"A Contrarian Christmas-Movie List: Nine Seasonal Scenes That Truly Stand Out" from NPR's Monkey See by Alonso Duralde

For most folks, Christmas movies are a seasonal treat that get pulled down from the attic with the ornaments and the tangled strings of lights. And like those brightly colored tree decorations, the movies often get taken for granted, viewed so many times that they become nothing more than a familiar background for holiday festivities. But when you've watched and rewatched these films as many times as I have, you start noticing weird and wonderful details that might escape the casual viewer. Here are a few, for your December delectation [...]

The crafty list was put together by Alonso Duralde, author of Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas (Limelight). Check that list out here; it's definitely worth the read. See also: 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men, Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema

"Favorite Books of 2010: Mara Liasson Suggests Actually 'Reading Obama'" from NPR's Monkey See by MARA LIASSON "+Democracy"

I cover the White House and the president, and I often wonder if there is such a thing as "Obamaism." This book offers one definition. Kloppenberg is the chairman of the history department at Harvard; he's written books about liberalism and social democracy, and he places Obama squarely in that progressive intellectual stream. Kloppenberg offers an answer to one of the great ironies about reactions to Obama: how the same man can be vilified as a socialist and derided as a sellout to Wall Street. According to Kloppenberg, Obama's writings and speeches show that he is an adherent of philosophical pragmatism, a home-grown American philosophy developed at the end of the 19th century by William James and John Dewey. Philosophical pragmatists are anti-absolutists. They believe that compromise, public debate and civility are the building blocks of true democracy. Kloppenberg believes Obama's cerebral caution and his nuanced understanding of both sides of a debate are not personality traits or signs of weakness; they are a philosophical choice.

Read the blog post here. But of all the blog posts and plugs for the book at NPR, the BBC and the like, the most substantive of them, must be this post out of the quarterly, "Democracy" ("a journal of ideas"), which we'll quote at length here:

One of Kloppenberg’s most important claims is that Obama embodies the spirit of pragmatism–not the colloquial pragmatism that is more or less the same thing as practicality, but the philosophical pragmatism that emerged largely from William James and John Dewey and continued to flourish through the work of Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and others. Kloppenberg provides an excellent summary of the pragmatic tradition–a tradition rooted in the belief that there are no eternal truths, that all ideas and convictions must meet the test of usefulness. (Or, as James put it, ideas have to “work.”) Josiah Royce, James’s Harvard colleague and friend, argued that behind all moral claims there must be some “absolute truth” or “absolute knowledge.” Without such absolutes, he (and many others) believed, individuals would have nothing on which to build a moral life. But the pragmatists insisted that every idea has to confront the test of relevance to its time and circumstances. There could be no easy recourse to an absolute truth, either from religion or ancient texts or even from contemporary philosophy. People and nations must live with the knowledge that even their deepest beliefs can be challenged and, if necessary, rejected.

What is the evidence that Obama shares that view? His years at Harvard Law School drew him into the pragmatic ideas that dominated much of the faculty, and so there is little doubt that he knew a great deal about the tradition of pragmatism. But despite Kloppenberg’s claim, it is not entirely clear that he wholly embraced it. In The Audacity of Hope, a book that was designed for his presidential campaign but that also contains much of what we know about his opinions and convictions, Obama makes clear that he has an interest in pragmatism, but he is not wholly committed to it. “It has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty,” he writes. “The hard, cold facts remind me that it was unbending idealists like William Lloyd Garrison . . . Denmark Vesey . . . Frederick Douglass . . . Harriet Tubman . . . who recognized that power would concede nothing without a fight.”

The best argument for Obama as a pragmatist is his well-known preference for “deliberative democracy,” which he describes as a politics “in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent.” Kloppenberg sees Obama as a person who is prone to “building support slowly, gradually, through compromise and painstaking consensus building . . . . It is a gamble he may lose. But it is not a sign of weakness.” Perhaps not. But the last two years suggest that the kind of slow, deliberate consensus-building that Obama seems to prefer is not consistent with the character and needs of national politics and is certainly not consistent with the political world he has inherited–as exhibited by the obdurate and virtually unanimous opposition of the Republican caucus to almost everything he proposes. It may be that no president could be more effective than Obama has been in this political climate. The climate of crisis that he inherited would make it difficult for any leader. But that is all the more reason for him to rebut energetically the powerful opposition that is attempting to derail him. His quasi-pragmatic coolness has not so far been helpful to him or to the nation.

If you're serious about "actually reading Obama," then it'd behoove you to check the full article out, here. See also: Pragmatism, Pragmatism: A Reader, Pragmatism and Other Writings (Penguin Classics), Pragmatism, A Companion to Pragmatism (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy)

"Surprise! Jaimy Gordon Wins The National Book Award, And Patti Smith Weeps" - from NPR's blog, "Monkey See"

The National Book Awards are like the Oscars of literature, without the national telecast, the security guards to watch over the Harry Winston jewels or the glowing Hollywood tans (most of the nominees bear the wan, indoors-y look of the writer's life). But, like the Academy Awards, there are fancy dresses, cummerbunds and cater waiters passing around Bellinis and caviar bites — trust us, book people can party. And, much like the Oscars, the NBAs are a particular industry's biggest night, in which a career can be made (or at least pushed heartily along) with the opening of an envelope. This year, that career belongs to Jaimy Gordon, a mid-career novelist from Baltimore living and teaching in Kalamazoo, Mich. Her fourth novel, Lord of Misrule, won the NBA for fiction on Wednesday evening, a victory that came as a surprise to many — including Gordon herself. When the announcement was read, the author's table companions shrieked at full volume, and Gordon seemed to be in shock when she finally took the stage. "I'm totally unprepared, and I’m totally surprised," she told the crowd. Later, we observed the author standing alone outside the grand façade of the Cipriani Ballroom on Wall Street in her long red gown, talking quietly into her cell phone: "I won," she said into the receiver, still seeming stunned. "I won ... the National Book Award."

Read the full NPR Monkey See piece, here. See also: She Drove without Stopping: A Novel, Shamp of the City-Solo: A Novel, Bogeywoman (Sun & Moon Classics)