Jacob Bender's Blog, page 16

Stranger Than Fiction: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

 So near the end of each semester, I would teach a short excerpt from "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave," the autobiography of a slave turned abolitionist pre-Civil War.  I assigned the part where a young Frederick has been rented out for a year to Mr. Covey, a particularly brutal farmer known for being a "slave-breaker."  But for once, his brutality backfires: Frederick finally snaps, and starts beating Mr. Covey for 2 hours straight; he even has...

Batman vs. Iron Man

When The Dark Knight debuted in 2008, it was quickly acclaimed not just for the quality of Heath Ledger's Joker and Christopher Nolan's direction, but for how perfectly it captured the zeitgeist, what with those opening scenes of black billowing smoke emerging from an assaulted federal building reminiscent of 9/11, and the Joker as the international terrorist par excellence, encapsulating all our anxieties about those "men who just want to watch the world burn" without regard to pain or tortu...

Low's July

 This song is brilliant, because there really is this malaise associated with the month of July, isn't there.  Because you must now confront the fact that the year is not only half over but past half over!  The summer solstice is past, the days have started to imperceptibly shorten again with the threat of much shorter to come in the near future, and even in this the high heat of summer you just know in the back of your mind that the world is already tilting away from the sun a...

Victor Frankl Did Not Actually Enjoy The Holocaust, Guys

Back when I adjuncted at LDSBC (a wonderful school that helps make college cheaply accessible to many, btw), I would invariably, every semester, get several student papers arguing that one can "choose to be happy" in any situation one is in.  They doubtless first heard the doctrine in some religion or marketing class, and perhaps thought it would please their instructors to parrot the idea right back at them; who knows, some of them may have even sincerely believed it.

Such papers were al...

Shawshank Redemption 2: THE SEQUEL!

So apparently The Shawshank Redemption was on TV 151 hours last year. Weirdly, that number actually feels low for Shawshank.  Heaven knows I first saw the film while randomly flipping channels one day...and that I saw it again that way every single time after, too.  Doesn't matter how many times I've seen that film, still if I'm randomly flipping channels and it's on, no matter whether it's at the start, the middle, or the end, no matter if I have appointments or other important thi...

Experienced Time

For his birthday, an astrophysicist of my acquaintance decided to calculate how much experienced time he had lived thus far (because of course he would).  Because when you're, say, 3, the interval between one year and the next is virtually unfathomable--it's a solid third of your life, right?  A birthday is of course a huge deal at that age.  Then by the time you're 5, a year has shortened to only a fifth of your life, and when you're 10 that's only tenth, and so forth.  B...

Jack White's Lazaretto Makes Me Miss Meg White

Jack White's new album Lazaretto is much better than his solo debut Blunderbuss.  Not that Blunderbuss was bad, not by any stretch.  The musicianship was excellent, the production professional, the song-writing wonderful and the performances impassioned.  But despite White's best efforts, it just didn't feel as vital--both in the sense of feeling necessary and of feeling alive--as any given White Stripes LP.   Even the White Stripes-esque "Sixteen Saltines" strangely...

Jack White's Lazaretto and Meg White's Importance

Jack White's new album Lazaretto is much better than his solo debut Blunderbuss.  Not that Blunderbuss was bad, not by any stretch.  The musicianship was excellent, the production professional, the song-writing wonderful and the performances impassioned.  But despite White's best efforts, it just didn't feel as vital--both in the sense of being necessary and of being alive--as any given White Stripes LP.   Even the rip-roaring "Sixteen Saltines" still feels more like...

Requiem on a Chrysler Sebring, Ashes to Ashes, Rust to Rust

There were multiple moments this last winter when I would rev up my car (no way I walking to class in 2 degree weather) and listen to the timing belt squeal for at least 2 minutes straight, while the battery light appeared, and I could smell the gas leak, and the crack in the windshield meant I had to scrape ice from the inside as well as the outside, and the de-fogger was useless, so I sometimes had to roll down the window enough for me to stick my scarfed-head outside and let the stinging w...

Requiem on a Chrysler

There were multiple moments this last winter when I would rev up my car (no way I walking to class in 2 degree weather) and listen to the timing belt squeal for at least 2 minutes straight, while the battery light appeared, and I could smell the gas leak, and the crack in the windshield meant I had to scrape ice from the inside as well as the outside, and the de-fogger was useless, so I sometimes had to roll down the window enough for me to stick my scarfed-head outside and let the stinging w...