In honor of my alter ego, Agnes, today I will be whelming.
Yesterday I read this wonderful article by Rachel Aviv about the local journalists who covered the Newtown massacre for the Newtown Bee and I want to recommend it to everyone who has ever worked as a small-town journalist or loved a local newspaper, but the site offers only a taste of the story so non-subscribers will have to buy the March 4 New Yorker.
Brad Leithauser's essay "In Praise of Concision," on the other hand, is fully available here. His explication of a moving Seamus Heaney haiku is almost as interesting as the haiku itself.
And now for something completely different: for a lecture on Monstrous Beasts, I showed the Learning in Retirement class a bunch of images and clips from various monster films. We watched Godzilla stomp Tokyo, Mighty Joe Young smash a nightclub, and Betty White feed a giant crocodile, but nothing we saw or discussed was as powerful as Robert Shaw's monologue from Jaws (here). It's helpful to be reminded that blood, gore, and spectacle may create overwhelming emotional responses, but sometimes all you really need is one guy quietly telling a story.
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