Here is Eva Ayllón on “Mal Paso.” This is coastal music from Peru, syncopated and African-based. Listen to that piquant Creole guitar. The square drums are called drawers. Actual drums were banned, back in the day, as subversive. Therefore the slaves would take the drawers out of the dressers and turn them into drums. Here … More Eva Ayllón
There is a book by Daniel Hurewitz called Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, and Martin Duberman has reviewed it. The review starts like this: What is the self? Do we all have one? Is it best treated with Botox or with books? Is it grounded in genetic concrete or manufactured by … More Bohemian Los Angeles
Le Colonel Chabert leads us to the Cultural Parody Center, which in turn leads us to the documentary Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, Parts I and II. It is fascinating and I hasten to call attention to it although I have not even finished watching it. The Cultural Parody Center quotes from the NYT review of … More On the Former Yugoslavia
I have spoken today with someone who still converses every night with the ghosts of the Viet Cong he killed. And every so often I hear a moving speech by an American who has visited Auschwitz and has contemplated the horror. Misanthropic or perhaps envious of such imagined innocence, I think it is very easy … More After 1945
Here are some marvelous paragraphs from David A. Bell’s review essay, introduced in the last post. In the twenty-first century the Enlightenment appears anything but the triumphant imperial “project” denounced by vulgar postmodernists. Its heritage is fragile and endangered. Admittedly, its works remain in the “canon”–but perhaps only because they go largely unread in certain … More Profane Illuminations
Now I am supposed to be at a festival but it is raining I am still cleaning out my bookcases and files. I would like to be reading: 1. Richard Serrano, Against the Postcolonial: “Francophone” Writers at the Ends of the French Empire (Lexington Books, 2005). The publisher’s blurb says: Richard Serrano begins his provocative … More La Libre Pensée
I am a Benevolent Creator. Cliquez sur l’image pour voir comment je suis. You, too, can take this entertaining test and receive a beautiful, multicolored square. Axé.
He was wearing a white summer suit with mother-of-pearl buttons, over which he had thrown a duster of the same color. Beneath his fine straw hat, broad-brimmed and newly washed, his great dying eyes shone around his sharply honed nose. His right hand was of hard plaster and he carried, hanging on his arm, a … More St. Lucy and St. Lazarus VII
[I]nstead of sending Town to a medical board and discharging him because of his injuries, doctors at Fort Carson, Colorado . . . claimed Town’s wounds were actually caused by a “personality disorder.” Town was then booted from the Army and told that under a personality order discharge, he would never receive disability or medical … More Supporting the Troops
Now, in honor of Ayacucho and all Andean towns, and of Lent which ends this weekend, we will see some of the 2007 Carnaval celebrations high up in the mountains. Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 