Walter Kirn is one of those critics whose writing is usually better than the stuff he’s reviewing. He shares James Wood’s knack for the pithy putdown (Wood on John Updike: “It seems to be easier for John Updike to stifle a yawn than to refrain from writing a book.”) but not the latter’s propensity to […]
(Or four items I saw on the web today and decided to link to in lieu of writing something interesting.)1. A new �3,000-a-night luxury hotel, which will replace useless trees and stuff.2. An RTE drama whose contemporary “cred” resides in the fact that its characters don’t go to mass and “spend their weekends drinking and […]
Cindy Sheehan, mother of the US Army Specialist killed in Iraq last year and currently camped outside President Bush’s Crawford retreat demanding a face-to-face meeting. Yes, it’s Christopher “The Hitch” Hitchens in Slate dismissing the woman’s efforts to get “some more face-time with our chief executive.”Of course, Hitchens manages to season his hatchet job with […]
Private Eye magazine honours the venerable English tradition of being suspicious of anything that has a whiff of intellectualism by having a section known as “Pseuds Corner“–a ragbag of postmodern blurbs, art catalog bumf, and Sunday columnists’ posturing. You used to get a tenner sterling if they printed your suggestion. I think the following would […]
David McWilliams is one of the best columnists working in Irish journalism (admittedly the competition isn’t that intense). In today’s Sunday Business Post, he examines the reasons behind the potentially worrying rise in Germany of the Linkspartei, the ramshackle populist coalition led by the former head of the East German Communists Gregor Gysi and Chancellor […]
It’s the 10th anniversary of that squib of a musical revolution, Britpop. The Guardian has an interview with some of the players from the time and it includes this rather precious exchange:”The underbelly of it was all quite sinister to me, despite how it might have seemed on the outside – champagne with Tony Blair […]
If you live in Ireland or Britain and are planning your TV viewing this evening, I recommend that rather than looking at Ricky Gervais’s rather flat Extras, you catch ex-CIA Robert Baer’s programme The Cult of the Suicide Bomber on Channel 4. Last week’s programme lucidly explained how suicide bombing evolved during the Israeli occupation […]
In keeping with my less-than-frenetic pace of blogging during the summer months (I have a life, you know), I’m just getting around to drawing your attention to an interesting piece in last Sunday’s New York Times on “The Xbox Auteurs“.The article describes how a bunch of call-center employees, who also happen to be Halo fanatics, […]
Soon after the fall of Baghdad or maybe it was around the time President Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln with the banner “Mission Accomplished” looming over the flight deck, I listened to a BBC World Service progamme on the state of the World after the Second Gulf War. Although the commentators were divided […]
According to her op-ed piece in the Guardian, Lionel Shriver–author of We Need To Talk About Kevin (see interview in ThreeMonkeysOnline)–lived in Belfast for 12 years. She uses this background as a platform for her views on the “stupidity of the Troubles.” She makes some reasonable if not massively original points–for example, Irish people like […]
