How to Make Your Characters Sound Puerile
By Robert Cooperman
I subscribe to a service that, for a monthly fee, provides playwrights with an extensive list of playwriting opportunities throughout the country (and sometimes the world). In addition to the monthly listing, the service also sends email messages that are supposed to help playwrights improve their craft. These helpful hints may be beneficial for fledgling playwrights, but for more experienced writers they are a little too basic. As a result, I rarely read the tips and tricks. This month I did. And this is why I must write this entry.
Moby Dick: Allegory of the First Order
By David Churchill Barrow
Why Howard Butcher, you old subversive, you, teaching Moby Dick or, The Whale – a scriptural allegory that makes C.S. Lewis and John Bunyan read like Joel Osteen – to our impressionable youth. Fortunately for you, the story is so compelling and the characters so riveting and well-drawn, you will get away with it year after year.
Melville puts the reader in a biblical frame of mind straight off, before he even gets to the story, with his bizarre Extracts (Supplied by a Sub-Sub- Librarian) citing from the books of Genesis, Job, Jonah, Psalms, and Isaiah, among other quotes; which include lines from Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost. To keep us in a King James Bible mood, characters such as the ship owners Bildad and Peleg, first mate Starbuck, and it is presumed, Ahab himself, are Quakers all, keeping in their dialogue the formal “thee and thou” for which that sect was famous.
Why Melville Still Matters
Celebrating the writer’s 200th Birthday
By Howard Butcher
Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum is celebrating the bicentennial of Herman Melville’s birthday by offering a variety of programs and classes about the famous writer’s work. Part of the celebration included a marathon reading of Moby-Dick. Similar events have taken place at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, the Firehouse at Fort Mason in San Francisco, and at Melville’s gravesite at the Woodlawn Conservatory in New York. These celebrations are a testament to the author’s enduring prominence in American literature. His work speaks to today’s generation and our current politics with remarkable prescience. In NRO Victor Davis Hanson recently alluded to Melville’s great novel in a critique of CNN: “But the better question is whether CNN—which has ruined its reputation and profits in an Ahab-esque effort to destroy the Trump white whale—is any longer a media organization at all, or a failing entertainment channel, or a boring Ministry of Truth.”
What Frankenstein’s Monster and the Joker Have in Common
By Shant Eghian
So I finally got around to seeking Joker. I can safely say that, despite many media warnings to the contrary, nothing catastrophic happened. Nothing blew up, the sun didn’t turn as black as sackcloth, a plague of locusts didn’t descend upon the theatre, and most importantly, there wasn’t the promised “wave” of incel violence that everyone was talking about.
In case you don’t know, “incel” stands for “involuntary celibate.” Incels are groups of young men (usually white, but they can be other races as well) who have yet to get into a relationship. They often spend their time on internet forums, resentful of the fact that they can’t find a romantic companion, and blame it on the fact that they were cursed with bad looks, while other guys with ample height and chiseled chins can get whatever girl they want. Their fulminations often devolve into misogynistic jeremiads against the state of modern dating and women in general, and in the worst case, they can take out their rage in acts of violence.
So, when trailers for the new Joker movie depicted a relatively young white male living alone in his apartment and seemingly unable to get into a stable relationship, many in the media panicked that it would inspire mentally unstable white men to go out and engage in acts of brutality. Fortunately, no such thing took place.
Disney Learns: Live by the Woke, Die by the Woke
By Shant Eghian
I have to admit, I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the slew of live-action Disney remakes that the company has been producing over the past few years. It’s not that I hate them, I just don’t find them worth my money. Every once and awhile, one of them would pop up on Netflix, or one of my friends would be playing them in the background, and I’d sit down and give them a watch. They’re… okay. Not terrible, not amazing, just okay. It just seems to me to be a way for Disney to make some easy money.
One aspect of these live action remakes that some have commented on is their newfound “wokeness.” Whether this is making Le Fou from Beauty and the Beast an open homosexual, giving an animal-rights slant to Dumbo, or even giving a subplot to the new Aladdin where Jasmine wants to be the next Sultan, apparently Disney feels like its old properties are in need of some good old self-criticism.
The New Devil’s Dictionary: A Quick Look at the Lexicon of the Left
By Robert Arrington
Beginning in 1881, and extending up through 1906, the American newspaper writer and noted cynic Ambrose Bierce compiled what he called “The Devil’s Dictionary”. It contained wry and sometimes humorous, but always cynical, definitions of words and phrases. The copyright has long since expired, and the entire slim volume can be found at no cost on a number of internet sites.
Bierce suggested his definitions were what people really meant in practice, as opposed to the formal dictionary definitions of the same terms.
One of my favorites is his definition of “bigot.” He wrote that it means “[o]ne who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion you do not entertain.”
Although Bierce wrote this definition well over 100 years ago, the mentality that inspired his biting definition is very much with us. This column will offer some examples of how our political left really defines some terms commonly in use, even though the copy of “Webster’s” on your desk won’t include them.
Making Gotham Great Again, Part 3: Ronald Reagan and the Republican Establishment
By Shant Eghian
One of the most innovative aspects of The Dark Knight Returns is that Miller very clearly places Gotham City in the real world of 1980s America, and not a hyper exaggerated comic book universe. Ronald Reagan is president, the United States is locked in an ever-escalating Cold War, and real-life celebrities like David Letterman and Dr Ruth Westheimer are murdered by the Joker. Of course, Miller never comes right out and names these people, but by the way he draws them, it is easy enough to figure out what he is up to.
Based on previous installments of this series, you may assume that Frank Miller would be very supportive of Ronald Reagan. After all, Batman is a stand in for a type of conservatism that, to paraphrase Whittaker Chambers, recognizes the reality of evil and fights it instead of smiling and waving at it (Chambers, Witness, 704). In a time when Reagan was constantly (and rightly) denouncing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” while many on the Left did not want to hear it, a reader may easily think The Dark Knight Returns is thinly veiled pro-Reagan propaganda. When Reagan does show up approximately halfway through the book however, Miller paints him in a less than flattering light. In almost every appearance, Miller portrays Reagan as a doddering, uncaring fool, who throws American soldiers into Cold War conflicts for no particular reason.
Check out the previous installments in this series: Part 1, The Media, and Part 2, Law and Order
From the Big Bang to Sinatra’s ‘Night and Day’
Great Moments in Chaos and Order, Part 1
By Fred Tribuzzo
From the unknown, let’s call it the eternal, a place outside of time and space, comes ignition and a monstrous flash of energy. This creative power unleashes the universe and births the stars. The Big Bang made its appearance some 14 billion years ago, followed by the Earth at 4.5 billion years. Single-cell microorganisms clock in a billion years later.
In the 1920s the Big Bang’s lines of energy reached the well-ordered mind of Belgian priest George Lemaitre, who had been studying the universe’s creation, incorporating Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and unearthing that flashy moment of creation when an itsy-bitsy particle ignited our ever-expanding universe.
Battling some dissenters, atheist Stephen Hawking agreed that the Jesuit priest was the Father of the Big Bang theory. Hawking also believed that if the Big Bang had come out of the chute a tad slow, or too fast, life would never have developed. Perhaps only in Western Civilization would a priest and a confirmed atheist have strong points of agreement, both affected by the energy traces of the Big Bang, and both departing the world, not as the punchline of a joke, but with plenty of grace.
Frankenstein’s Monster, Mr. Hyde, and the Horrors of Science
By Shant Eghian
For the past month, I have been diving into some of the Golden Age Horror films from the 1930s. Like most people, these are movies that have always been in the background of my cultural knowledge, but ones that I have never actually seen. I decided to change that this October, so I watched Dracula, Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Like a lot of older films, they can be slow and somewhat hokey at times. Since these were some of the first sound films ever produced, most of the actors came right from the stage to the screen, and it shows. As anyone who has been in acting knows, you have to overact on a stage production in a way that comes off as silly in a film, but since many of these actors were not used to the transition, a lot of the performances come off as overdone.
But none of that can suppress the genuinely great scenes in these films; indeed, they deserve the bone-chilling reputation that they have garnered over the decades. No one can ever forget Lugosi’s haunting performance as the title character of Dracula, Fredric March’s leering grin as Mr. Hyde, or Colin Clive’s electrifying screams of “It’s alive! It’s alive!” as the horrifying creature comes to life.
New Humor Essay: Back in the Saddle
By Carlos Stranger
There comes a time in most men’s lives when treatment for erectile dysfunction goes from being some other poor bastard’s problem to something that must be seriously considered. Performance has become less reliable than in youthful glory days, and the underperformance has begun to affect self-esteem and intimate relationships.
Things can be especially confusing if you’ve been out of the loop, i.e. been off the market in those transitory years between steadfast rigidity and a feeling akin to trying to fold a California King foam mattress into the back of a minivan.
