"So we beat on, boats against the current"

If Michael Fassbender copped an attitude...

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:24:54 -0500

He would be Michael Sassbender.

vintageanchorbooks: Literary Caucus: Salman Rushdie, James...

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:53:24 -0500

Literary Caucus: Salman Rushdie, James Franco, and 28 More Notables Assess Philip Roth’s Career…

“Philip Roth turns 80 next month, with 27 novels behind him, but when he announced his retirement last November, it felt like he was actually cutting something short—possibly the most prolific, probably the most distinguished, and certainly the most debated career in postwar American fiction. Roth was never just a novelist to readers but an iconoclast and narcissist, a Jewish cultural hero (villain to some), a (probable) misogynist, a literary celebrity who folded his own life into novels like they were tabloids (or metafictions?) and, after Toni Morrison, our great American hope, The Man Who Should Win the Nobel Prize (If Any Man Should). Just ahead of Philip Roth: Unmasked, an intimate documentary airing on PBS next month, we asked a panel of 30 literati to assess his oeuvre.”

Read in New York magazine here.

jeffthrowdown: What the fucking fuck is this shit?

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:37:30 -0500

jeffthrowdown:

What the fucking fuck is this shit?

"The cruelest thing anyone can do with Portnoy’s Complaint is read it twice."

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:08:01 -0500

““The cruelest thing anyone can do with Portnoy’s Complaint is read it twice.””

- Irving Howe, “Philip Roth Reconsidered.” Commentary, December 1972.

vintageanchor: James Joyce collector coin launched…A new coin...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:05:16 -0500

vintageanchor:

James Joyce collector coin launched…
A new coin honouring James Joyce was launched by the Central Bank today featuring a portrait of the writer and lines from Ulysses.

More here.

(Photograph: Jason Clarke):

Mad Men Review ("The Doorway" April 7, 2013)

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 22:38:42 -0500

Oscillating between the inferno of a career and the paradiso of something unattainable, Don Draper finds himself in the same place as Dante’s Pilgrim, halfway through life, alone in the wilderness. Throughout the course of the two hour season 6 premiere, there’s a sense that things are in motion without actually going anywhere. It’s because they’re not. Roger Sterling’s musings during a session with an analyst reveal a seemingly nihilistic attitude toward life, that it’s nothing but doors, bridges, and windows that open up and then shut behind you; that all the major events in life are nothing but pennies that we pick up on the street and then continue on our path toward Death. And Death, my favorite subject, comes up in almost every scene in this episode, whether it’s in the form of literature (Dante), a funeral (Roger loses his mother), or a doctor (Arnold Rosen). Along with the mentioning of Death is the denial of it, as the conversation arises after Don unsuccessfully pitches an ad for Hawaii in which the paradisiacal neophyte to our nation is a jumping off point - a chance for the individual to get to heaven, their paradise. In that sense, Hawaii, Don’s vacation, is more of a purgatorio than anything else. Death becomes the thing that Don struggles to sell, the hotel reps being uncomfortable with the possibility of people reading into the ad and finding suicide, because it’s the thing that people are surround by, which has always been the case, however, but the events of the late 1960s have made it seem more ubiquitous than ever. It’s everywhere to the point where Roger can’t feel anything after his mother passes away, much like Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger. This focus on death for the beginning of a season seems appropriate when considering that this is the penultimate season of the show - Mad Men is aware of its own eminent demise. And because of that, as well as the turbulence of the end of the 60s, I’m guessing that it’s now 1968, we’re going to experience these characters in this transition period - midway through their lives, in the wilderness of death.

fuckyeahdirectors: Martin Scorsese directing Leonardo Dicaprio...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 03:12:22 -0500

fuckyeahdirectors:

Martin Scorsese directing Leonardo Dicaprio on-set of The Aviator

breelandwalker: applepiesfromscratch: How To Suck At Your...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 03:08:26 -0500

breelandwalker:

applepiesfromscratch:

How To Suck At Your Religion by The Oatmeal

(View Full Comic)

I love this comic so fucking much.

"If one thinks of Americans in this way, “freedom” is used here as a synonym for “comfort.” People..."

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 03:01:16 -0500

“If one thinks of Americans in this way, “freedom” is used here as a synonym for “comfort.” People think they are free because they don’t have a military machine oppressing them; but one of the simplest ways to lose freedom is to stop fighting for it and stop respecting it. And when it goes that way, something much worse happens, I think: when freedom goes that way, it completely vanishes, and nobody cares.”

- An excerpt from “The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings” by James Baldwin (via iamapatientboy)

jeffthrowdown: mrchristianbale: Fucking Quintana. That creep...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:03:55 -0500

jeffthrowdown:

mrchristianbale:

Fucking Quintana. That creep can roll, man.

The man is a pederast.

8 year olds..

Photo

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:01:29 -0500

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per...

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 22:44:22 -0500

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

Photo

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 22:42:36 -0500

How to Pull an All-Nighter Effectively and Still Do Well on Your Exam

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 22:39:37 -0500

thisisjennn:

Favorite German novel, favorite German film.

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 22:39:09 -0500

Favorite German novel, favorite German film.

Photo

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 22:35:47 -0500

“For me, film-making combines everything. That’s the reason...

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 03:23:06 -0500

“For me, film-making combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AKIRA KUROSAWA | (March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998)

vintageanchor: On this day in 1932, the infant son of Charles...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:54:17 -0500

vintageanchor:

On this day in 1932, the infant son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh was kidnapped from the family home near Hopewell, N.J.

*

In Philip Roth’s novel THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, he imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America–and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.

thepenguinpress: Happy 80th birthday to Philip Roth! “Because...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:49:56 -0500

thepenguinpress:

Happy 80th birthday to Philip Roth!

“Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.”

-The Human Stain

Illustration by Andy Friedman (via)

vintageanchor: “He had learned the worst lesson that life can...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:49:41 -0500

vintageanchor:

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.”
― from American Pastoral

Happy 80th birthday to Philip Roth.