| CARVIEW |
Select Language
HTTP/2 200
content-type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
vary: Sec-Fetch-Dest, Sec-Fetch-Mode, Sec-Fetch-Site
feedburnerv2:
last-modified: Sun, 18 Jan 2026 05:30:15 GMT
cache-control: no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate
pragma: no-cache
expires: Mon, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT
date: Sat, 24 Jan 2026 23:59:43 GMT
content-security-policy: require-trusted-types-for 'script';report-uri /_/RaichuFeedServer/cspreport
content-security-policy: script-src 'report-sample' 'nonce-dUFaBV2IOebB9HpuJ2DjfQ' 'unsafe-inline';object-src 'none';base-uri 'self';report-uri /_/RaichuFeedServer/cspreport;worker-src 'self'
content-security-policy: script-src 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval' blob: data: 'self' https://apis.google.com https://ssl.gstatic.com https://www.google.com https://www.googletagmanager.com https://www.gstatic.com https://www.google-analytics.com;report-uri /_/RaichuFeedServer/cspreport/allowlist
accept-ch: Sec-CH-UA-Arch, Sec-CH-UA-Bitness, Sec-CH-UA-Full-Version, Sec-CH-UA-Full-Version-List, Sec-CH-UA-Model, Sec-CH-UA-WoW64, Sec-CH-UA-Form-Factors, Sec-CH-UA-Platform, Sec-CH-UA-Platform-Version
permissions-policy: ch-ua-arch=*, ch-ua-bitness=*, ch-ua-full-version=*, ch-ua-full-version-list=*, ch-ua-model=*, ch-ua-wow64=*, ch-ua-form-factors=*, ch-ua-platform=*, ch-ua-platform-version=*
cross-origin-opener-policy: same-origin
reporting-endpoints: default="/_/RaichuFeedServer/web-reports?context=eJzj4tDikmII0JBiEOLmeL_z6mk2gQUftvIrWSblF8YnlqZk5usWlCblZBZnpBYV6wIFdYsSM5MzSnXTUlNTilOLylKL4o0MjMwMDI2M9AxM4gsMAFLqGzU"
content-encoding: gzip
server: ESF
x-xss-protection: 0
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
x-content-type-options: nosniff
alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-29=":443"; ma=2592000
tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521 2026-01-06T02:15:45.471-06:00 Blog Meridian Arranging, deepening, enchanting the blogosphere.
Commentary on film, art, music, books, and the ideas they inspire. John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com Blogger 1190 1 25 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-590144032514077489 2012-09-02T07:50:00.000-05:00 2012-09-02T07:50:49.137-05:00 Ghost Dances: A review Hello, all. It's been fairly busy around here as the new semester approached and has now arrived and, moreover, combined with a dearth of much of anything "interesting" to pass along in this space. However, some engaging books, films and music have arrived here at the Meridian manse, and I will be posting about them in the next few days and weeks.
A word about the review below: About a month John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 19 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-1642074619274277642 2012-07-27T08:16:00.000-05:00 2012-07-29T07:51:43.001-05:00 Ghosts in Our Own Machines: A Review of Naqoyqatsi It's been pretty quiet 'round these parts as the summer begins to wind down and August and the new semester approach. But I recently posted the following review on Amazon, and I thought I'd post it here (with some minor editing) as well.
Breughel's The Tower of Babel, which also serves as the opening image from Naqoyqatsi. Image found here.
This film, the third and last of the Qatsi trilogy, John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 6 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-4532290956699107761 2012-07-14T23:31:00.000-05:00 2012-07-17T05:23:19.481-05:00 Some notes on the opening of The Conversation Over at his excellent film blog, Scanners, Jim Emerson has an ongoing feature called the Opening Shots Projects. Here's its rationale, in brief:
1) The movie is about what happens to you while you watch it. So, pay attention -- to both the movie and your response. If you have reactions to, or questions about, what you're seeing, chances are they'll tell you something about what the movie is John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 5 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-9106937219840982819 2012-07-11T23:00:00.000-05:00 2012-07-11T23:00:23.735-05:00 "A track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth":Thoreau and late capitalism
A stretch of the railroad between Fitchburg and Concord. Image found here.
One would think that there'd be no need to write something like a post with the title that this one has: that a fairly attentive reading of Walden or, less directly, "Life Without Principle" would reveal to the reader pretty clearly what the Concord Curmudgeon would have to say about such things.
Just as a refresher, John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 2 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-7902307022111683685 2012-05-15T20:40:00.000-05:00 2012-05-16T06:02:47.017-05:00 Carlos Fuentes, 1928-2012
Fuentes, standing in front of the Aztec Sun Calendar at the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City. Image found here.
Carlos Fuentes died today in his home town of Mexico City. He was 83. Here is a brief obituary in today's Los Angeles Times. His passing means that of that generation of Latin American writers of the "Boom" years of the '60s and '70s, only Colombia's Gabriel García John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 4 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-1590816292805405782 2012-05-15T06:27:00.000-05:00 2012-05-15T06:28:10.713-05:00 Self, image, self-image
The controversy over the claim that Vermeer used a camera obscura when painting now, with the recent discovery of this image, seems like pretty small potatoes. (Image found here.)
Grades are in (though some stragglers are still out there), my office is tidier than it's been for, well, a while, and the summer stretches ahead. Aside from some work for my school's Online Writing Lab, a trip John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 4 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-126545543250109908 2012-05-06T08:35:00.001-05:00 2012-05-07T17:09:24.710-05:00 ". . . and its beauty was not lost on him": An open letter to Terence Malick
Terence Malick and Christian Bale, Austin, Texas, September 2011. Image found here.
Dear Mr. Malick,
I'm under no illusions here. You almost certainly will never read this. For one thing, who the heck am I to you? For another, you don't strike me as the sort of guy who has a publicist who Googles for mentions of you. Finally, and most important, you are pretty busy right now, it appears John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 5 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-585858770295483834 2012-04-26T05:51:00.000-05:00 2012-04-26T05:52:21.723-05:00 At the mid-point of the Meridian Century . . . . . . it's okay if it passed without your knowing. No fireworks, no mass rallies, not even a mention on the cable news chyrons. It was pretty quiet even for the person whose century's midpoint was passed. He marked it by doing some teaching, eating a delicious ribeye grilled by the Mrs., going to choir rehearsal, and (second night in a row) dozing off towards the end of The Colbert Report ( John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 7 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-2370264215726895666 2012-04-22T07:55:00.000-05:00 2012-04-22T07:56:27.312-05:00 Just start calling me Rip Van Meridian Your correspondent's arrival to last Tuesday's department meeting? Naah--it's really Tompkins H. Matteson's Rip Van Winkle's Return (1860). Image found here.
Apparently, part of turning 50 (which for me will occur next week) is that one feels the uncontrollable impulse to begin lots of sentences with "In my day . . ." or "I remember when"--not to mention, in my particular instance, a certain John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 7 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-5197784085283545357 2012-04-20T16:54:00.002-05:00 2012-04-20T16:56:17.766-05:00 People to visit: The Odd Sandwich
Lee's caption: "Mary Alice and Fluffles, the morning they pulled the big bank job."
Tumblr accounts, you may have heard, are the Hot New Thing on the Interwebs. I'm drawing your attention to The Odd Sandwich because its host, Lee Ingalls, is a friend and he's drumming up eyeballs for his place. And because I like his wry captions for these vintage pictures, some of them quite odd, from John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 0 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-6101347015539733399 2012-04-14T08:46:00.002-05:00 2012-04-14T08:52:33.757-05:00 "Full of many things except boundaries": Aloneness, Transcendentalism, and PrairyErth Room for the Sky, taken somewhere in Chase County, Kansas, by Dave Leiker. Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.As mentioned in my most recent post, I've begun reading William Least-Heat Moon's PrairyErth. What follows is a particularly compelling snippet of writing from it. It'd be quite easy to create post after post consisting of such snippets--Least-Heat Moon has this way of John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 8 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-3779491410071562132 2012-04-10T07:16:00.003-05:00 2012-04-14T09:55:47.726-05:00 "Some old compass in the blood": On PrairyErth and place Skyline of Cottonwood Falls, the county seat of Chase County, Kansas. Click on image to enlarge. The courthouse is the oldest government building in continuous use in Kansas. Image found here.The origin myths of ancient cultures, including our own Judeo-Christian one, are as much about the land as they are about anything else. This is also true of that new-ish, caterwauling, still-naïve John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 4 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-3166711367583227365 2012-04-07T08:57:00.005-05:00 2012-04-07T14:47:28.622-05:00 Caravaggio and Lent Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew, 1599-1600. Click on image to enlarge. Image (and a lengthy discussion of the painting) found here.With Good Friday being last night and Easter to come tomorrow and a gloomy sky accompanying Scruffy and me this morning, I found myself thinking about Lent's demand of us that we take its questions as serious, inevitable ones. Just before Ash Wednesday this John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 2 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-5422663785085323001 2012-04-01T19:37:00.000-05:00 2012-04-01T19:40:21.177-05:00 Midnight in Paris and nostalgia Marion Cotillard (left) and Owen Wilson in a typical shot from Midnight in Paris. Image found here.Midnight in Paris (2011; dir. Woody Allen).Thanks to my colleague (and film buff) Larry the Movie Guy, the Mrs. and I watched Midnight in Paris this past Friday night. The Mrs.' quickie review: "That wasn't as terrible as I had expected." (She had said earlier that she has had trouble John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 7 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-8737013118168168583 2012-03-22T17:49:00.002-05:00 2012-03-23T09:19:34.838-05:00 The obligatory picking-through-the-ashes-of-one's-bracket post Image found here.Well, we gave it a go. I can take some comfort in the knowledge that very, very few people picked Missouri to lose to Norfolk State; I'm pleased that I picked Lehigh to beat Duke and that, as I had originally picked, Ohio U. is in the Sweet Sixteen. But the upshot is that only half of my Sweet Sixteen selections are actually going to play tonight and tomorrow. This saddens me, John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 4 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-5232674705690055267 2012-03-22T10:56:00.001-05:00 2012-03-22T11:02:46.319-05:00 On "snobbishness" and higher education "To my astonishment, I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation!--why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it." --Thoreau, Walden.Thoreau's feigned dismissiveness of the value of formal education notwithstanding (he himself was a Harvard man), he does have a point: There indeed do exist any number of human activities which can be learned John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 3 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-8095602384250465563 2012-03-13T07:53:00.004-05:00 2012-03-13T12:59:37.259-05:00 The obligatory March Madness post An ad that appeared in this morning's Washington Post. Despite the ad's immodesty, Virginia Commonwealth just might be able to back it up. Image found here.I've had nothing to say this season about college basketball, but (thanks/curses to cable in the Meridian household) I've seen a lot of it. It's been a strange season, in my mind, and this bracket--actually, the saner of my two brackets--is John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 2 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-5707956577016323843 2012-03-09T08:09:00.002-06:00 2012-03-10T07:12:10.815-06:00 Some comments on The Tree of Life Hello, reader(s). All is well here; just busy and lacking in things worthy of troubling you to consider reading.By some fluke, over the course of the fall and winter the Mrs. and I ended up seeing four of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture. While I'm glad that one of them, The Artist, won, the post below is about the most interesting and challenging and demanding of the lot.A still from The John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 5 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-8191438041006457552 2012-02-11T11:38:00.002-06:00 2012-02-11T11:39:32.172-06:00 Adventures at the Wichita Art Museum #8, Part II: Pairings from the Permanent Collection Edward Hopper, Sunlight on Brownstones (1956). Image found here.Joseph Lorusso, Red Brick and Shadow (ca. 2000). Biography. Image found here.In yesterday's post, I mentioned that the WAM's selections from the permanent collection "look a little different these days." That's due to the fact that the museum has hung the pieces (or, in a few cases, has arranged sculptures and other objects John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 2 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-7699861026624422492 2012-02-10T17:25:00.003-06:00 2012-02-11T07:34:00.218-06:00 Adventures at the Wichita Art Museum #8: Chuck Close and Provincetown artists An unidentified man looks at a jacquard tapestry of a Chuck Close self-portrait at the Austin exhibition in August of 2009. The original is a large image, so be sure to click to enlarge. Here is the exhibition in book form. Image found here.I will confess: I visited the WAM last Saturday because I didn't want to start my morning off by doing laundry. A quick perusal of the website, and the John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 0 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-8014323577887395160 2012-02-05T15:30:00.001-06:00 2012-02-05T15:30:27.041-06:00 Sunset project Sunset, Wichita, Kansas, January 20, 2012, by the Mrs. Click image to enlarge.It's pretty simple: Take a picture of the sunset each day of the year. This is the task that the Mrs. has set for herself, and you can see all the results that she's so far posted here. If you'd prefer not to click a whole lot, here is a slideshow of the sunsets she has taken thus far this year (that she has posted). John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 2 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-2797820284699851196 2012-01-28T10:16:00.002-06:00 2012-01-28T10:26:58.439-06:00 Bleeding Kansas, bleeding Congressmen The famous caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks on the floor of the House of Representatives, May 22, 1856. The misplaced apostrophe aside, the caption (though quietly sympathizing with Sumner) is pretty accurate. Image found here.People don't hurl invective like they used to. Partly because it's the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and partly because it comes so highly recommended by John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 2 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-1904403718283252863 2012-01-22T15:33:00.003-06:00 2012-01-23T09:06:49.720-06:00 "You are a scrawny brown guy!" "No, you are a scrawny brown guy!": Lamb and the Jesus of History Christopher Moore. Official website. Image found here.Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.This is the first Christopher Moore novel I've read. It comes recommended to me by two people: the Mrs., who is a long-time fan; and my pastor. Talking with them both about both Joseph's absence from the Gospels after the scene with the boy Jesus in the Temple and about the Infancy John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 7 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-8141217423992434548 2012-01-10T19:42:00.001-06:00 2012-01-10T19:42:53.148-06:00 Back to school . . . Thanks, FailBlogIt's back to back-to-school meetings this week. The chief activity has been to coin yet another phrase for what we need to be doing that means "assessment" and yet sound different enough that our various constituencies will believe that we're doing something different. Anyway: I have syllabi to write, so I hope to have something of substance next week. John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 6 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-5311449586737635392 2012-01-07T09:51:00.005-06:00 2012-01-07T09:55:50.552-06:00 "The Idea of Order at Key West" (and some shameless spousal promotion) For she was the maker of the song she sang.The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured seaWas merely a place by which she walked to sing.Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knewIt was the spirit that we sought and knewThat we should ask this often as she sang.If it was only the dark voice of the seaThat rose, or even colored by many waves;If it was only the outer voice of skyAnd cloud, of the sunken John B. https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120 noreply@blogger.com 2