My OSU comrade Don Pollock had a great Op/Ed piece in yesterday's New York Times called "Off the Political Wagon."
The new issue of H_NGM_N is alive and full of great things including new work from Ben Mirov like this piece called "You Machine" which begins:
I go to bars and don’t know. You should be Oakland looking for jokes. I can tell when a relationship bends. It’s the last thing that happened. People begin to walk. There’s no jacket for weather.
I just read Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction, because I'd never read it before and it felt like the right thing to do with my first free week of winter break. It was neither disappointing nor mind blowing, just a nice little primer. This blogger took pretty good notes, if you're interested in seeing some excerpts. After finishing it, I went surfing for info about Eagleton and found this hilarious book review he wrote, which basically disembowels Richard Dawkins.
In closing, I must tell you about this spectacular film Caitlin and I watched last night called Russian Ark, directed by Alexander Sokurov. It was released in 2002, so perhaps it is old news, but I had not seen it until now. What a piece of brilliance! It is touted as the first feature film to ever be shot in one long take: a 96 minute Steadicam shot which moves through St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum and unfolds approximately 300 years of Russian history. The genius of this feat cannot be overstated; speaking as someone who used to make films, who understands the immense difficulty of the process, I can tell you that it is literally unbelievable that Sokurov pulled this off, but somehow he did!
