Vladimir Nabokov did not like the novel of ideas. Artists often have their idiosyncratic dislikes, contrary expressions of the unique aesthetic vision that drives their own work. Particularly, Nabokov did not like the work of those monuments of great-idea novels, Dostoyevsky and Mann, though there is no reason his distaste should have excluded the novels […]
CineFile: Mothers, Sons, & Political Paranoia
In the 1950s there really was a communist threat. It just wasn’t in the United States, even though there were surely many more American communist supporters and sympathizers then than there are Americans today who are supporters of any form of Islamism. Even then Joe McCarthy claimed that there were communists in the Pentagon, and […]
How We Lived on It (34) – Pierre Gleizes and Greenpeace
Photographer Pierre Gleizes has worked for Greepeace for three of the four decades the environmental campaigning organization has been in existence. He has shot some of the organization’s most striking and well-known images. This year, Greenpeace turns forty. This video offers the photographer’s thoughts on his long career as journalist and activist. Follow Greenpeace Video […]
Darkness at Noon, Today
The challenges to Enlightenment Humanism come from all sides. In the U.S., on the Right, a fundamentalist rejection of modernity has led to an increasing, unreasoned disbelief in the scientific method and the process of rational inference from its results. It rejects any conception of the human without GOD, even as it rationalizes varied forms […]
Egyptics
Among the many approaches to the study of literature are varied considerations of structure, form, and language, including archetypologies, symbologies, and rhetorical and verbal analysis. These differing hermeneutics can be brought to bear on the interpretation of more than just literature, as almost anything can be argued to show intention, in the sense of indications […]