The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on July 01, 2025, 11:58:25 am ---What a charismatic person Lincoln was! I'm almost inspired to read his biography or watch the movie with Daniel Day-Lewis.
--- End quote ---
The movie with Daniel Day-Lewis is quite good. Tommy Lee Jones is Lancaster, Pennsylvania's own Thaddeus Stevens.
Front-Ranger:
Interesting, Wrangler.
I was also struck by the profile of Sayaka Murata in the April 14th issue. I've not heard of the concept of defamiliarization before. Making the familiar strange. I like that idea and have started to practice it. Isn't that what makes Brokeback Mountain, the story, so shocking and effective? You take a couple of gay men and put them in a different environment, like rural Wyoming, and voila! You have a mindbending story.
I've often tried to visualize what Earth would look like for space creatures looking down on us. A bunch of beetles scurrying around on round rubber feet, I imagine. A few birds, some large with shiny metal feathers, and a few snakelike things slithering along tracks.
Jeff Wrangler:
In that June 30 article about the Mutter Museum, I think the woman in the photograph on page 41 looks like the woman in the famous Grant Wood painting "American Gothic."
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on June 28, 2025, 04:16:39 pm ---Yeah, what's up with that? >:(
--- End quote ---
Finally came a couple of days ago. I've been reading the Civil War article.
I've seen, and also enjoyed, the Daniel Day-Lewis Lincoln movie.
I'm a little vague on this, but my feeling is that Lincoln, though presumably favoring abolition, was not a big anti-slavery crusader as much as a leader trying to find compromises that would keep the country together. That's shocking from today's perspective, but it's hard for us to put ourselves in the mindset of a time when slavery had been practiced so long and so routinely that it wasn't regarded as the great evil we see it as now. Maybe more like the way now we'd regard some people not having health insurance or something like that. Far from ideal, but maybe at the time considered short of outright evil.
Front-Ranger:
That's the same impression I got about Lincoln. Going back to Washington, he was also opposed to slavery, but he did have enslaved people, who came from his wife's side (she was a widow). He directed that all the slaves should be freed upon his wife's death, and some were freed before that. Washington was opposed to some issues privately but didn't speak out publicly. And Jefferson! He wrote the Constitution, including "All men are created equal" while having children with his Black maid. How Shakesperian.
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