Random Notes:

April 25, 2003

Steve Almond's primer on writing pornography is very cool. I blogged his interview in Identity theory a while back. I really ought to read the book (Of course all the Steve Almond links are stolen from Jess Crispin's weblog who seems to post anything that Almond writes).

Anne Burke in a rather well written rant about nothing in particular:

"Here is a simple matter: if you want to oppose war (or anything else for that matter), get your ass out on the street and risk something, but do not abuse poetry any more than it is already abused by writing (and then, dear God, reading aloud!) some piece of worthless crap. Since the beginning of mankind, there have been written only three good "war protest" poems, but in each case I suspect that the poets were, as poets do, appropriating war as materials for their poems. In short, they may not have been all that sincere. As to the rest of you, stop degrading the language and the form...."

Rebecca Traister managed to catch the interesting side of LeRoy in a story about him and his rather strange world:

"When people think about Jesus, they think about the crucifixion and the rising," he said. "But if you think about who he was, he was a guy who hung out with a bunch of freaky people, a bunch of outcasts. He was probably a little psychotic himself, but he hung out with street people and prostitutes. I?d like to think I?m a little healthier than Jesus, because I?ve had more therapy than he did. And I?m not into pain like he was."

(The last two links via Mobilives)

Reason online has a very good essay on Vaclav Havel by Matt Welch. (Welch also maintains a popular 'warblog', a genre that that I find a little disturbing).

I find Havel one of the most enigmatic people in contemporary Europe. I am ambivalent about the quality of his statesmanship or the wisdom of his politics. But his courage and humanism has never been in question.

Sometime back there was also very good profile of Havel by Remnick in The New Yorker. It is very well written. I saved the link somewhere for weblogging later (with suitably weighty sounding commentary) and forgot all about it until now. (Thanks to google, I rediscovered it in Tigerbeat)

Posted by Kaushik at April 25, 2003 03:13 PM | TrackBack

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