Every time I see the image of lemur–eyed Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan I struggle to recall where I have seen him in person before. I know that I…
A review of Portrait of Jennie and films of love found and lost in the City Is it every lonely, searching urban man’s fantasy, on turning some city street corner,…
[Continued from Part 1] At Pisa we checked our luggage at the station and headed off for the obligatory staged photographs of each of us “holding the leaning tower from…
The other morning, on some blogsite I was perusing there was an essay on “why Michael Phelps is a jerk.” Conceding that it might take a jerk to waste his…
Most hyphenated Americans, especially those born in the good old USA, carry around some degree of nostalgia for what is commonly referred to as “the old country.” Many will never…
Now that public massacres like the recent one in Aurora, CO, arrive with almost semi-automatic regularity to prompt a few days of public keening, prayer and opportunistic platitudinous funeral orations…
Hitler’s Niece (2009), by Ron Hansen, and Eva (1984), by Ib Melchior Monsters fascinate us, I think, because their very perverse twisted natures provide an insight into our own elusive normalcy. The twisted,…
Note: I have been beseiged by political robo-calls and solicitations of late. So I dug up this piece from a few years ago for myself and fellow sufferers. The…
Last night, on TCM, I found myself watching––again––The Song of Bernadette, the 1943 movie about the little peasant girl of Lourdes who started seeing “a lady in white” in a…
Jesuit missionaries seeking eternal paradise in all the wrong places and all the worse ways. A review Saints of the American Wilderness by John A. O’Brien (2011) Who hasn’t been preached the…