The Buddha in the Attic

05/14/2013 By in Books, Literature, Reading, Reviews, Society Tags: , , , Leave a comment

First, I want to acknowledge my impetus for reading this little book by pointing to the review at A Little Blog of Books. Then I want to give a slightly different view compared with some of the specifics of that review.

Buddha

Yes, the narrative structure of The Buddha in the Attic is not typical of your every-day boring story, or is it? When I was a project manager for a large corporation I used special computer software to develop task flows for the planning and control of major projects. On more than one occasion the charts would consist of a single milestone followed by a widely expanded array of the numerous tasks that followed the milestone and then to collapse into another control point on the chart. This one to many and back to one structure is what I saw in Julie Otsuka’s interesting novel.

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This May Kill You

05/14/2013 By in Announcements, Movies Tags: , , , Leave a comment

And you thought it couldn’t be done.

FrancoLooking over some of the offerings at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I was surprised to see that they made a movie out of William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying.

I expect this will either be an epic twist to the art of film or a lamentable travesty. The movie is from James Franco so I’m not betting on its success (but you have to applause the audacity, I suppose).

I recall that HBO purchased the rights to all of Faulkner’s novels but even when I heard that, I was skeptical. Here’s an article from the Telegraph (Dec. 2011) on the HBO acquisition and plans for filming Faulner:

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A Real Treasure

05/13/2013 By in Adaptations, Books, Movies, Reviews Tags: , , , Leave a comment

The Treasure of the Sierra MadreTonight was movie night. The window was open and Joey popped in so we cranked up the bed and watched Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It was very good. I didn’t lay a hand on Joey. I’m pure and innocent.

The discussion that followed the movie, which obviated the need for animalistic rutting under the Bart Simpson sheets, centered around the differences between the movie and the original novel. How well did the adaptation work? Bottom line, the movie followed the book almost perfectly. But there were a few differences.

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Go Cocks!

05/12/2013 By in Critical Thinking, Politics, Thinking Out Loud Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Last year the senator from South Carolina, Jim DeMint, resigned his elected position to become the head of the influential conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation. Although this was a surprise move, if you think about how much the Senate (and House) gets done in Washington, heading up the Heritage Foundation probably gave DeMitt an even broader voice in spreading his own personal racism.

SCIt didn’t take long but the results are a bit surprising. The Heritage Foundation, following the research done by what the The Daily Beast calls “a report authored in part by a modern-day phrenologist,” made a big and miscalculated splash accusing immigration reform to be hugely expensive. Of course Heritage and their racist guru only calculated the costs of the reform over the years and never included any of the benefits, not even the monetary ones. It has been common knowledge that immigration reform is a winner for the economy of the country, but that didn’t stop Jim DeMint.

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