Word: ishmael
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What went unacknowledged was that everyone occupies a position in the great stream of events and ideas, even in a time of rampant vapidity, and to forget that was to lose one's bearings, along with one's soul. Moby Dick begins with Ishmael seeing his voyage as an interlude squeezed between more significant events, which he presents as newspaper headlines (you'll smile at his choices...
...When I was a kid, I was reading a lot of existentialist novels, and one of them mentioned a poet named T. S. Eliot. In the Black Poets anthology, Ishmael Reed mentions “the hell that thrilled him so” in reference to Eliot. So I was at the Waldenbooks in the Sunrise Mall in Citrus Heights, California. Waldenbooks has terrible poetry sections, but you don’t know that when you’re young. There was all the usual schlocky stuff, like Robert Browning, that I just couldn’t get my mind...
...pundits have wasted a lot of breath lately wondering if, in the new America after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, irony is dead. Maybe, maybe not. But one thing is for sure. After "Isaac and Ishmael," Wednesday night's special, terrorism-themed episode of "The West Wing" - earnest in its tone, admirable in its charitable intent and God-awful in its condescending pedantry - if irony had been dead, it has by now clawed itself out of its coffin and is roaming the moonlit countryside looking for revenge...
...Laura figure who's been preaching that the Bible calls homosexuality an abomination, reeling off a list of petty misdemeanors that some passages of the Bible advocate punishing with death; the rant cam pretty much verbatim from a widely circulated anti-Laura e-mail. In "Isaac and Ishmael," Toby explains that the people of Afghanistan are not to be blamed for the excesses of the Taliban. The Taliban, he says, are like the Nazis, ordinary Afghans like Jews in concentration camps. It's a provocative, if hyperbolic point. And if you're really interested in it, you can read...
...might understandably ask why I should even bother criticizing "Isaac and Ishmael." It's timely, and was written and produced in record time. It contains a lot of sentiments, however hamhandedly expressed, that we need to hear now. It benefited charity. And it's undeniably a heartfelt response to an unimaginable tragedy...