According to the edublog This Week in Education — or, more accurately, according to its author, past drinking buddy Alexander Russo — I am Hot…For Education. (If politics is Hollywood for ugly people, I wonder what the education policy/reporting world would be. Kansas City for the introverted?)
Quoth Russo:
He may be on sabbatical or something, but The Dallas Morning News’ award winning reporter and columnist Josh Benton makes women fall off their seats. Not just ones he’s interviewing. We’ve seen it happen at EWA events. Come back, Josh, come back!
Eventually, man, eventually. Let me write this novel first.
I always thought this Gawker post got the “hot for” phenomenon right.
20 February 2008 |
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An interesting 1973 BBC doc on The Angry Brigade, a group of militant anarchists who were responsible for 25 bombings around Britain in the early 1970s. (This continues my fascination with internal militant groups operating within Western societies in the early ’70s — Baader-Meinhof in Germany, the FLQ in Quebec, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Weathermen, and the most creatively named, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers [The Motherfuckers for short] in New York. It’s so strange to think of a time so relatively recent where (a) anarchists were a quasi-vibrant political force, (b) terrorism hadn’t become so “branded” as a developing-world-based idea, (c) college kids were blowing things up, (d) countries we think of as modern and democratic like Spain and Portugal were fascist dictatorships exporting terror, and (e) what we now think of as the broad, stable, post-WWII world order seemed very much up for grabs.)
17 February 2008 |
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Various literary links:
— A Tom Wolfe profile in the Guardian. Money quote: “If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before they were not noticed, now they are.”
— Graham Greene as seen through his letters.
Between these links (probably stolen from my old friend Maud, where I steal most often), an orgy of Norman Mailer retrospectives, the fact I’m currently taking James Wood’s Postwar British and American Novel class at Harvard (just finished Bellow and Nabokov, headed for Greene, Spark, McEwan, Naipaul), my one-novel-a-week goal for 2008 (having run through DeLillo’s White Noise, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Camus’ The Stranger, and Wodehouse’s Carry On, Jeeves), and my own in-progress novel (a tale of generational regret, youthful nonsense, and yes, American foreign policy), I’ve had a lot of fiction on the brain of late.
(By the way, I’m troubled by the degree of passion with which I disliked White Noise and was bored by Camus. And how completely brilliant Disgrace was. Man, that was a great novel.)
14 February 2008 |
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Friend of Crabwalk Kevin alerts me to the latest on a one-time crabwalk.com obsession: Orange County gang-rapist and assistant-sheriff’s-son Greg Haidl is now a free man. He served more than half his six-year sentence. (For the latecomers, here are a bunch of past scribblings about Haidl.)
13 February 2008 |
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Here’s an interesting article by Friend of Crabwalk Molly Worthen on Protestant monks (or at least Protestant monkishness). Molly’s carved out a really interesting niche for herself journalistically — writing about the smaller, unnoticed movements coursing through contemporary Christianity. (Viz her piece on classical Christian education in Idaho.)
12 February 2008 |
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Hey, remember me, Internet? I used to post things here. Will again soon. But in the meantime, I present a Flickr set of photos of my recent four weeks in Morocco. You can almost smell the mint tea. (Consider yourselves lucky I edited down the 1,500 or so photos to this manageable subset.)
09 February 2008 |
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