Act I, Scene 1 Barnardo, Francisco, Horatio and Marcellus, castle guards at Elsinore, the home of the king and queen of Denmark, are working the night shift. Having passed the evening without an appearance by the mice that plague the building, the conversation soon turns to ghosts[1]. The spirit of …
The commemoration of any great tragedy is a thorny proposition. Pay it too little attention, and you are open to charges of ignoring the pain of the victims and the grief of the survivors; pay it too much attention, and you become vulnerable to accusations of exploitation and devaluation. This …
It’s hard to write anything like this without seeming to endorse a second term for Barack Obama. This is difficult for me to do, since I’ve generally found Obama to be a Clintonian disappointment; he’s squandered one political opportunity after another, bowed down before the G.O.P. with barely a struggle, …
It’s Labor Day in America. Celebrating what Adam Smith called “the first price, the original purchase that was paid for all things” has always been an iffy proposition in this most capitalist of countries. In fact, the very commemoration of Labor Day here in the U.S. was sped along by …
Some of the High Hat gang were updating their 100-best-movies list; I haven’t touched mine since the pre-Netflix days, and I’ve seen more movies in the last five years than I did in the 35 years before that. So I figured it was time I did the same. Alas, I …
From William T. Vollman’s Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means. COPS LOOKING FOR MOLEST CASE SUSPECT: Penang – Police are looking for a factory bus driver who allegedly fondled the breasts of a 23-year-old woman in Air Itam here recently…It is learnt that …
From Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West. They grew gaunted and lank under the white suns of those days and their hollow burnedout eyes were like those of noctambulants surprised by day. Crouched under their hats they seemed fugitives on sone grander scale, like beings …
From Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. The British fought the war for four years and three months. Its potential of ironic meaning, considered not now in relation to the complacencies of the past but in itself alone, emerges when we consider its events chronologically. The last five …
I’m kicking off a week of Deep Reads, in hopes of jumping back in the habit of reading books, which I’ve fallen out of for the last couple of months. Regular content — including, I promise, new Sandwich Century entries — will resume next week. From Fred Halliday’s 100 Myths …
All-Story magazine, October 1912. First appearance of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Tarzan of the Apes”. Art by Clinton Pettee; text available as an e-book here.
And now it’s time for another exciting installment of LEONARD GIVES ADVICE TO WRITERS EVEN THOUGH HE IS TERRIBLE! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ One of the biggest problems in writing fiction is giving a character attributes that you, as a writer, do not possess. “Write what you know”, they say, and if, for …
So everyone is bitching and moaning that the awesome new debt ceiling deal is going to be bad for the economy. Liberals are all running around saying that Obama went all Cave Carson on the deal, and that all the austerity measures, which are totally necessary because America doesn’t have …
I’ve been listening to a collection of incredible music from the ’40s and ’50s by Holiness preacher Brother Claude Ely, which is inspiring in all kinds of ways, but also deeply frustrating. For one thing, as much as I like to denigrate religion, it is one of the few things …
I wrote this fairy tale a few years ago and never really found the right home for it (I read it aloud in front of a group of well-meaning parents and their baffled kids at the Evanston Ethnic Arts Festival, but you can probably imagine their reaction). Here it is …
So, because I am a self-hating jerk, I was flitting around a bunch of the right-blogs yesterday, to see what horrifying inhumane garbage they had to say about the Norway slaughter. And one of the most common threads, especially at Ace of Spades and Confederate Yankee, was a variant of …
