Woke up early this morning with John McCain slapping me on the back. I was in fatigues, standing among fellow soldiers for some sort of honor guard ceremony. I leaned uninjured against crutches, trying to fake my way out of fighting. McCain, his big scarred face a plastic mask of fellowship, slapped me on my back again and nearly knocked me over. Then a towering, super-buff Latino General— of higher rank somehow than McCain— came over and laid his crushing, buff arm over my head. This Latino General regarded the field of soldiers, the gleaming guns, the spectators in the stands. How was I lucky/unlucky enough to have the two important guys on either side of me? Then I realized the Latino General thought McCain was a bullshit pussy, and I— with my glasses and touch-typing fingers— was someone just as bad.–“I Dream of War,” Nathan Deuel, True/Slant
Chinese axe the Hummer;
the triumph of terrorist sharks in Dubai;
no, this hot dog will not kill your babies
What is really happening from the borders of the Saarland to the hinterland of Saxony is the takeover of Germany by the Left. If America became enraptured with the global-capitalism gospel of the past two decades, Germany has experienced the opposite. The country has long been held captive by the communist program: first, through its division during the Cold War; then, as it tried to join its ailing East with its far healthier West. The Germans’ failure to make themselves whole and equal again leaves their country increasingly insular and provincial. To some extent, blame for the leftists’ staying power rests with former-Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The stolid Kohl, a product of the centrist Christian Democratic Union, had promised East Germans a “blooming landscape” no sooner than the wall had fallen. It never happened. Instead, the West Germans who headed east to dismantle the ossified industries were regarded by the locals as invading colonialists. The bitterness has never subsided. East Germany is an economic basket case. —“Teuton the Introvert,” Jacob Heilbrunn, The National Interest
Are professional football players brain dead? The NFL will have the truth;
Randy Savage’s deceased lady-wrestler;
the science of drop-kicking the punt (translation: go for it!)
O’Connor’s laconic, formidably tough-minded novels and stories are fully as good as their reputation, and vastly better than anything published by Baldwin, Capote, Mailer, Salinger, or Vidal. After she died, Thomas Merton wrote that “when I read Flannery O’Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles.” Though O’Connor herself would surely have scoffed at such praise, she is among a bare handful of American writers, modern or otherwise, of whom such a thing might plausibly be said. But her reputation rests in part on a persistent misunderstanding. Unlike most of the other major American novelists of the 20th century, O’Connor wrote not as a more or less secular humanist but as a believer, a rigorously orthodox Roman Catholic. Her fiction was permeated with religious language and symbolism, and its underlying intent was in many cases specifically spiritual. Yet most of O’Connor’s early critics failed to grasp her intentions, and even now many younger readers are ignorant of the true meaning of her work. —“Believing in Flannery O’Connor,” Terry Teachout, Commentary
Point number four of a “reader’s advice to novelists”: readers either can’t recognize “good writing” or don’t value it that much;
Grisham for kids;
bad music performed by talented lovers