• Fiction

    The Cry for Freedom in
    “The Adulterous Woman”

    August 31, 2014 - By 

    She is sitting on a bus crossing the wintry Algerian desert, seated tight up against her slumbering merchant husband and surrounded by Arabs tucked deep into their burnooses to ward off the cold and the fine grains of sand that find their way through cracks in the vehicle. Suddenly, she notices a French soldier across the aisle who gives her a glance, carrying just a tinge of suggestion. That glance and a couple of other feeling states to follow are about as far as the “adultery” in this story’s title ever goes, but it sets in motion a long and…

  • Music

    The Delectable, Delicious, Delovely—and Inimitable—Cole Porter

    August 28, 2014 - By 

    I think Cole Porter is one of the great writers in history. No “music history” or “songwriting history” about it. Just “great writer,” period. Consider: You’re the top! You’re the Coliseum. You’re the top! You’re the Louvre Museum Porter was that rare talent whose gifts and cultivations would surely have made him successful in most any form, but his upbringing, intelligence, tenacity and love of a well-turned phrase landed him in the music world as a major composer and lyricist. Too bad for you, poetry and fiction! There’s something wild about you child That’s so contagious Let’s be outrageous Let’s…

  • Film/TV

    It’s Life, Just Life: Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”

    August 24, 2014 - By 

    Nothing much happens in Richard Linklater’s finely wrought film, Boyhood. No stabbings or shootings, no kidnaps or car wrecks designed to set the protagonists’ lives on a post-crisis course and get audience members’ guts churning. Linklater disdains virtually every conventional narrative technique out of Film 101’s playbook, going light on the trauma and minimalist on conflict. And what he winds up with is one of the most absorbing movies in years. Boyhood’s two hours and forty-four minutes of running time effortlessly depicts multiple lives as they play out over an actual nearly 12-year-span in various Texas locales. Meaning Linklater followed…

  • Personal Reflections - Religion

    Father Bob and the Misapprehension of Spiritual Life

    August 22, 2014 - By 

    Way back in 1980-81, I spent one of the most stimulating years of my life in seminary, taking whatever classes I wanted at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. It was one of those “exploration in graduate theological education” programs: one year, no requirements, graze to your heart’s content among the consortium’s eight seminaries. There’s a synonym for all that, and here it is: Heaven. I spent pretty much the entire year enraptured, mostly reclining on my mattress-on-the-floor (the true graduate school bedding protocol) with a pile of books when I wasn’t running in the East Bay hills or walking the…

  • Film/TV - Philosophy - Religion

    Perfection or Oppression? Chasing Happiness With Epicurus and “The Giver”

    August 17, 2014 - By 

    So we heard from Kierkegaard a couple of posts ago, and his prescription for happiness, at least as it existed in his own mind. Kierkegaard largely turned his back on the pleasures and joys of this world (other than philosophy and religion), putting all his faith as well as his formidable intellectual capital into a vision of an afterlife that would ultimately reward the denial or disinterest in pedestrian earthly pleasures. His philosophy is far more nuanced and rich with rhetoric than that brief summary suggests, but at base, Kierkegaard and a segment of Christianity that has at least partially…