Mauve Moments with Orlando Plumbe

Instant Classic

Link: WSJ.com - Why Hedge Funds Are Feeling the Need To Burst Into Poetry.

Struggling to find just the right words to explain a run of bad luck to investors, money manager Michael Roth looked to literature for inspiration

America Needs More Coarse Language!

From this week’s New Yorker,

Anthony Lane

has an often amusing review of the new StarWars film.  Although at times it seems like he is shooting fish in a barrel. The film is, after all, a sci-fi fantasy, so arguing its realism seems a bit pointless. But one supposes a critic for the New Yorker could not simply write an article about he likes StarWars, and Lane needs to show that he is higher up the IQ and sophistication scale than the average StarWars lover, which last time I looked was typified by a fourteen year old boy.  However, Lane seemed completely off-base when he suggests:

After all, the Lucasian universe is drained of all reference to bodily functions. Nobody ingests or excretes. Language remains unblue. Smoking and cursing are out of bounds, as is drunkenness, although personally I wouldn’t go near the place without a hip flask. Did Lucas learn nothing from “Alien” and “Blade Runner”—from the suggestion that other times and places might be no less rusted and septic than ours,

There is much about StarWars that is cloying, but I never occurred to me that JarJar Binks or the Ewoks could be improved by giving them potty mouths.  There is no shortage of outlets for vulgaraity in our culture if Lane wants to take in even more of it. And there should be a few movies you can take a ten year old too that are not animated. Vulgarity is a over used crutch in much video and music thse days, and in most instances does not add much in the way of depth or realism. I doubt that it would add much to StarWars.

Stuck in Lincoln's Land

Link: Stuck in Lincoln's Land - New York Times. From David Brooks:

Today, a lot of us are stuck in Lincoln's land. We reject the bland relativism of the militant secularists. We reject the smug ignorance of, say, a Robert Kuttner, who recently argued that the culture war is a contest between enlightened reason and dogmatic absolutism. But neither can we share the conviction of the orthodox believers, like the new pope, who find maximum freedom in obedience to eternal truth. We're a little nervous about the perfectionism that often infects evangelical politics, the rush to crash through procedural checks and balances in order to reach the point of maximum moral correctness. Those of us stuck here in this wrestling-with-faith world find Lincoln to be our guide and navigator. Lincoln had enough firm conviction to lead a great moral crusade, but his zeal was tempered by doubt, and his governing style was dispassionate. The key to Lincoln's approach is that he was mesmerized by religion, but could never shake his skepticism. Politically, he knew that the country needed the evangelicals' moral rigor to counteract the forces of selfishness and subjectivism, but he could never actually be an evangelical himself.