– Cinetrix is way wicked about Dave Kehr. I’m, like, ouch.
– No doubt Our Girl probably already blogged this once upon a time, but I only just discovered The Henry James Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites. It’s exhaustive–in that good way.
– Joseph Epstein waxes grumpy
(but interestingly so) on youth culture and its discontents:
If one wants to dress like a kid, spin around the office on a scooter, not make up one’s mind about what work one wants to do until one is 40, be noncommittal in one’s relationships–what, really, are the consequences? I happen to think that the consequences are genuine, and fairly serious.
“Obviously it is normal to think of oneself as younger than one is,” W.H. Auden, a younger son, told Robert Craft, “but fatal to want to be younger.” I’m not sure about fatal, but it is at a minimum degrading for a culture at large to want to be younger. The tone of national life is lowered, made less rich. The first thing lowered is expectations, intellectual and otherwise. To begin with education, one wonders if the dumbing down of culture one used to hear so much about and which continues isn’t connected to the rise of the perpetual adolescent.
Consider contemporary journalism, which tends to play everything to lower and lower common denominators. Why does the New York Times, with its pretensions to being our national newspaper, choose to put on its front pages stories about Gennifer Flowers’s career as a chanteuse in New Orleans, the firing of NFL coaches, the retirement of Yves Saint Laurent, the canceling of the singer Mariah Carey’s recording contract? Slow-news days is a charitable guess; a lowered standard of the significant is a more realistic one. Since the advent of its new publisher, a man of the baby boomer generation, an aura of juvenilia clings to the paper. Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, two of the paper’s most-read columnists, seem not so much the type of the bright college student but of the sassy high-school student–the clever, provocative editor of the school paper out to shock the principal–even though both are in their early fifties….
– While we’re on the subject, here’s a new angle on The Passion of the Christ, courtesy of Variety:
Young males who flock to slasher pics seem to be taking an interest in “The Passion,” which has been widely characterized as gory by reviewers.
Fangoria editor Anthony Timpone said, “It’s sparked an interest in my readership because of the extreme nature of the it as well as the controversy.” The magazine hasn’t covered “The Passion,” but Timpone said horror helmer David Cronenberg recently suggested he should. And at least one horror fan site, E-Splatter.com, has given “The Passion” the thumb’s up: “As a horror fan, I was more than satisfied. This is not some kiddie Christ film. This is the real deal.”