In the alternative reality presented in The Plot Against America, the relocation of America�s Jewish population�including the narrator�s family�under the Homestead 42 scheme is seen one of the final steps in cementing the Lindbergh Administration�s totalitarian tendencies. But this fictional act of state coercion pales in comparison with the real Executive Order 9066, which Roosevelt […]
It’s rare that this monkey feels the need to defend Sig. Silvio Berlusconi, but reading this week’s Lettera dall’Italia in Internazionale, written by film critic Deborah Young, I have the unsettling urge to rally to Berluska’s defence. Young, on contemporary Italian film making writes: “The worrying thing is that the last spaces for freedom of […]
OK, first off, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is an entertaining work, its ‘counterfactual’ premise evoking for me those yellow-jacketed Gollancz sci-fi novels that I borrowed from the local library before I dutifully moved on to ‘proper’ literature. In fact, the alternative history that Roth limns in this novel -that Charles Lindbergh’s successful Republican […]
A new report from England, on the effects of texting on literacy, will be of some comfort to Italy’s cultural guardians. The study, conducted at the the department of communication and science at City University in London, found that there were no significant differences in the instances of grammar and spelling mistakes between two groups […]
A new report from England, on the effects of texting on literacy, will be of some comfort to Italy’s cultural guardians. The study, conducted at the the department of communication and science at City University in London, found that there were no significant differences in the instances of grammar and spelling mistakes between two groups […]
As someone obliged to regard the artistic endeavours of my (oh so advanced) three-and-a-half year-old daughter with the frowning awe of a latter-day Clement Greenberg, I found this odd project weirdly compelling.Link via Boing BoingMore substantial posts on the way, I hope, including a very belated critique of what I consider to be some very […]
Last night in Rome ten to fifteen thousand people marched in a candlelit procession to the Iranian embassy, to protest against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement that ‘Israel should be wiped off the map’. Were this Monkey in Rome yesterday, he would have attended the march, albeit with an apprehension as to what one’s presence […]
November the 2nd is, across the Catholic world, the day of the dead, a day when families visit the final resting places of their dearly departed, physically or metaphorically. Thirty years ago today, on a patch of wasteground near the beach resort of Ostia, the brutally beaten body of poet and film director Pier Paolo […]
Review of The Constant Gardener now available here. Capsule review: Good, but could have been even better.