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Another note from my perpetual consideration of the question of the differences and relations between the sexes: Dawn Eden has a fascinating post on the number of men attending her readings because they are trying to get control of their sexual impulses and behavior and are finding little or no help. And there's an equally…
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Sufjan Stevens: Seven Swans I could hardly have gone further in the opposite direction from last week’s artists, goth-metal Tristania, than this gentle, intimate, and explicitly Christian album. Yet I’ve been listening to both these albums to the exclusion of almost everything else for the past couple of weeks, well past the three mandatory hearings…
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The Sixty-Forty Ratio …just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into his mouth by the ocean of uncertainty, so the non-believer is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of the world which he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole….…
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Amy Welborn is backing off her blog, which has been sort of a major hub of the Catholic blogosphere. This doesn't come as a great surprise. I've often wondered how she ever got anything else done. Even the relatively small amount of posting I do here takes a fair amount of time, which is in…
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Update: The first Masters of Science Fiction episode, "A Clean Escape," was, to my taste, a disappointment. Tiresome and tendentious, and I saw the big revelation coming within the first ten minutes or so. I'll give the series one more try. Those who have a tv, that is. I just read in the local paper…
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Still simmering over J. Podhoretz's sniping at Bergman and his suggestion that Bergman admirers are a species of poseur, I went looking for more substantial commentary. (Not your fault, Mary Ann–I had read the piece before you mentioned it here.) Here is a fine overview by self-described "right-wing film geek" Victor Morton. I only skimmed…
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Back in March I posted a description of how I do this. At the end of that post I mentioned that I planned to try a program called Golden Records which is supposed to make the process simpler, and promised to report on it. Here's the report, finally. Verdict: it works fine and makes the…
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Yes, it is a bit spooky that he died within a day or two of Bergman, one of those things that you feel must mean something even though you aren't sure what it might be—which, come to think of it, is highly fitting for these two directors. Here is what I said a month or…
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Provisional Last Word on Harry Potter NOTE: There are no spoilers, properly speaking, in this post, but I do give my general opinion of the last book, so if you want to remain absolutely free of preconceptions about it you may want to skip this. UPDATE: no spoilers in the post itself, but there are…
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Since I first encountered them in college, forty years ago, Bergman's films have been among the few that I care about as deeply as I do my favorite books and music, notwithstanding the fact that I had no clear idea what some of the more gnomic ones (e.g. Persona) were really about. As much as…
Light On Dark Water 