Alex > Recent Status Updates

I like Mouse, he's a funny guy.

The dialogues are cringe.

"It [story of the fall of Satan] is a real recognition of the fact that evil is a parasite, not an original thing. The powers which enable evil to carry on are powers given it by goodness. All the things which enable a bad man to be effectively bad are in themselves good things—resolution, cleverness, good looks, existence itself."

"We called sadism a sexual perversion; but you must first have the idea of a normal sexuality before you can talk of its being perverted; and you can see which is the perversion, because you can explain the perverted from the normal, and cannot explain the normal from the perverted."

"I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness."

"The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?"

The information on Baldur von Schirach and the harassment of Boy Scouts returning from Rome in 1935 was new to me.

Very good pamphlet.

This book has become a surprisingly good metaphor for sexual lust.

There's two characters named Luigi, seriously?

The emotional reactions are well written, but there are barely any individual differences among the characters. I think Armored didn't suffer this due to the nature of the story, but here, every character is faced with the same horror and seems to react the same way. It detracts from what would otherwise be good melodrama.

Every other page reminds me that Jack Crows work is dangerous. I get it.

For no discernible reason, Steakley now uses Carl's last name and not the first, a third into the book.

I'm not too impressed by the excerpts of LaFarges draft. Too theoretical, not scriptural enough, too much weight given to rhetorical devices.

His assessment of Pius XII is extremely unfair. It's like Eisner has picked his heroes and villains and tries to frame each character as one, as if he were writing a fictional story and not a history.