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A GIRL-AND-A-BOY-INTERRUPTED Girl, Interrupted is a 1999 American drama film, and an adaptation of Susanna Kaysen's 1993 memoir of the same name. The film was released just as I was settling into an early retirement and a sea-change at the age of 55 in Australia's spring season, and just as I...

JOHN MALKOVICH Part 1: Being John Malkovich was an American dramedy fantasy which opened in October 1999 just as I was retiring after a 50 year student and employment life, a career of 32 years as a teacher, and another 18 as a student. In October 1999 I was settling into a little town by the...

Apocalypse Now Redux(ANR) is a 2001 extended version of Francis Ford Coppola's epic war-film Apocalypse Now(AN). AN was originally released in 1979. Coppola, along with editor/long-time collaborator Walter Murch, added 49 minutes of scenes that had been cut out of the original film. The Redux...

Preamble: I put the following pieces of prose and prose-poetry together as a single literary package after watching Hitchcock, a 2012 American biographical dramafilm based on Stephen Rebello's non-fiction book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. The film was released on 23 November 2012...

Toronto, Ontario, 19 April 2011 (CBNS) — While Canada’s political parties vie for voter support in the coming federal polls, Canada’s Baha’i community is preparing for its own local and national elections. While both elections are democratic in nature, the character of the two electoral...

In 1893 the American Historical Association held its annual meeting in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. As the site of both Frederick Jackson Turner’s legendary speech, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” and the celebration of the Exposition in Chicago...

In his book Being and Time1 (1962) Martin Heidegger discusses “The Being of the Entities Encountered in the Environment.” He describes the dynamics surrounding our relationship to tools in our environment as we encounter them in our everyday experience. He notes that in our everyday dealings we...

DISAPPEARING FROM HISTORY In the last months of my career as a full-time teacher in 1998/99 in Western Australia and the first months of my sea-change and retirement in Tasmania at the age of 55, Augusto Pinochet was back in the news. I had first come across his name and his activity in...

FRAMEWORK FOR MY LITERARY WORK AS EPIC8-) The number of long epic poems written the world over is increasing. World history and the history of its many nation states is characterized by epochal statements and epics of various kinds. The Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg...

I posted an introduction to the paradigmatic shift in the Baha’i community, the new culture of learning and growth that is at the heart of this paradigm, nearly three years ago. I did this posting at several internet sites and have revised that post in these last three years as developments in...

THIS HUMBLE HABITATION When a person plies their trade, their profession or some personal activity in one place for any length of time they tend to keep certain items of equipment, gadgets, tools and resources on their work table or bench, in their study or shed. Were some observer with...

THE POLITICAL AFTER 1936 My poetry is political in the sense that George Orwell used the word. He used the word political in the widest possible sense. By political purpose in writing Orwell meant “the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind...

THE ENDLESS JIG-SAW PUZZLE The social breakdown of Hellenic society was first manifest in what historian Arnold Toynbee called a ‘Time of Troubles.’ That time began with the Peloponnesian War(431-404 BC). It was a Time of Troubles that lasted for 400 years. Toynbee sites several examples of a...

The dust of reviews has settled on this film and so: the time has come, perhaps, for a more dispassionate, a more considered, a more reflective, little review. Perhaps review is not quite the right word; perhaps what I have written here is just a comment, but it is no less provocative than the...