Though the Pope did concede that the church has demonstrated “a misplaced concern for the reputation of the church and the avoidance of scandal” and said he “openly expressed the shame and remorse that we all feel,” he also continued to blame the scandal on others. No one—not bishops, priests, nuns, parents, even the faithful—themselves, escape having to bear the responsibility of this terrible burden. “I urge you,” he wrote to Catholic parents, “to play your part in ensuring the best possible care of children.” Not all parents are above reproach, of course, but this seems to me to be entirely missing the point. —“Pope Benedict’s Underwhelming Response to the Church Scandal in Ireland,” Lisa Miller, Newsweek
War is hell–the color-photographic evidence;
this is only hellish: “a magazine…[about] the Left Hand Path, Dark Paganism, Voudou and everything in between–Satanism, Cabalism, Knight Templars and many other Occult Sciences”;
the “universe as a quantum computer?” not Hell, not hellish–not even The Matrix
AB: You said in another interview with Daniel Williams that you learn more from your dog Nell than you do by reading interviews—that there’s more to learn from the animal world than from reading these kinds of things.
BH: Oh, sure. When I was a young writer I got a great deal out of interviews with the greats: Faulkner and Hemingway and O’Connor. They’re probably good for young people, young writers like you. But I really get tired of talking about myself, frankly. I’ve done it so long now. I’m sixty-?ve—the subject of “me” is really redundant. I try to be fresh. I just bought a new bow this summer, just to try something I hadn’t done in a long time and be sort of good at it. But if I can say something of worth that would help or give comfort to some young writer, so be it.
AB: In one of your essays, “Mr. Brain, He Want a Song,” you say that if an image is intense enough, it always brings a narrative with it.
BH: I’m still a small-town boy, a gawker. A rubbernecking peckerwood [laughs]. My wife and I go to Paris, and I like to just drink cafe au lait and look at folks—better than the Louvre—and imagine their lives. I get these images, hard, hard, like an artist does. I can’t draw or paint. Very primitive is all I can do.
AB: So it’s the image ?rst and the narrative will come with it.
BH: The narrative will come. —“A Conversation with Barry Hannah: ‘Crying Like a Fire in the Sun,'” interview by Andrew Brininstool, Gulf Coast
Philadelphia, where the flash mob comes to never, ever, finally die;
autism as a threat to the sanctity of marriage;
Tiger Woods is no longer the master of control: “I quit meditating, I quit being a Buddhist, and my life changed upside down.”
Researchers of Pyongyang University of Agriculture have recently succeeded in breeding a new species of stevia. Stevia, a perennial plant belonging to the Compositae, is very high in sugar content. It, with no adverse effect on human body, is good for diabetes, hypertension, nephritis, digestion and stomach. The new species almost doubles the existing species common in Korea in the amount of sugar and its taste is also much better. It, which gives no unnecessary taste but sweet smell, does not change in color and taste when it is mixed with foodstuffs. So it can be used in making cake, bread, cooling drinks and soybean paste and sauce, preparing vegetable food, processing meat and manufacturing medicines. —“New Species of Stevia Bred,” Korean Central News Agency of DPRK
