Category: Culture
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Taste Is No Mere Luxury
Deal W. Hudson I have not looked at Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for years until I started reading Peter Ackyrod’s new “retelling” in a sparkling prose which maintains the spirit and tone of the original Middle English verse. As Chaucer’s narrator describes his fellow pilgrims in the General Prologue, I was taken aback by two straightforward…
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Noah Meets the Transformers and Pretends to Be Abraham
Deal W. Hudson The very talented writer director Darren Aronofsky would have been well advised not to entitle his movie, Noah. This name raises reasonable expectations in a viewer, such as the movie be placed within a Judeo-Christian cosmology and to portray the chief spiritual struggle of the main character. “Aronofsky’s Noah” — a more…
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Why Dictators Start with the Culture
Deal W. Hudson In her 2012 study of the Soviet takeover after WWII of eight European countries, Anne Applebaum underscores how diligently the agents of Stalin, the Red Army, set out to transform the culture of every occupied nation (Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56). Applebaum notes that after the initial Soviet takeover…
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“Pavarotti, a Voice That Will Never Die”
Deal W. Hudson September 6, 2007 We all awakened this morning to the news that the greatest voice of our generation, Luciano Pavarotti, had died. The sound of his voice is something that I have carried inside my head since my early 20s, when I first heard him sing La Boheme at the Metropolitan Opera.…
Deal W. Hudson 