above: brave-little-girl
The Philosopher-Pope, Jan Pawel II: His love for life made him an unflinching upholder of Catholic teaching. Ask Me Anything: Love Means Having to Say You're Sorry
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Focus on a Brutal Past: Never far from a Mirror
The past looms large at this year's German Film Festival, with World War II and its divisive aftermath serving as prominent reference points.
A coming-of-age story with a difference, the superb Napola (2004, 115 minutes) is mostly set in picturesque Allenstein, at one of the 40 National-Political Institutes of Learning established to lay the foundations for the future of the Third Reich.
The elements are familiar enough: the teenager who yearns to rise above his class, the disapproving father, the stern headmaster, the various types of students one routinely encounters in boys' boarding-school films (from Goodbye Mr Chips through Dead Poets Society to Les Choristes).
But this time, everything revolves around the ruthless destruction of innocence. Young Friedrich (Max Riemelt), invited to the school because of his boxing prowess, is introduced to a new way of thinking about the sport.
"You have to forget your humanity, your learned pity and false modesty," he's told
• A Chronicle of Endings & Beginnings [I wish my name was Smith right about now ;-P One of the world's most popular pastimes is investigating family history so we tend to share many stories; some about our metaphorical blood being in the water: Our Surreal Viennas: : Short story. We're talking elevator blurb here ; Sacha Lolitorisz has story (hard copy only) in Travel section of the SMH on Saturday entitled Off the Wall. “East Berliners used to risk their lives trying to escape to the west. Now the former communist stamping ground is fun and funky.” While Helen Bradle on line is surprised what you can dig up when creating a family tree Minimum wage for a literary author ;-D It's all relatives ]
• · Why haven't I finished yet? Why does it always take me so long? What's wrong with me? I must be stupid or lazy. Maybe I just don't have any talent. Sound familiar? The Long and Winding Cold River; The Internationale is the hymn of the Fourth International Communist Party and it is in copyright - filmmaker fined French filmmaker has just been fined for letting a character in one of his films whistle the tune
• · · Yes, now the story can be told. Authors have shouldered the burden of rejection for so long that it has come to seem a mythic, Sisyphean component of the basic job description. To be rejected again and again, in the faint hope of one day being accepted, is a sign of nobility rather than futility. "Be patient," authors are told. "Never give up." Publishers Hate Rejection, Too ; Marketing Books and Sepulculture ofVintage Technology Call Me Martin Luther: More than a literature, less than a god ; I have no problems with D. Parvas’s disdain for “wasted youth” memoirs (Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Rolling Away: My Agony With Ecstasy) Introverts Unite! ; D. Anthony Storm's very fine Kierkegaard site
• · · · 'A Land of Ghosts': Across the River and Into the Trees ; I realized, with his passing, that he was a hero of mine. That I felt better and safer about the world because he was in it, and I feel that we are just a little worse off, in a little more danger, because he's gone. Why I Miss Karol Wojtyla
• · · · · There is more and more to say about Guy Debord; one can scarcely walk through the bohemian district of the bookstore without toppling a stack of biographies and gossip. Perhaps it's an apology for not noticing in a timely fashion how incisive was his description of daily life, political domination, and their entwined fate Tall Poetics and Drunken Stumbling in '50s Paris ; People are happiest in their 40s
• · · · · · I was away from the blogosphere yesterday, because I just dove (sic?) right into Erin Hart's second novel, Lake of Sorrows, and I didn't want to come up for air! I love it when that happens -- pure flow... Lake of Sorrows ; The specter of a bookseller signing exclusive deals to publish bestselling authors is either thrilling or worrisome, depending on where you sit. And now it may be a reality. Amazon is seeking rookies Amazon House? New Program Would Commission Work, Sell it like iTunes ; Litblog Co-Op