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  • Down to a Sunless Sea Winner of Sixth Annual Noble Prize for Literature

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    Matt

    It is the Noble (Not Nobel) Prize for 2008. If you go to http://www.myshelf.com and press the Back to Literature column a little blurb comments on the book. Allow me to cite Carolyn Howard-Johnson at length: They say self-deprecating humor can be a good thing. So, know that the authors I pick for my Noble will never get famous for the prestige it bestows on the book or the writer. The award is an opportunity, of course, for some bragging rights, maybe in one’s local press and online. But it’s really all about giving writers of literary fiction and poetry a little recognition,…

  • Peter Lorre, Emigre, Star of M, Face-Maker, Mis-Used, Actor’s Actor

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    Matt

    Several months back I saw Fritz Lang’s M in which Peter Lorre introduced himself to cinema. In the film he is a child molester and murderer;  for the greater part of the movie we see Lorre at angles, in shadows and then we catch that face with eyes as big as “soft-boiled eggs” Kirk douglas labeled them in a much later Disney movie. Lorre’s head was round and often he gave the appearance of a goiterous frog. At the end of the movie he has about three to four minutes in which he pleads and cajoles his criminal captors to grasp his…

  • Here I Stand, Martin Luther in Defense of his Theses.

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    Matt

    I admire that short sentence although I do not admire Luther who was an anti-Semite. Some of his essays about Jews are vitriolic. Unwilling to convert to Protestantism, Luther tagged them as “this insufferable devilish burden.” Read his “The Jews and Their Lies” (1543) and  his “suggestions” of how to deal with the Jews. This blog is not about Luther but more about  “Here I stand.” As I age I fully realize that the social and psychological cues of my early years are a razed environment; that what ethical values I have are not extant or in very serious decline. However,…

  • ASK THE GOLEM — TITLE SUGGESTED BY JANE HOLT

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    Matt

    Jane and I have just finished laughing about the title of this blog. I was thinking of starting a column for a local newspaper with this as my working title. After all, what questions do you ask a golem? Before I go on I must say that I just finished a short story about 20 pages long tentatively called, “The Dis-Enchanted Golem,” the hyphen having importance. It is a part of a working collection of new short stories called, again tentatively, “Tales of the Holocaust and other Fun Stories.” In any case a golem is a kind of dolt made…