. My column from the spring 2012 issue of West: Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and an exercise in the craft of poetry. The close of The Great Gatsby is probably the most famous and referenced ending of any American novel. Lyricized in a lushly romantic invocation of American promise, somehow gone wrong in the […]
CineFile – The City
. The remarkable The City, which ran for two years at the 1939 World’s Fair “City of Tomorrow” exhibit, is not so much a documentary in any sense of reportorial filmmaking as much as it is an early film essay on the nature of the modern industrial city and the planned green city. It was directed […]
Eating Poetry (XXX) – “Every telling has a tailing”
. In 1929, James Joyce recorded this rendition of “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” from Finnegans Wake. It is one of only two recordings of Joyce reading from his work, after a a much more sonically primitive 1924 reading of an excerpt from Ulysses. This wonderful animation by savagecabbage offers subtitles to aide in deciphering Joyce’s luccious vocalization of an […]
How We Lived On It (46) – “The Caging Of America”
. The temptation is to quote it all. This selection gives you an idea. From Adam Gopnik’s stunning New Yorker article on the sowing and reaping of American criminal justice. For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people […]
CineFile: A Serious Man
. Before the Law. Waiting for Godot. Meeting Marshak. Anticipating the week ahead… Related articles CineFile – Cheyenne Autumn (sadredearth.com) CineFile – The Last of the Mochicans (sadredearth.com) CineFile: Let There Be Light (sadredearth.com) Running for Office in Movies (sadredearth.com)