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December 2009

I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road during my move from Texas to Washington, DC. I started at the airport and ended one morning in my bed in DC while my girlfriend was sleeping next to me. It scared me. It wasn't my first book or film about the end of the world as we knew ...

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Is it wrong of me to pass judgment on a book that I haven’t read?  No, I say, on the authority of Malcolm Gladwell—who argues in Blink that a quick first impression is often correct—that I am justified in thinking myself enough of a littérateur to know before I reach the end of the first ...

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I won’t pretend to know what it is like to be an artist. I’m far removed from that moniker. I’m simply a viewer. I pay for a ticket. I sit in my seat and I wait for directors to move me. Who knows why I’m so in love with movies. Movies are escape. They always ...

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I live in a hotel for most of the year. Hotels all come with the standard internet connection: shitty. The available cable channels are only slightly better at crappy. Because of this, I'm behind on Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy and The Vampire Diaries. (That's actually a lie. I'm very much up to date on ...

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Black Beard Abuses His Position by Posting a Politically Slanted Opinion Piece Presented as a Book Review: The Jungle

December 27, 2009

Seventeen cents in 1906 is equivalent to $4.02 in 2009. Aside from the intrinsic desire I have to present you with superfluous information, why I am telling you this?  Answer: seventeen cents is the amount Jurgis Rudkus—the focal character of The Jungle, which Upton Sinclair published in 1906—is paid per hour to work in a [...]

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Holmes Not Worth The Film It’s Printed On

December 25, 2009

What does it say about our generation that every time there is a “reimagining” of a classic character they are always sloven frat boys that are too smart for their own good. How is that cool? You know what’s cool? Keeping your room clean. That’s cool.

Take Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk in J.J. Abrams Star Trek [...]

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Up In The Air Not So Lofty

December 24, 2009

George Clooney is dreamy. Let’s just get that out of the way now. Close your eyes for a minute and imagine him running his hands up your thigh.

Now open your eyes.

Did you get it out of your system? If not stop reading. I don’t want to spend all of this time reviewing Up In The [...]

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Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: American Pastoral

December 24, 2009

I like to buy books for people as gifts.  I do this with the awareness that most of the books I purchase will never be finished and most likely not even begun.  I don’t know what it is about me—whether buying books or writing in this space—that instills me with the compulsion to thrust things [...]

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Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: Ulyssses

December 22, 2009

I’ve been reading Ulysses again recently.  As part of the applications I’m submitting to PhD programs in English Literature this winter, I have to produce a sample of scholarly material to demonstrate my analytical ability.  Writing about Ulysses was a safe choice for me because you rarely meet anyone, even in academia, who has studied [...]

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By Endurance We Conquer

December 22, 2009

I just watched The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition is a 2000 documentary directed by George Butler. The film tells the story of Ernest Shackleton and his expedition to cross the newly discovered South Pole  and claim it for England. He set out with 28 crew members, including himself.

A day before reaching land the temperature [...]

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