A couple of days ago, I viewed Tim Fehlbaum’s directorial debut Hell, which “tells the story of a group of survivors in post-apocalyptic Germany in the year 2016, when solar flares have destroyed the earth’s atmosphere and temperatures have risen by 10°C.” As my posts here on The Walking Dead and The Road would indicate,Continue reading “The Post-Apocalyptic Famine”
Category Archives: Philosophy
A Professional Businessman, Not a Professional Pakistani
Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears‘ My Beautiful Laundrette makes most of its viewers laugh a lot. My personal favorite of its many rib-ticklingly subversive moments came–as it seemingly did for many others–when the gay street punk Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) helps the Pakistani Nasser Ali (Saeed Jaffrey) evict black West Indian tenants from his slummish property,Continue reading “A Professional Businessman, Not a Professional Pakistani”
The New York State Assembly is First Amendment-Illiterate
Earlier this morning, on both my Facebook and Twitter pages, I wondered aloud Is the Empire State particularly hostile to academic freedom? Is it particularly illiterate about the First Amendment? The reason for this slightly despairing query? Read this and despair for free speech: The New York State Assembly is currently considering a bill (A.8392) to prohibitContinue reading “The New York State Assembly is First Amendment-Illiterate”
The Coven’s Vision of Hell and ‘Repetition Compulsion’
American Horror Story‘s third season, The Coven, ended last night. The show as a whole did not quite meet my expectations–a critique echoed here and here; but still, for various reasons, I quite enjoyed the season’s finale. Among them was it’s take on hell: each of us has our own private one. Misty, the “swamp-dwelling,Continue reading “The Coven’s Vision of Hell and ‘Repetition Compulsion’”
The Nature Documentary and the Failed Hunt
Like many middle-class children, here or elsewhere, I watched wildlife documentaries while ‘growing up.’ There was a long-running Sunday feature whose name I forget that subjected one species to its lens each week; there were the full-length movies–sometimes on the big cats (my personal favorite), sometimes on elephants, sometimes on the primates–my parents took meContinue reading “The Nature Documentary and the Failed Hunt”
Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero and the ‘Hidden Presence of Others’
Michael Ondaatje‘s Divisadero is a wise book, elliptical and allusive in his distinctive style, one replaying close, attentive reading to its many lovely, lyrical lines, too many to excerpt and note. Here is one that hones in on a truth already known to those who create: Everything is biographical…What we make, why it is made,Continue reading “Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero and the ‘Hidden Presence of Others’”
My Imagined Interlocutors
Sometimes I find myself conducting arguments with myself; ‘in my head’, as it were. I walk along the streets, running their premises and conclusions through my mind; I refine their rhetorical pitch, I rehearse them; sometimes, I find myself overcome by the emotion associated with their content; indeed, one of the reasons I write hereContinue reading “My Imagined Interlocutors”
Combating Envy with the Quotidian
Last week, I suffered a crippling, sickening, attack of envy. For one day, soon after I had awoken and fixed myself my morning cuppa, a missive arrived, confirming for me not just someone else’s spectacular success, but also the darkest assessments I often entertain about my professional and intellectual worth. I tried to put these thoughtsContinue reading “Combating Envy with the Quotidian”
The American Tragedy of Willie Bosket
The story of Willie Bosket, now serving a life sentence, due only to be released from solitary confinement in 2062, and once described as New York state’s most dangerous prison inmate, is the kind of tale all too easily described as an American tragedy. Fox Butterfield‘s All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition ofContinue reading “The American Tragedy of Willie Bosket”
Dexter, Psychopaths, and Vigilante Justice
Dexter provoked a great deal of commentary–as any long-running television serial on a killer-killing serial killer would (and should.) Now that I’ve finished the show–all eight seasons of it, after feeling several times during the sixth season that I would never make it to the end–I’ll throw in my tuppence. Dexter‘s central conceit–the killings mentionedContinue reading “Dexter, Psychopaths, and Vigilante Justice”
Samir Chopra 