December 2011
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The Ghost Writer, which I saw last night, is a very good "thriller." It's co-written and directed by Roman Polanski and therefore inevitably dwells upon the menace that lurks beneath quotidian events. Once again, Polanski offers us a naif who gradually comes to realize that the world is under the control of dark, implacable, omnipresent…
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I'm sure that everyone but I knows these excellent words, but each one is an absolute novelty to me. A quadriga is a chariot drawn by four abreast horses. They must have been quite a trick to control. Wide chariot, I guess, or skinny horses. Quadriga racing was the nascar of the classical world. The…
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I've been studying (or more exactly being dazzled by) the illustrations in a magnificent four-pound coffee-table extravaganza called The Horse From Cave Paintings to Modern Art. It was first published in France (Cheval dans l'art) in 2008 and came to me through the Abbeville Press on Varick Street in NYC and also through the generosity…
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If the profoundly Christian seventeenth-century founders of our country had a single favorite Biblical passage, it might be the one in which the Lord (speaking through His minor prophet Amos) severely condemned the empty vanity of holidays. "I hate," said the Lord, "I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn…
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In last night's dream, I was back in college anxiously sitting a final exam in a literature course. I remember that the exam was titanically difficult and unnerving but I can recall only one specific question. "Discuss Ernest Hemingway's father's Buddhist leanings." I must say that my dreamatorium was working overtime to come up with…
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It's absolutely astonishing that I've lived all these years in total ignorance of onagers. And would have presisted in abysmal onagerian oblivion hadn't read David Anthony's fascinating monograph, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2007). Anthony's thesis is that "proto-Indo-European" — from which the Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Romance, and Indic languages, among others, are descended,…
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Here in peaceful, progrressive Boulder, two commissioners' seats are coming open next election. Commissioners are important officers: they directly govern the half of our citizens who live in unincorporated areas of the county, they employ 1800 people and administer a $300 million budget, they manage all the social services, and they set policy on land…
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Having just read the posthumously published An Old Man's Love (1884), I believe I can now claim to have read every single one of Anthony Trollope's forty-seven novels. Who would have guessed, when I encountered The Warden and Barchester Towers back in 1958, that it would have taken fifty-three years to complete the marathon? I'm…
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For the record, Blind Horizon (2003) may be the most confusing, confused, and derivative film ever perpetrated. It's a failed memory-assassinate the president movie, a genre of which The Manchurian Candidate stands as head and font. Blind Horizon offers one picturesque moment — when a giant tanker truck decorated with a Confederate flag and carrying…
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William Blake asks us to beware "venomous Newt" — venomous because the skin of this lizard-like creature contains the extraordinarily dangerous poison tetrodotoxin which it secretes through its granular skin glands. It is unwise to befriend or embrace a Newt and they should never be swallowed. Tetrodotoxin blocks sodium channels and can therefore cause heart…