Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Thirteen is a horrible age to be a boy. Your testicles are developed enough to make demands on you. But the rest of you is sufficiently immature that you can’t do much about it. Thirteen year old girls are already young women—with airs and wiles and the beginnings of sexual instincts. They have no interest in thirteen year old testicles.
Northrop Frye was chancellor of Victoria University when I was an undergrad student doing my English degree there. He cast a spell over the campus, and some of that magic lingers.
It appears that more than 91% of all people pick their nose. I’m not sure about the research methodology used to arrive at that statistic, but I’m willing to accept the figure with verifying it independently. The statistic means that if you’ve got working digits, then you’re sticking them up your nose on pretty much a daily basis.
There were two sisters who lived in Yarmouth. One was missing a finger and the other had a squeaky whisper of a voice. The story goes that when they were young girls, they had a conversation that went like this:
The judge gave Jackson time served plus community service. Since Jackson had half an English degree behind him, the judge let him do his community service at the Oak Ridge Rest Home. The staff there needed help with a special project. They wanted to interview all the residents—or at least all the residents who were…
I went last night to see James Cameron’s Titanic in Imax 3D. At least a couple times, I found myself dodging things that appeared to leap from the screen. There were the ice bergs, of course, and there were Kate Winslet’s tits.
I’m puzzled by the warning that appears before a lot of TV shows: The following program contains scenes of violence, language and sexuality; parental guidance is advised. The violence warning I understand. The violence is the stuff that hurts people. The language warning is more obtuse.
I dreamt I died and went to heaven. When I got there, they told me there was no such thing as print media. They said: books are physical things, but we, as incorporeal spirit beings, have no fingers to turn the pages.
Personally, I don’t see the appeal of slaughtering, plucking and skinning one them, letting it simmer in its own juices for five hours, then serving it up on a platter of bread crumbs and whatnot that have cooked inside its own body cavity…
Moby Dick is one of those classics everyone knows but few have ever read. We know it because it has given us iconic images that have sunk to the rock bottom of our culture: the whale; the whiteness of the whale; Ahab’s rage; Queequeg worshiping before his idol; and the opening line: “Call me Ishmael.”
To those who insist that there is such a thing as a literal reading of text, I offer a headline posted today by the BBC: Virgin Alerts Infected Customers.
In a startling revelation today, Charles Dickens confessed to maintaining a blog about an orphan popularly known as “Oliver Twist.” Mr. Dickens admitted that there is, in fact, no such person as Oliver Twist and that he made him up simply as a way to draw attention to the plight of children in industrialized Britain.
I shouldn’t do this. I shouldn’t laugh in public at someone else’s writing. Especially when I’m publishing some of my own work in a couple weeks. It’s courting disaster.