Buckley’s Mix

How To Write a Novel

Nothing easier. There are, after all, only two stories.
A Stranger Comes to Town: The Iliad.
A Man Goes on a Voyage: The Odyssey.
Some say that there is a third story: A boy meets a girl. But that is usually subsumed under the above two stories. Or else it is quite another genre, that of comedy.
In a [...]

La nouvelle vague

We celebrate this year the fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave, with the release of Truffaut’s Les quatre cent coups in 1959. That’s how I count things in any event. 1959 was also the year of Resnais’ Hirsohima mon amour, Godard’s A bout de souffle and Chabrol’s Les cousins, but for me it was [...]

Denmark

I have begun watching Danish films, the hook being the scores by Johan Soderqvist. For their earnest, humorless moralizing, their determined effort to exclude any possibility of joy from life, they surpass even Canadian films. Here’s a review of Festen (1998) from IMDB:
I have seen this film more than I’ve bothered to keep track of. [...]

How to Write Satire

It is sometimes thought that satire is no longer possible, as reality has outstripped it. There is nothing left to mock. But there always is something, and nothing is easier to write than satire. Merely find a bad idea, and take it to another level. “We take Gay Pride Month very seriously indeed, here at [...]

Lincoln-Darwin

I have been putting together a program on Lincoln an Darwin, the hook being the fact that they were born within a few hours of each other. Happily Poe was born a few weeks before, so I didn’t have to worry about him.
Lincoln and Darwin shared several personal traits. Both were subject to bouts of [...]

American Laughter

Other countries, other laughter. American laughter emphasizes the social bond between joke-teller and listener more than it does the sense of superiority to the butt. Not that I find this in any way attractive, as it expresses an excessive concern about fitting in, about communicating subservience to the joke-teller.
Judges know this. When appointed to the [...]

It’s All Right When We Do It, vol ccccxxxviii

I happened to see Joe (”the Plumber”) Wurzelbacher last night, and recalled his effrontery in questioning Barak Obama. What was especially galling was that he had once had a tax lien registered against him, as we discovered through the good offices of the Ohio tax department. The point is that a person with a questionable [...]

It’s All Right When We Do It, vol. cccxxxvii

On July 7, 2008, Melanie Sloan, Executive Director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (”CREW”), reported on Huffington Post that CREW had filed complaints against Bush DOJ staffers for politicizing the Justice Deparment by firing liberal U.S. District Attorneys.
So here is the same Melanie Sloan in today’s Washington Post. “They can’t want [...]

Springtime for Hitler

At 10 am it’s already over 70 degrees. The seasons have changed. The crocuses are out and the daffodils will soon follow. Spring has arrived, and with it a spate of news stories about Hitler. I don’t try to explain this. I simply note a curious fact of modern journalism.
Michael Dirda reviews Hitler’s personal library [...]

Museums

In Milwaukee a few days back I visited the splendid Milwaukee Art Museum, housed in the striking Quadracci wing designed by Santiago Calatrava.
The museum reinforced my belief that it’s not enough to have money–you must have money at the right time. Having money in the 1970s resulted in ink blob modernism and brutalist concrete buildings. [...]

Worst Unmade Films

Rendition II. If they don’t make it, the audiences will have won…
The Virtue of Selfishness. Alan Greenspan reads from Atlas Shrugged, leaving out the quite incidental plot.
Siddhartha, with Sean Penn.
The Helen Thomas Story, with Barbra Streisand
Blago: The Movie, starring himself.
It’s only a matter of time…

Best Unmade Films

The Trial of Socrates
The Master of Ballantrae (it’s been done before, but a great story)
The Pre-raphaelite Tragedy: John and Effie take a Scottish holiday with John Millais
R. v. Somerset. Before Wilberforce there was Blackstone and Lord Mansfield. On emancipation, the common lawyers got there first. Dread Scott in England in 1772. “The air of England [...]

Travel

Off to Milwaukee and Chicago for several days

Best Unwitten Books IV

An Intellectual History of Law and Economics would study one of the most important development of the last 50 years, a movement first stigmatized and then welcomed as a crucial tool in legal analysis.
The book would trace the now-familiar roots of law-and-economics from Bentham and Holmes to Coase, Manne and Posner, and then show how the [...]