This is a strange yet unsurprising story. A truck filled with 31 individuals was stopped in Idaho. The 31 were on their way to disrupt a gay pride parade in Idaho. The men arrested came from different states. I saw the article in the Houston Chronicle but it was widely reported. When I read it before, I decided not to post it. But then I realized it has a larger significance, as it signifies the normalization of extremism, that is, extremists who wear uniforms and show their faces instead of lurking in the shadows and muttering to themselves.

Why was this group converging on gays in Idaho, not in a city in their own states? I’m guessing that they expected little resistance in a deeply conservative state. If they had rioted in a big city like Houston, Chicago, Miami, or Los Angeles, the crowd would have far outnumbered them and…

The short answer to the question is… maybe, it depends. Not a yes or a no. That’s because should you highlight is not a simple question. Unless you are a marker addict of course, in which case the answer is an unequivocal yes.

Highlighting is a form of engaging with writing. It’s a particular kind of annotation. We read a text and mark out the things that we think are important. And highlighting what we think is important is only half of what we have to do.Highlighting a text is usually understood bythose who research it as three steps:

• Selecting text to highlight
• Organising the highlights into some kind of mental or material schema and
• Integrating what is highlighted into what is already known about the topic.

And here’s the rub. Unless you make it to step three then highlighting doesn’t actually help your comprehension of a topic…

Review by Pauline Kael: “Introducing himself to a delicate, fine-boned parisienne, the farm-boy hero of Louis Malle’s new movie does not give his name as Lucien Lacombe; he gives the bureaucratic designation—Lacombe, Lucien. He presents himself name inverted because he is trying to be formal and proper, as he’s been trained to be at school and at work, sweeping floors at his local, small-town hospital, in southwest France. When he meets the girl, France Horn—and falls in love with her—his new job is hunting down and torturing people for the Gestapo. He likes it a whole lot better than the hospital. The title Lacombe, Lucien refers to the case of a boy of seventeen who doesn’t achieve a fully human identity, a boy who has an empty space where feelings beyond the purely instinctive are expected to be. The time is 1944, after the Normandy landings, and the Nazis and…

It’s not a genre per se, but a type of novel I find interesting is “The Whole Life in One Book” book. Yes, while many novels span a few years or less, some span the main character’s entire existence — whether she or he dies relatively young or in old age.

Of course a multigenerational saga can do that for a number of lives, but for this post I’m focusing on novels that concentrate the majority of their contents on one person — showing a complete life in a sometimes surprisingly small number of pages. It can be fascinating and poignant to see decades of a character’s family relationships, romantic relationships, jobs, right decisions or wrong decisions, good luck or bad luck, etc. — as well as the real-world news events that swirled around her or him. All while we’re reminded of our own mortality and that life — even if…

Lucía: In Progress “What can it mean for cinema to be revolutionary? Answering a version of this question in a 1977 interview, the Cuban filmmaker Humberto Solás stressed the importance of real-world context. In a capitalist environment, a revolutionary film must strive for the effect of a guerrilla action, transcending mere analysis or exposé. In a socialist society, however, with the revolution already achieved—as in the Cuba of the sixties, where Solás and his compatriots were forging a very particular cinematic New Wave—what is needed is not a call to arms but a reminder of the work still to come. Such films, Solás argued, ‘must present the revolution as a permanent fact, an ongoing process which nothing can reverse.’ Few movies have ever adopted this mandate with the conceptual sophistication and pointed vigor of Solás’s first full-length feature, Lucía (1968), an astonishing reinvention of the historical epic. With its…

By Kim Phuc Phan Thi. “I grew up in the small village of Trang Bang in South Vietnam. My mother said I laughed a lot as a young girl. We led a simple life with an abundance of food, since my family had a farm and my mom ran the best restaurant in town. I remember loving school and playing with my cousins and the other children in our village, jumping rope, running and chasing one another joyfully. All of that changed on June 8, 1972. I have only flashes of memories of that horrific day. I was playing with my cousins in the temple courtyard. The next moment, there was a plane swooping down close and a deafening noise. Then explosions and smoke and excruciating pain. I was 9 years old. Napalm sticks to you, no matter how fast you run, causing horrific burns and pain that last a…

Robert Kelly, Preface from The Journals: “The Journals to my mind are Blackburn’s quintessential work, and demonstrate the way his work knew to go, the power of music he could charm out of everything that came his way, or even looked as if it were thinking about it. The poems and entries are also his last work. The latest writing in it comes up to six weeks of his death in September 1971. From his papers, it is clear that in those last weeks he tried to collect the Journal pages together, and did sense them (as many of his readers from 1968 onward did) as a continuous and coherent book. The present text follows generally the order of what he had collected together and erratically paginated as The Journals. When repetitions, revisions, and versions have been taken away, our inheritance in this particular amounts to a…