Double Reading

Thanks to Restless Reader (i.e. Molly), I found Time Magazine’s All-Time 100 Best Novels (published after 1923).
Of the 100, I have read 17… not too bad, but not great either. But then again, these lists are sorta silly and whatnot anyway. I have read:

Animal Farm
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
The Catcher in the Rye
The Corrections
The Crying of Lot [...]

I won’t say much about Ocean’s 12, mostly because there isn’t much to say. The film is fun and has a bunch of twists at the end that make you go, “Oooohhh,” but for the most part the film is just a basic action/suspense movie. (Though, to be fair, Steven Soderbergh is a genius filmmaker [...]

And now today’s For They Know Not What They Do quote of the day from Slavoj Zizek:

We all remember from our youth the sublime dialectical materialist formulas of the “subjective mirroring-reflection of the objective reality”; (15)

Ahhh yes. Our youth and that silly sublime dialectical materialist formulas! How can I forget!

(I had started writing this post literally months ago but sorta gave up so this is a super simplified version…)
Ever since taking a “Gothic American Literature” course in college, the idea of the uncanny has been one of my favorite literary themes. The idea comes from Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny.” The best way I [...]

It was great to see that Countdown with Keith Olberman had a segment called “The Nexus of Politics and Terror” tonight that went over 10 (though they have 13 on the web site) situations where bad news about the Bush administration was followed by a change in the terror alert.
I realize that Olberman isn’t the [...]

After I got my new iPod I assigned myself the fun (though tedious) task of taking all of my CDs that wouldn’t fit on my first iPod and putting them on my computer since my new iPod held 3x as much music. This meant putting on a lot of albums that weren’t really in the [...]

Over at The Huffington Post, a guy named Sam Harris has a succinct, and convincing (well, for me he’s preaching to the choir, so maybe I’m not the best to judge) defense of atheism and argument against belief in God, etc. titled “There is No God (And You Know It).”
At the same time, the current [...]

There has been a lot of news lately about the avian flu — scientists have recreated the strain of virus that caused the 1918 “Spanish” flu, Bush has called for production of new vaccine, experts are saying that nobody anywhere in the world is prepared for the flu, a man in Indonesia died from a [...]

… Maybe he’s not so bad as we think? … Maybe he really is a nice guy? … I don’t know. All I know is that I’m feeling very confused right now.
I’m not sure exactly how to put this, but after watching the self-reflexively sympathetic Journeys With George, I have been brainwashed/fooled/deceived/whatever into think that [...]

Now that I’ve seen Ichi the Killer, I can say that it is my favorite Takashi Miike film. Like my other Miike film reviews (Dead or Alive and Izo, I won’t say too much — mostly because there are so many things happening in the movies that it’s hard to keep track.
For the most part, [...]