This will be a difficult week. How can I face trouble at work? Stress-related illness, a false friend betraying me, and visiting my father who is very ill with brain cancer? Family helps. Real friends help. Going to the beach this weekend and writing was excellent medicine.
How does everyone else handle crises?
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Thursday, September 9, 2010
GET LOW
How does a person handle deep, irrational love that envelopes the body and spirit and won’t let go? How can anyone prevent such a love from causing destruction?
What is the best way to ask for forgiveness?
These are the questions posed by the Robert Duvall movie Get Low, directed by Aaron Schneider and written by Chris Provenzano.
In 1920s small town American, Duvall portrays Felix Bush, a hirsute hermit with a secret past. Felix wakes from a 40-year funk and decides to orchestrate his own funeral and attend it as the main speaker. He is assisted in this plan by Buddy Robinson, sweetly acted by Lucas Black. Black, as a young boy played the lead opposite Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade.
Times are hard in a flapper, Model T sort of way. Bill Murray, as Frank Quinn, the sarcastic funeral director, laments “Everywhere in the world people are dying. Everywhere but here.” He finds Felix fascinating because Felix has a big greasy wad of money to spend on a funeral “party.” If Felix can pay, Quinn can arrange anything.
In Duvall sinner-saint fashion, reminiscent of The Apostle, Felix turns the tables on everyone. “Am I the only one,” Quinn asks, “who has noticed this guy is extremely articulate when he wants to be?”
Suspense builds as the date of the funeral nears. Felix rekindles a romance with Mattie (Sissie Spacek). He travels to Illinois to visit Rev. Charlie Jackson (Bill Cobbs) a preacher who would rather stay fixed in his quiet life and play dominoes.
This is a yin/yang story. Nobody wastes time polishing a halo. Good and evil are intertwined, and the world exists in purgatory. The answer is honesty. Felix must learn to ask for forgiveness in order to forgive himself.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
THE POWER OF BLOGGING
by Laura P. Valtorta
In China these days, bloggers are able to evade authority and exercise more free speech than traditional journalists. This is partly because bloggers use pseudonyms. Chinese authorities tend to quash any criticism of the government. Chinese blogs persist at this point, but the Chinese government would like to force contributors to register under their true names.
The 17 June 2010 issue of Avvenire, (a Catholic newspaper I tend to read in Italy because the writing is simpler than in other newspapers) contained an article about Han Han, a 27-year-old blogger on Sina.org who is followed by 300 million readers. Han apparently has a lot to say about the recent killings of schoolchildren in China and the inability of the government to prevent these killings. Avvenire, being Catholic, emphasized that most modern Chinese families have only one child, because that is all the law allows, and the loss of a child in China is therefore particularly harsh. But the death of a schoolchild is always horrific.
Most newspapers are biased. Most forms of writing, whether fiction or non-fiction espouse a particular point of view. The Chinese government apparently slants news in favor of the communist party. In Italy, journalists make no secret of their bias, writing for newspapers that are communist or Catholic or Christian Democrat and pointing the news in that direction. Avvenire, like the Catholic Church, would have us produce as many children as possible, regardless of the effect on the environment, because the Church wants more members. The Church wants to keep women in line. They dislike the fact that Italy, a crowded country, has a negative birth rate. Italy, unlike the United States, is beginning to control its pollution problem. Maybe the Church doesn’t like that, either.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
