Listmaker, listmaker

When I was in college, I moderated a forum which asked several professors to pontificate about thosee lists (e.g. Modern Library's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century) becoming increasingly popular because 99 was changing 00. Since, I've largely become a detractor of lists. They're useful if you make them yourself—of groceries, of things to do, of books to read—but their utility doesn't reach far beyond the personal. I've scoffed and sighed when I've seen über lists arise, but that hasn't stopped their arising yet. My blog-cred is suffering, I realize, because I'm a month late in posting this, but did you know these were the “Most Harmful Books” of the past two hundred years? Of note: Darwin only made honorable mention, but Marx & Engels made it twice; Silent Spring?; Why no Orientalism? Anyway, I'm sure you get the drift.

posted by Greg at 8:32 AM

rose update

rose is now 1.5+ years old and can do lots of new stuff. most importantly, she talks a lot nowsome of it makes sense, some doesn't. she never speaks in sentencesalmost always single words. today's word of the day is "heavy," which seems to mean something that is difficult to pick up for any reason. That is, heavy things can actually be heavy, or they can just be entangled with another object in such a way that renders them hard to pick up.

another of her favorite words is "rose," which invariably means "rose wants to do this." often "rose" is used in the context of turning on the microwave, ringing the doorbell, flipping the light switch, walking up the stairs (instead of being carried), etc.

posted by Chris at 5:29 PM

Blow

Forgive me for bringing it up, but in our house we can't stop watching Blow Out. If you live cable-free, or if you have better taste than I, then here's the gist:

Jonathan Antin owns two hair salons.

Really, that's about it. The first season followed Jonathan around Beverly Hills as he started his second salon there. So far this season seems to be about Jonathan's new line of product. Jonathan himself is a megalomaniac whose narcissism Kathy thinks is a cover for his homosexuality, but I think is overcompensated masculinity in the face of an ever-effeminizing career choice. Whatever his clinical diagnosis might be, he manages in every episode 1) to explain how he has everything he ever wanted; 2) to remind that he's just a hair stylist; 3) to insist he loves chicks; 5) to worry over how little his stylists are making; 4) to cry to his psychiatrist that nobody understands his generous heart; 6) to piss other narcissists off; and 7) to look in a mirror/to pimp for Lens Crafters/to pimp for Sprint/to pimp for Botox. It's shallow, monotonous, excruciatingly chauvinist, stocked with materialistic people, silly women, effeminate men (not to say that the girls and the men aren't materialistic), and—like watching Cry Baby—intoxicating.

posted by Greg at 11:23 PM

naptime

just a little pic of a little girl who likes to watch the world more than she likes to sleep, even though sleep is what lets her be a happy little girl who observes the world

posted by Jeremy at 10:09 PM

Beebe for Governor

A quick note: when I was in high school, I served a day as Mike Beebe's Page when he was a state Senator. Being a Page, at least on the day I volunteered, was unconscionably boring. Nevertheless, it's yet another of my slight brushes with politics, such as the day I shook Bill Clinton's hand (in fourth grade, when he was my governor and spoke at the annual awards banquet my school held), or the day I got Oliver North to autograph a slip of paper from a chiropractic office.

posted by Greg at 9:26 AM

Salvador

Joan Didion's Salvador is less Didion's El Salvador than it is American policy in El Salvador according to Didion, and even then, it's not really that. Neither straight-up travelogue nor succinct empirical analysis, the essays constitute what Mary Louise Pratt says they are: a book that abdicates traditional narrative authority and subscribes to a recognition that something exists outside what that authority can know (Imperial Eyes 225–6). Pratt is disappointed with Didion for not having greater sympathy for El Salvador than she does, and she finds Didion's abdication of authority a counter-rhetoric that goes too far opposite the traditional rhetorics of travel to be ethical. I largely agree with Pratt, although sometimes I wonder whether her disappointment with Didion is more because Didion is a woman and is of ambiguous ethics than it is that she is of ambiguous ethics. Where is El Salvador in Salvador? The country is torn apart by civil war. Men and boys, women and girls, Americans and Salvadorans die at the hands of death squads. The nation's mode is fear, and for that reason most of the traditional subjects that attract the attentions of western travelers—culture, markets, history, prehistory, nature—are closed to her gaze. She went to El Salvador, she claims, because she wanted to learn the truth of El Salvador; of her experience, what turns out to be the truth of the place for her, she writes, “I came to understand in El Salvador the mechanism of terror” (26). For Didion the mechanism of terror is uncertainty paired with inaction, threat with ignorance, power with misunderstanding. El Salvador is a place where no meaning is constant—the size of an earthquake, for example, could shift from day to day because no one knew, or cared, about the measures of science. Where to read The New England Journal of Medicine is to read leftist propaganda no concept is pure, no idea safe, no meaning constant. Didion's El Salvador is thus a place that has nothing to know—it is, in other words, terror. (Cynically, stereotypically, to a western traveler anywhere where is the unknown is terror.) The last pairing, power with misunderstanding, draws her attention most because it turns on a different kind of unknown, irony and it provides her with the traveler's other common subject—one which seemingly springs eternal—governmental corruption. Didion's sojourn in El Salvador was during the heyday of the Reagan Administration's most two-headed policies regarding that nation. In one breath America would celebrate El Salvado's progress toward democracy; in another it would support the Salvadoran government's quashing of dissent. The relationship turned, Didion observed, on

something of the familiar ineffable, as if it were taking place not in El Salvador but in a mirage of El Salvador, the mirage of a society not unlike our own but “sick,” a temporarily fevered republic in which the antibodies of democracy needed only to be encouraged, in which words hand stable meanings north and south (“election,” say, and “Marxist”) and in which there existed, waiting to be tapped by our support, some latent good will. (96)

Her point is clear: elections mean nothing if that which defines power is outside of law and, hence, outside of election; and accusation alone doesn't a communist make—but there, then, accusation stood for definition, and so long as the Salvadorans were eradicating “communists”—and surely they were, since they said they were—the Americans gave them money and political breaks. In Salvador, to seek meaning is to find meaning is outside of your grasp; the passages that matter most, in the end, are scenes. When life exists in spite of terror, as when she watches a man teach a woman to drive; or when nauseous fear becomes the only real response, as when a group of young men with automatic weapons surround her and her husband on the street: the only El Salvador that exists in Salvador is the one that appears when Didion describes what she cannot explain.

posted by Greg at 10:24 PM

in the same vein

a few sundays ago i was really nervous walking in to class because we were going to discuss matthew 19 and there are a number of divorced and remarried people in our sunday school class. in fact, one of these couples had told me just the previous sunday that they had some questions about matthew 19. that sunday, i hadn't yet read ahead (and i don't know my bible the way i used to know it in college), so i had no idea what question they might have. but when i sat down to prepare for class, my palms started sweating as i read the chapter and i began to utterly dread class. matthew 19 starts off with jesus being asked about divorce and remarriage, and i was sure that this was the question...after all, had it been me, that would've been my question. in the end, jesus is quite definite about his proscription of marriage between divorcees...and its only been in the last 15 years that mainstream american denominations have begun to move away from a literal reading of jesus' proscription. in fact, there are still some groups and some congregations among other groups, who still view the divorced with suspicion. unfortunately/fortunately, they didn't show the next sunday.

later that week he emailed me and his question had nothing whatsoever to do with divorce and remarriage, but with why jesus didn't go into a disquistion on grace when the rich young ruler came to ask him about what works he needed to do to be saved...after all, we all know that we are saved by grace. but not only does jesus not launch into a "my blood is sufficient" soliloquy, he even says you must obey the law.

in terms of hermeneutics, the two questions seem to be very similar. his is essentially: "how do i reconcile this statement about works, that is, this non-statement about grace, by the founder of our faith with church doctrine on salvation by grace?" mine is: "how do we read jesus' statement on divorce and remarriage without continuing to ostracize those who are?" both questions want to read jesus without taking what he says literally.

as my recent hijacking of chris' post on literality shows, questions of heremeneutics and interpretation fascinate me...but more than fascinate me in an "at play in the fields of the differed signifier" kind of way, they are, especially when it comes to scripture, something i take rather seriously. and, though i think that there are limitations, uncertainties and ambiguities i'm not all about the free play of the signifier. and, though i believe that humans are hermeneutical beings, creatures that actively interpret the world around them, i do not necessarily ascribe to the facile, popularized nietszchean idea that everything is interpretation. irony, ambiguity, uncertainty, and even a multiplicity of interpretations were all around well before post-structuralism's celebration of the unconcious of language or the uncertainty of language, something i find to be more a curiousity than anything else. all of this to say, hermeneutics is wrent with problems whether or not one is poststructuralist/postmodernist. and, though many people might find the more theoretical aspects of hermeneutics to be arcane, this does not mean that how one reads and the problems inherent to interpretation do not have effects in the world...consider the number of people the church has ostracized because of how it reads jesus' pronouncement on divorce and remarriage...or the debates that the church of christ and the baptists had in the 40s and 50s where one group would ridicule the other for their doctrine of "once saved always saved" and the other would be ridiculed for its "work based" religion...or how the church of christ has read "make music in your hearts" and what it has done with this interpretation.

i opened my missive to him with a statement about interpretation...because, regardless of how you read the passage of the rich young ruler, unless you simply say: "you must keep all the law in order to be saved", you are actively doing something to the text. especially, if what you want to do is make the text say that grace is what all of Jesus' teachings are about. in fact, if one reads his teachings there is much more in the gospels about keeping the law faithfully than about grace. my comments were intended to show that what we were doing with the text was precisely producing an interpretation, which, as such, only has validity as an interpretation...it is not, in fact, a "faithful" reproduction of jesus' statement but us doing something to his statement. that, in fact, regardless of what we say about jesus' words, we have to remember that he said what he said. that is, he did say "if you wish to enter into life you must keep the commandments" and making it say anything else is precisely that, us making it say something else. because we are making it say something else, it is my belief that we should go in as aware as possible of what is going on and what we are doing.

i then pointed out that throughout matthew 19 jesus uses hyperbole in all of his responses to those who are questioning him in order to get the disciples to say: "well, who can keep the commandments?...who can be saved?...why should we even marry if this is what is required of us?" paying attention to this dynamic allows us to propose that jesus is trying to show the impossibility of keeping the law and thus the need for something else. thus, when jesus says "what is impossible for man is possible for God", one could plausibly say that he is speaking of grace. but, still he does not say that this is grace and, like i said before, jesus speaks much more of keeping the law than of grace. (i did not go into the question of the editor of the gospel arranging jesus' statements in such a way as to make this point)

in the end, my interlocutor could care less about questions of interpretation all he wanted me to say was: "yes, Jesus knew all along that salvation is by grace and grace alone...and, that he didn't mean for us to take what he said literally. instead, he was being ironic and using hyperbole to show them that it is impossible to please God."

this, for me, is a clear example of what i mean by the problems of interpretation...do you read them as suffused with irony and thus bolstering the idea of salvation by grace or do you read them literally and then have to deal with the question of works?

and, though we may think hermeneutics to be arcane and academic (which in a way it is) it still has very real effects on the world, on how treat others, on how we practice our christianity.

posted by Jeremy at 2:30 PM

Under the Banner of Heaven

Krakauer, Jon. Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Christ told his children, “I know life is fucking crazy, but I'm here to tell you there's purpose behind it. We're working for the Kingdom of God. And the way we do that is we just put in our time here. And every hour you put in here is building up credit for the Big Party. That's the promise. That's the covenant. It's going to be crazy down there for a while, but in the end, through Elijah, I will come.”

Krakauer describes it as a basic debate on the nature of religious faith: on the one hand his attorneys argued that his faith was so radical as to be evidence of insanity;on the other hand the prosecution argued that no such argument could work—who is to say any faith is sane?—because by its very nature religion carries within it its own reasonableness,its own sense of righteous action. As Krakauer describes the trial, he lets others argue where his own analysis and meditation on his subject might have been more valuable. And Ron's venom is strong: Krakauer recounts the man's death row hearing in which Ron spits curses at the judge throughout. As for Dan, however, in Utah “almost nobody doubts the sincerity of [his] religious faith.” His theology is a hodgepodge of Biblical, Mormon, and personally-revealed truth these days; it is his eschatological vision which is at the beginning of this review.

How is it that a fundamentalist is born? How does a man one day exist as a functioning part of his family and community and the next divorce himself from it all? What sends him in the morning to search for truth in scripture and in the evening to come out of it, truth in hand, with the conviction that all is folly? From the certain sinners to those who yesterday seemed righteous themselves but today are hopelessly flawed; to the malleable structures in which the church itself has been passed from yesterday's generation to today's; to all the small compromises each of us makes as we seek to function in this world, the fundamentalist in his search for truth finds it in rejecting all the curves of the world. Perhaps, as happened to Ron Lafferty, what sends him that way is a sudden turn in his luck. Here he defaults on a loan; there his marriage shows cracks where it once was pure plaster. The world does not seem as good as it did. So he turns to scripture to find his way out. But what he finds there is not hope; rather, he finds error. For Mormons who become Mormon Fundamentalists two errors of the LDS church stand out: first, the Doctrine of Celestial or Plural Marriage was abandoned as a capitulation to worldly power, not as a true turn to better doctrine; second, and likewise, President Spencer Kimball's revelation to allow dark-skinned people into the Mormon Priesthood in 1978 was both a mistake and a sign of political weakness, because God and Kimball knows black men cannot be Saints. Whether or not the fundamentalist is a Mormon, where he finds error he advocates return. Let us return to the place we once were!, he cries to himself. His argument is tautology: the church of God can be no other way than the way it was because it is the sanctioned way; the sanctioned way of the church of God is the way it was when the church first came into this world.

The impulse to return to the world as it was is not an impulse that is unique to fundamentalists, of course, and most fundamentalists never reach for so much as Ron and Dan Lafferty did. What they did was awful. Nevertheless, I think a question further remains, especially with respect to Dan: Is what they did also righteous?

posted by Greg at 10:34 PM

one of the saddest movies i've seen in a while

the movie ends with the father (a pakistani or east indian muslim immigrant to a northern english town) coming home alone at night to an empty house, turning on all the lights, going to the basement to turn on louis armstrong as loud as the phonograph will go, getting a bottle of whiskey and a tumbler, climbing the stairs, and sitting with his bottle to drink as satchmo sings about heaven (i didn't, unfortunately, check out what the song was and i've already returned it.)

the movie is the 1997 british release my son the fanatic. after watching it one is left rather disconcerted because it is billed as a comedy, and yet, there are only a few moments of comedy, if one can call the mistaking of "Schitz" for "SHITs" comedic. instead, it is a character study of a muslim, who in his desire to assimilate into british/westerm culture has left behind islam, taken an interest in jazz and whiskey, and is intent on living out the "dream" that he neglects his family and drives his son out of the arts into accounting.

there are so many things that it gets right about religion, assimilation, discrimination that it would be easy to overlook the few false or hollow notes of the movie. the false notes seem more because it gives in, at times, to easy cliches: the father who pushes the son into accountancy rather than fostering his interest in led zepplin; and, it seems, that the main character's defense of all of western culture, even it's acceptance of utterly immoral ways of life seem a little too self-apologetic.

the main character, parvez, utterly adores his only son to the point of idolatry. his hopes of making it in the country rest on the success of his son...his marrying a powerful person's daughter, his success in school and british sports, and his moving up the corporate ladder. parvez and his wife were, apparently, at one time in love with one another, but we see them on the down side of their marriage. parvez is a taxi driver and this keeps him out of the house a lot, especially at night. whatismore, he has struck up a friendship with one of the local prostitutes. the taxi drivers, in order to get more tips, act as pimps. (though this isn't the prostitute with the heart of gold, it is the prostitute who distinguishes herself from the others by being "different," the prostitute who wants nothing more than to be kissed and held by a "man.")

his son, however, tired of his father having sacrificed his "identity" to money and assimilation and wanting to find something more meaningful than subservience to a dominant culture that views muslims (religious or otherwise) as threats, finds family in a strident fundamentalist muslim group made up of young bucks rebelling agaisnt their fathers' lukewarm faith.

the movie alternates between long heart-bearing chats between "bettina" and parvez and the tedium of home life. parvez's wife, minoo, sends much of the money he makes home to her family. he comes home tired, and recently feeling somewhat guilty about his conversations with bettina, while she is tired of being couped up and constantly cleaning and cooking for a husban who's never there. it was an arranged marriage, but they let you know that at one time they were "in love."

"love," or at least, consensual and caring sex is had in the movie between bettina and parvez. for most of the movie parvez is only the virgil of earthly delights...but the pressures at home, the long hours, the friendship with the prostitute finally come to a head and they consumate their feelings for eachother. but even then, parvez cannot decide between his wife and his new love. though he defends his friendship with her as nothing wrong, he still says he wants to be with his wife...that they are too old and have been together too long to be apart. when she leaves for india (or pakistan) at the end of the movie and he stays to wait for his son, he tells her he will return for her once their son comes back home.

though parvez's discription of why he left islam (the overbearing friday school teacher), or his defense of liberal, western, tolerant culture may, at times, ring somewhat false, somewhat too western, what the movie is really good at is portraying contrasts and contradictions. more than his defense of these "values" it is the certainty with which he defends them that comes across as false. for what the movie does best is portray parvez's contradictions and confusions more than his certainties. on the one hand, he is able to see the humanity of the prostitutes (so he defends them) but at the same time he is constantly disgusted by the animal behavior that he facilitates. throughout the entire movie, he is caught between wife and lover; caught between his son's fundamentalism and his own secularism.

at the end of the movie he ends up at the top of a stairway, listening to a sultry trumpet, drinking whiskey in a clean well-lit place as he waits for his son to return from his dalliances with fundamentalism...

posted by Jeremy at 12:47 AM

literally

Here is something that has been on my mind for a while...

What does it mean to believe the Bible is "literally" true or to subscribe to a "literal" interpretation of the Bible? I sincerely do not understand how that is supposed to work. I am not trying to be pedantic or facetious. Maybe people mean that they are trying to interpret the Bible in a "parsimonious" way or the "simplest (in a non-pejorative sense) possible" fashion? On the other had, are not interpretations by definition subjective, ruling out "literal" in the sense of "without interpretation"?

literal:

• without interpretation or embellishment; "a literal translation of the scene before him"


• limited to the explicit meaning of a word or text; "a literal translation"


• lacking stylistic embellishment; "a literal description"; "wrote good but plain prose"; "a plain unadorned account of the coronation"; "a forthright unembellished style"

How might a "literal" interpretation or reading of the following excerpts differ from other reasonable interpretations? Can one come up with a "literal" interpretative rubric that would make effective sense of all of the following?

Genesis 2
[21] So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; [22] and the rib which the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. [23] Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man."

Luke 14
[26] "If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. [27] Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple.

Matthew 21
[18] In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he was hungry. [19] And seeing a fig tree by the wayside he went to it, and found nothing on it but leaves only. And he said to it, "May no fruit ever come from you again!" And the fig tree withered at once. [20] When the disciples saw it they marveled, saying, "How did the fig tree wither at once?" [21] And Jesus answered them, "Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and never doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, `Be taken up and cast into the sea,' it will be done. [22] And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith."

posted by Chris at 3:47 PM

stanley on content

prof. dr. fish is rarely boring. what do you comp teachers (and any other people, of course) think of this? to my teacher-y ears, it sounds fun, but it also sounds like fiction.

posted by Chris at 6:08 PM

riding the netflix wave

this spring we became members of netflix. now, when the little retoño goes to down for the night between 8:30 and 9 we'll pop in a dvd. we've watched the british version of the office (though this was during t's leave back when 20 of the 24 hours of the day were employed in the feeding of evie), 1/3 of monty python's flying circus, and we've just begun homicide (homicide really was just a smart show, largely because it was about anything but homicide. i remember liking it back when it was on; i think we started watching it during the 4th season of 6 seasons).

also we've watched "luther," an awful movie recommended to me by a reformed baptist student of mine, who, like a good conservative christian (of the kind that we can no longer find in the u.s.) is wary of images and music. but this movie she liked...i wonder if during the violent scenes, of which there could be many more, she averted her eyes like she's done in movies we've screened in class...but i digress.

it was a rather unfortunate film that turned everyone in the catholic church into power/money hungry men and luther into a reluctant rebel, not that there might have been moments of doubt...but his writings and his handling of scripture show a much more decisive man than the movie. whatismore, it turned luther's god into a god of unconditional love...this is not to say that love, forgiveness, and "direct access to god" aren't part of the reformed tradition, but luther's version of is god is not a modern-day-benny-hin-style-stadium-seating-tent-revival-pray-jesus-into-your-heart-and-your-good-to-go kind of god either. what i would've like to have seen was a little bit more of political intrigue that led to the german rulers supporting the renegade bishop...but, alas, religion and politics are presented in aclassicallyy modern portrayal where religious beliefs act upon the political decisions of those in power and never the other way around. and even this might have been tolerable had they shown how the german princes were converted...but conversion is too private a matter, it seems.

being a fan of the chilean born spanish director alejandro amenábar we saw the sea inside. (his last name comes from northern spain and indicates a possible latin, italian, jewish, visigoth, arabic, and basque ancestry...the visigoth/basque because of the region of spain in which it first appears is the basque country and was one of the last holdouts for the latin/visigothic kingdom when hispania fell to the moors in 711; jewish/arabic because the a's and b's are much more characteristic of arabic/semitic languagesalmohada (pillow), alfombra (rug), berenjena (eggplant) and don't have the x's, t's and g's of many basque names; italian because an amenabar shows up in northern italy quite early on). anyway, he's chilean but all of his movies, with the exception of the british film "the other's" are set in spain and very spanish in nature.

amenábar is a great director, this film in the hands of a lesser director would've been schmaltzy, as it was, there were still moments when amenábar decided to cash in on cheap emotionalism rather than on exploring the legal, metaphysical and psychological difficulties surrounding the right to die movement. given this short coming though, there are moments of real genius, both in terms of the dialogue and the directing (such as the scene where the quadriplegic sampedrothe galician invalid whose life the movie portraysdebates the equally quadraplegic priest who has accused sampedro of being selfish and bourgeois. they at first use a young priest who runs up and down the stairs, since sampedro won't go down to see the priest and the priest can't make it up the stairs in his wheelchair, and then resort to shouting down and and up the stairs as they argue over the right to die).

another fabulous scene is a dream sequence in which sampedro (an ex sailor who becomes a quadraplegic because of diving accident) takes flight from his bed over and through galicia, up and down the fjords that the gallegos are so proud of, to the beach to meet the lawyer who has taken on his case (a women who suffers from cadasil and has taken on the case pro-bono because she too believes she wants the right to die when her time comes) and with whom he has fallen in love. aside from the beauty of galicia, one of the things that makes this scene so fascinating is precisely amenábar's chilean origin and how spanish his films are. galicia becomes a character in the movie, both in this scene and in the constant dialogue about the weather and the land itself. galicia exists in the spanish imagination as a place of natural wonder tended by farmers of stubborn simplicity. in fact, there is no movie set in galicia where the land doesn't become a protagonist. the reproduction of this myth could be a fault, but amenábar does it so well that rather than becoming a weakness it allows him to contrast sampedro's confinement with the beauty and freedom of the outdoors and subtly make his case for the man's desire to die.

javier bardem, the great canary island actor, pulled of one of the best rolls of his career. with the exception of an odd twitch or two and his family rolling him from side to side every three hours, he never moved anything except his head in the movie. and he was able to bring to life a complex man. this is a different bardem from his earlier sex-pot days. aside from the makeup job that turns the 35 yearold actor into a fifty plus man, he talks like a galician. in fact, he sounds like he could actually be the brother of the man who plays his brother. (the canary islanders have a speach that is reminiscent of a thick caribbean accent, whereas the gallegans have a language all their own, which is very similar to peninsular portuguese, and not the melifluous portuguese of the brazilians.)

despite being a movie that is a supposed apology for sampedro and right to die activists, it does such a good job of bringing the family members to life, thier love and care of sampedro, that it could equally make the case for life. in fact, when sampedro explains that the person who really loves him will help him commit suicide, he comes across as someone who knows nothing about love at all. despite everyone falling in love with him and wanting to keep him around (and this could be another fault of the movie), there are time when he is portrayed as someone who is incapable of love.

rather than watching it for where it wants to come down on the death with dignity issue, i would recommend watching to see how the family copes with caring for him and with his death wish, something they do not understand.

i was going to review the triplets of belleville, but that will be for another post.

summertime is a misnomer...for though i might have "more time" and spend some of it on hermits...i really should get to my book.

posted by Jeremy at 8:33 AM