Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 346

Heavy metal

Rugby lesson: The Hooker

A scrum in sevens. We can attest that forwards Justin and the Andrews still have teeth in their heads and that their ears are not calcified. There's a rugby-playing character in The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis. He is Adriano, an aristocratic Italian midget. "Adriano was the hooker, and did his work in the fulcrum [...]

LitWit Challenge 4.4: The Yucch-meter has a request.

The Yucch-meter finds that they are paralyzed with dread at the thought of reading the submissions for LitWit Challenge 4.4. They are simply not in the mood. To force the Yucch-meter to evaluate the entries in these circumstances would place the contestants in dire peril. How dire? Ever seen one of our favorite childhood movies, [...]

How to pick your next book

This is how organized my reading habit is. First I decided to restart my Russian project (to read the major Russian novels) which was interrupted last year when my hardcover The Brothers Karamazov would not fit in the seat pocket of the plane to New Zealand. It had to be stashed in the overhead bin [...]

Theoretical physics exists because Dante's Inferno doesn't

Did Galileo get his ideas from disproving the measurements of Dante's Inferno? Gustave Dore's illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. In 1588, when Galileo was a 24-year-old unknown, a medical school dropout, he was invited to deliver a couple of lectures on Dante's "Divine Comedy." Many in Galileo's audience would have been shocked, even dismayed, to [...]

Books do not make you a deranged killer.

The Catcher in the Rye did not make Mark David Chapman kill John Lennon. The Catcher in the Rye did not make John Hinckley shoot President Ronald Reagan, nor did Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver despite those letters the gunman wrote to Jodie Foster. They shot people because they were crazy. To try to make sense [...]

The Condensed John Irving

The writer John Irving with Dr. Joven Cuanang at Pinto Art Museum in Grand Heights, Antipolo. Photos by JZ. The Irvings Everett, 19, and John. There is no use pretending that you've read more of John Irving's work than you really have: he will catch you. Not only that, but he will lay a trap, [...]

There is Another.

Poster by Rickyv, based on the original movie poster We are huge fans of Dakota Fanning. She's a 40-year-old woman in the body of a 16-year-old. As Noel likes to point out, at age 10 she was flirting with Denzel Washington in Man on Fire. She's played 500-year-old vampires (the Twilight series) and wasted rock [...]

Calvin & Hobbes in Fight Club

"In the film Fight Club, the real name of the protagonist (Ed Norton's character) is never revealed. Many believe the reason behind this anonymity is to give "Jack" more of an everyman quality. Do not be deceived. "Jack" is really Calvin from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. It's true. Norton portrays the grown-up version [...]

Journey around your skull

Daniel Lieberman, chair of the newly-created Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, talks about the skull. I've been interested in the human skull (and its contents) since I fractured mine at age eight. The headaches were horrific, but I had an excuse to get out of P.E. class. "My neurologist says. . ." Jedi [...]