As of course we were, here is one of the great monologues of movie history. Right? The Indianapolis Speech Jaws — MOVIECLIPS.com
Entries Tagged as 'Uncategorized'
Speaking of Sharks …
January 9th, 2012 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments
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In Defense of Civil War Reenacting (Not!)
August 31st, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · 2 Comments
The Red Badge of Gayness Tags: SOUTH PARKmore… While Andrew Sullivan is on vacation, his blog has taken up the always contentious topic of Civil War reenacting. It started with Drew Gilpin Faust, who argued that reenactments are “less about remembrance than forgetting” (pdf). This prompted Lewis McCrary, thesaurus in hand, to counter: For [...]
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Eat That, King George!
May 3rd, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments
In a world without hope … there will always be 30 Rock.
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Top Ten Books of 1709
December 7th, 2009 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments
More than 150,000 books were published this year; in 1709, in the British colonies of North America, that number was just 31. Out of those, the historian Jill Lepore gives us her Top 10. Unsurprisingly, New Englanders, the likes of Increase Mather and his son Cotton, dominate the list. Virginia, after all, was “one of [...]
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Beware the Organized Big Fairies
September 9th, 2009 by Brendan Wolfe · 1 Comment
From the Wilson Quarterly, history professor Anders Hendriksson compiles verbatim excerpts from several decades’ worth of freshmen papers, so offering their “more striking insights into European history from the Middle Ages to the present.” Here’s the beginning: History, as we know, is always bias, because human beings have to be studied by other human beings, [...]
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Cellulose Preaching
August 25th, 2009 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments
The details of this particular academic kerfuffle are less interesting (to me) than the fact that John Stauffer, a professor of history at Harvard University and author, with Sally Jenkins, of The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy, defends Hollywood films: I’ve been amazed by the deep animosity that [...]
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Something to Chew On
July 31st, 2009 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments
From Ta-Nehisi Coates: We have too much faith in talk,—or rather we have too much faith in big men to control events through talk. The obsession with a “dialouge around race” is nauseating. I can’t tell if it’s real, or just a notion that (much like “postracial”) that cable news hosts put to their guests. [...]
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Iowa and Why It's the South's Fault
June 11th, 2009 by Brendan Wolfe · 1 Comment
“You are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always well taken care of if you come from Iowa.” – Gertrude Stein “Seldom has a people been less interested in spiritual self-expression and more concerned with hog nutrition.” – Johan J. Smertenko [...]
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And from Baseball Back to Jazz Again
May 8th, 2009 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments
As noted previously, Alfred Appel Jr. has died, and Appel wrote a book about jazz in which he mentioned the baseball player Van Lingo Mungo, whose name was so cool that the jazz musician Dave Frishberg wrote a song about it—a song whose lyrics consisted of only the names of baseball players. Frishberg also wrote [...]
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From Nabokov to Jazz to Baseball
May 8th, 2009 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments
Look, I know this has no connection to Virginia—although, for the record, I used the full power of Google to try create one. But we’re going to go ahead and mourn the loss of Alfred Appel Jr. anyway. After all, we are not only about the Civil War here, or history; we are about Nabokov [...]
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