movie could have been a four-star classic had Rodrigo Cortés left this draft of the screenplay in a drawer for a year or two and come back with fresh eyes to tighten the whole thing up.
Your Correspondent, Dreamed he saw the bombers riding shotgun in the sky
This is a surprisingly little read book that displays Robinson’s wonderful discursive intelligence in a whole new field. It asks why we should be so concerned about the threat of nuclear warfare when plants like Sellafield produce the equivalent destructive force and let it slip out of tubes minute by minute, day by day, no less toxic because it happens over the course of fifty years, not fifty milliseconds?
It is a caustically anti-British book, in a form that is rare. She directly connects the rise of British capitalism through the Poor Laws, the Welfare state and the plutonium industry with the curious emptiness of rigorous thought in British policy formation.
Needless to say, I loved it.
British social thought may as well be imagined as occurring this way. It takes place in a country house built and furnished to accord with conventions polished by use, a house filled with guests, great and minor luminaries, ornaments of literature, the sciences, the church, and of philosophy and politics. Most of them, not coincidentally, are cousins at some remove. They are charmed to find in one another just that streak of intuitive brilliance they had always admired in themselves, and to be confirmed in their sense that they are true members of a group in which there are no impostors, by a very great similarity of taste, of interest, of sympathy. It is a leisurely visit, some centuries in length, and in due course everyone has confessed his weakness for Hesiod, and admired the garden, and regretted the weather. The evenings would perhaps have begun to weigh, if someone had not suggested a game called Philanthropy. The rules of this game are very simple. One must justify things as they are by attacking things as they are. It is a philosophic game, perfectly suited to showing off a fine wit. It has even the thrill of risk, since it invites subversive ideas. But the point is always, of course, to achieve a resolution that will bring the argument right back where it began.
This distinguished party warms to the challenge. And how affecting it is to hear them, one after another, in the language of statesman and moralist, decry the sufferings of the poor, until it seems that the very table they sit around must be made into splints and crutches and the topiary garden planted in potatoes. Then, just when the pleasure of participation in this virtuous fantasy is at its height, that is to say, just when the temptations of virtue are most intense, then the player reveals the illusion: This “virtue” is not virtue at all, but an evil to be scrupulously avoided. A little thrill of relief passes over the company when their world is safely restored to them. But the risk is never as great as it may seem. Any strategy is sufficient in defending the moon from the wolves.
Your Correspondent, Always falling over his many gymnastics trophies
The definitive trailer-is-better-than-the-film movie.
Your Correspondent, Expects a load of boats to sail down a river in his honour after maintaining this site for 60 years.
At this point, it is undisputed among the scholars but that Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That is both the greatest movie of Nathaniel Hornblower’s career and the best movie title to feature a semi-colon but such acclaim too easily passes over the simple fact that this rocks.
Your Correspondent, He’s got more action than his man John Woo
It may be the greatest movie of this, the year of our LORD, 2012.
Your Correspondent, His prequel would involve shots of his father working night shifts in a factory
There is a scene before the plot really kicks into action, in this novel set in an information-saturated not-too-distant future where one character, seemingly shallow beyond description, toasts the pregnancy of his friends:
“I think they are the only people who should be giving birth, the only peeps qualified to pop one out.”
“Right on!” we call-and-responded.
“The only peeps sure of themselves enough so that, come what may, the child will be loved and cared for and sheltered. Because they’re good people. I know folks say that a lot – ‘They’re good peeps, yo’ – but there’s the kind of plastic good, the kind of easy ‘good’ any of us can generate, and then there’s this other, deep thing that is so hard for us to find anymore. Consistency. Day-to-day. Moving on. Taking stock. Never exploding. Channeling it all, that anger, that huge anger about what’s happened to us as a people, channeling it into whatever-the-fuck. Keeping it away from children, that’s all I’m going to say.”
It is a novel about how we know that we don’t know what we’ve lost. Or maybe lost isn’t the right term because we know our memory of what we had isn’t reliable so it is about how we know that we don’t know what is missing.
Your Correspondent, Has escaped the anxiety of theological influence by never stepping foot inside a church
Contra Declan, I declare this to be the action movie of the year and a smashingly excellent film that features the scariest space ships of all time.
Your Correspondent, Likes Scarlett a whole lot.
I hugely enjoyed Talal Asad’s Formations Of The Secular, which Eoin O’Mahony has been pressing into my hands since I first met him. It is a worthy ally to Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is one of those books that I suspect I must carefully re-read because even taking close notes, I reckon I got about 30% of what was on offer.
It is probably bad form to use as a quote, something that he quotes but I’ll do it anyway. Footnote 65 on page 47 lets us into a brilliant conversation Asad begins. When I talk with people about secularism, the Christian usually thinks it is about politically laying the ground for mass persecutions to follow and the non-Christian usually thinks it is about fostering reasonable conversation and secure freedom in the face of faith-based irrationalism. Cutting through this shite, Asad asks us (as one of many perplexing and illuminating questions) instead to consider whether pain has a meaning or not. Secularism won the day not when it drove prayer out of schools but when it stripped our owies of certain kinds of metaphysical explanations. Thus:
Their pain became totally secular since pain as well as illness were seen as nature’s punishment for omissions in one’s regimen, while mental illness was perceived as a sign of conflict between the demands of each individual character and the constraints of the social order; this interpretation called for a fundamental social reorganization when its standards (chastity in particular) went against nature. This explains why, as a leitmotiv, the physician of the Enlightenment maintained that in order to be a good moralist, one must first be a good physician, thus reversing the traditional relationship between medicine and morality.
– Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 107.
Your Correspondent, Is off home to think of a lie
I didn’t want to like this movie but I really did and I don’t want to be like Penelope but I really am.
Your Correspondent, Doesn’t believe in the god of carnage but finds him very amusing