It is widely considered the Nobel laureate's masterpiece; rather than as a drawback, its making no sense is perceived as a challenge.

Pinter's characters are either sorry nonentities or predatory jackals. Bad enough, but, worse yet, each turns with predictable schematism into his or her opposite. Then, often enough, back again. Even the dead revolve, not in their graves but in human memory. For the spectator, steadily foreseeable reversals become an unsurprising shell game.

Max, 70, a retired butcher, has three sons: the youngest, Joey, a demolition worker by day and aspiring boxer at night; the middle one, Lenny, a successful pimp in London's Soho with a high-class clientele; the eldest, Teddy, a professor of philosophy in America, home to visit with his wife, Ruth.

Max refers to his late wife, Jessie, as one at whose ``rotten, stinking face it made [him] sick to look,'' though not ``such a bad bitch.'' At another time as a paragon who taught her boys ``all the morality they know,'' which turns out to be low praise indeed. Sam, Max's chauffeur brother, first calls her a charming lady, and later mentions her having adulterous sex in the back of his car.

Logical Incoherence?

Surly Lenny tries to engage Teddy in a philosophical discussion.

``Do you detect a certain logical incoherence in the central affirmations of Christian theism?'' he asks amid recondite questioning. Teddy, like no philosopher one has ever met, finds existential questions beyond his purview.

Lenny reminisces about an old lady coming out of nowhere and asking him to move an iron mangle from her front room to a back one. When the mangle proves too heavy, Lenny settles, being in a good mood, for a mere jab to the crone's belly.

Ruth, who seems withdrawn and cold, nonetheless is an exemplary wife and good mother to her three boys. Max treats her alternately as a lady and as a whore. Soon she is playing erotic games with her brothers-in-law.

Typical of the writing is Ruth's description of America: ``It's all rock. And sand. It stretches . . . so far . . . everywhere you look. And there's lots of insects there.'' The latter sentence is duly repeated after one of those infamous, pseudo-pregnant Pinteresque pauses. Not even cigars can stay in character: pronounced excellent one moment, they are decried as wretched soon after.

He pouts, broods and beats his way into our hearts, riding around the moors in leather boots and furry coats, looking ripe for rescue by our Jane.

He is clever, tortured and besotted, and Jane follows him around the house and calls him 'Sir' and 'Master' in scenes which, if I were not so well bred, I would consider rude.

A typical one goes like this: "You examine me, Miss Eyre," said he. "Do you find me handsome?" Jane has a ponder and comes back (no pushover she): "No, Sir".

It's a struggle, a battle, an epic; and when he finally declares his love to her (after naughtily pretending he was going to marry someone else), a tree gets struck by lightning in the garden. (This doesn't happen in my love-life, although I dearly wish it would). But ? and most people forget this ? Jane Eyre is a fantasy too rich for one hero. Charlotte wrote us two.

After she leaves Thornfield (to nearly die of exposure), she meets St John Rivers, who is later revealed to be her cousin. (In some ways, Jane Eyre is a lot like Dynasty.)

St John is a prim, sexy blond. (She probably cut a third hero, a red-head this time, from an early draft.) And, sometimes - particularly on winter Sunday afternoons - I find him more beguiling even than Rochester.

St John is a priest - a "cold hard man" he tells Jane - but he falls for Jane like an orange rolling off a fridge. She fancies him, too, watching him admire a picture of a beautiful girl and drooling: "He breathed low and fast; I stood silent."

That's two-love to lonely Miss Bronte. How spoilt she was in her head. But it's back to Rochester and his marvellous flaws, and the beautiful cry: "Reader," - say it with me - "I married him." Aaah.

That is when I collapse prostrate on the floor, like a piece of toast waiting for some Rochester-flavoured jam.

In Rochester, Charlotte wrote a hero no real man can ever touch. Jane Eyre should be subtitled Revenge Of The Parson's Daughter because she spoilt real love for us all.

He is the man in every film, book or TV series you ever wanted; the dark darling you can save from himself. Plus Thorn-field would be fab to redecorate.

And Jane is so ordinary, "poor, obscure, plain and little", that anyone could get him. He chucks the glamourous beauty Blanche for Jane. He falls, like a god, into our laps.

What about Jane Austen, you may squeak. What about Pride And Prejudice? Shaddap is my answer. Charlotte herself sneered that Jane Austen "ruffles her readers with nothing vehement" (ouch!) and tidy Miss Austen is a pastel to Bronte's lustrous crimson.

She's John Lewis to Charlotte's Selfridges. Who wants to hear about the city of Bath when you can have the wilds of Yorkshire? Who wants drippy Darcy ? a man so wet you could do backstroke in him ? when you can have Rochester and Rivers?

So Jane Eyre isn't the first book in the canon of love-starved fantasy. It is the canon. The only thing I can say against it is that it is indirectly responsible for Dame Barbara Cartland getting published.

Dock Ellis, who infamously claimed he pitched a no-hitter for Pittsburgh under the influence of LSD and later fiercely spoke out against drug and alcohol addiction, died Friday. He was 63.

You can't win a general election with a coalition of America hating Bitter African- Americans and America hating Bitter white liberal elitist billionaires/millionaires, who buy brie, Chardonnay, and expensive rat politicians like the elitist Hussein Obama/Samma.

Labels: Sonnets

I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die. But there's still the rest of you. There's your breasts and your genitals... They're amazingly stupid, like babies or faithful dogs. They don't get it, they just want him. Want him.

Labels: Sonnets

When we talk about the demand curve for a good, what we mean is how the quantity consumed for that exact same good changes with the price of that good while holding everything else constant (such as the consumer's income, the price of other goods, etc). A moment's reflection makes it obvious that the customer who purchases the high-price prostitute would demand just as much or more of her services if she were willing to do all the same things but at half the price. Similarly, the customer who chooses the low-price prostitute would also consume more of her services if her price were halved. If this is the case, the demand for prostitutes indeed slopes downward, just like the demand for virtually every other good known to mankind.

So how is it that rice in rural China might violate this rule? How could it be that when the price of rice rises, people actually consume more of it? Two factors are critical.

First, rice makes up a large share of the total expenditures of these Chinese peasants. Second, if they were richer, these peasants would prefer to eat less rice and more of other things, like meat; it is just that they are too poor right now to afford much meat and they have to eat something. When rice becomes more expensive, one effect of the higher price is to make the peasants want to consume less of it (just as johns do with prostitutes who raise their prices).

Fox Force Five

Personal Jesus

Pooh Story

Stage Diving

The B Word

Mr. Black

Happily Married

The Helicopter

There is but one other head on which I wish to offer a remark; and that has reference to the public health. In so vast a country, where there are thousands of millions of acres of land yet unsettled and uncleared, and on every rood of which, vegetable decomposition is annually taking place; where there are so many great rivers, and such opposite varieties of climate; there cannot fail to be a great amount of sickness at certain seasons. But I may venture to say, after conversing with many members of the medical profession in America, that I am not singular in the opinion that much of the disease which does prevail, might be avoided, if a few common precautions were observed. Greater means of personal cleanliness, are indispensable to this end; the custom of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food, three times a-day, and rushing back to sedentary pursuits after each meal, must be changed; the gentler sex must go more wisely clad, and take more healthful exercise; and in the latter clause, the males must be included also. Above all, in public institutions, and throughout the whole of every town and city, the system of ventilation, and drainage, and removal of impurities requires to be thoroughly revised. There is no local Legislature in America which may not study Mr. Chadwick’s excellent Report upon the Sanitary Condition of our Labouring Classes, with immense advantage.

This film, written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, who adapted it from his own play, unfolds in 1964, at a Catholic school in the Bronx. A jovial priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is accused by the principal, Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), of interfering with an altar boy. He denies it, she yearns to believe it, and we don’t care. Collectors of large narrative signposts will spend a happy couple of hours at Shanley’s movie, enjoying the window-rattling thunderstorms that he uses to indicate spiritual crisis, and the grimness with which Sister Aloysius, narrowing her red-rimmed eyes, delivers the line “So, it’s happened.” I didn’t know you could hiss, groan, and murmur at the same time, but Streep can do anything. She is, of course, wasted on this elephantine fable; if only “Doubt” had been made in 1964, shot by Roger Corman over a long weekend, and retitled “Spawn of the Devil Witch” or “Blood Wimple,” all would have been forgiven.

Carl has a donut hangover

Lori is remembering the infamy of this date.

Tom is in the hoopty with Ogelthorpe tearing ass around the galaxy

Jonathan is a monkey

Cheryl is about to enjoy the blending of many traditions that is "The Klezmer Nutcracker."

Jessica wonders what if the hokey pokey really is what it's all about?

In the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”

Labels: Sonnets

Now, it shouldn't take a genius to figure out that with early intervention such problems can be prevented. But Mr. Murray isn't interested in prevention. He's interested in pushing a very particular policy agenda, specifically, the elimination of affirmative action and welfare programs aimed at the poor. With one finger out to the political wind, Mr. Murray has apparently decided that white America is ready for a return to good old-fashioned racism so long as it's artfully packaged and can admit for exceptions like Colin Powell. It's easy to see the basis for Mr. Murray's calculations. After watching their income stagnate or decline over the past decade, the majority of Americans are in an ugly mood and deeply resent any advantages, real or perceived, that minorities may enjoy.