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7.8.05

Culturally Speaking #69

By Sarah Stodola

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It's probably necessary that as I am currently residing in London, I say something about yesterday's terrorist attacks. Most of the questions coming to me from other parts of the world involved the reaction from Londoners. To that I can say that Londoners, while shocked and upset, seem to have been resigned to the fact that something like this was going to happen eventually.  Unfortunately, this is the day and age we live in.

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A flattering profile of JC Gabel and his magazine, Stop Smiling, in Chicago. Stop Smiling represents one of the few independent publishing success stories of recent years, as Gabel started the thing in his dorm room during college and now, several years later, he's got a staff and national distribution and an advertising department and the whole shebang.  Plus a great magazine.

 

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One former editor of what I believe is America's best magazine -- The Atlantic Monthly -- reviews the first book on another former editor of that same magazine.

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Despite the risk of offending one of my favorite professors from back in grad school, who runs the journal Salmagundi, I have to say that if the quotes that James Wolcott offers up from a piece in that very journal is representative of the whole thing, then no wonder intellectuals have such a bad name with the rest of the world.  It's shocking that anyone (in this case, George Steiner) could seriously take it upon themselves to write such frivolous, flowerly, contentless drivel. And that someone else would pay them for it.

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What would my column be without a little bit of self-promotion? Why, it would be a column without a link to this story that I just had published in Eclectica!

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James Wood knows how hard it is to find (or to write, as the case may be) the perfect ending. It's a little strange to see him writing about the movie Before Sunset for some reason, but he is absolutely right that this movie has a perfect ending.

If anyone else would like to give their opinions about great fictional endings, please send them to me at sstodola @ gmail dot com, and I'll post them next week.

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There may have been times in life where I thought I'd be happy to see Judith Miller behind bars, but really, I didn't mean it. Her jailing is appalling, a real threat to freedom of the press and to its role in keeping the government and other powers that be in check.

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It always seem like a faulty statistic to state how many people on earth live on "less than $1 a day," because there are many parts of the world where a dollar goes a long way. In offering a way to get a grip on such ambiguous figures, the CS Monitor offers a first hand account of how a family of six in Malawi lives on $453 in a year.

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Me Three plug: We are in the final weeks of selling ads for Issue #2.  If you are interested in buying on, please see this page or email ads @ methree dot net.

Click here for the last Culturally Speaking.

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Sarah Stodola is the Executive Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted here.

© 2005 Me Three