I was listening to the radio and was surprised to hear that while some people live in dread of impending home foreclosures, others are impatient with the banks for not foreclosing on their homes quickly enough. Why? Because the value of their home has dropped so significantly that they do not want to pay their mortgage anymore. They'd rather let the bank take the property so they can buy a similar home at a fraction of the cost...
Jewish (on his father’s side) author J. D. Salinger has just died at 91 years of age. For many decades he had been a recluse, the “hermit crab of American letters1,” according to TIME magazine, the “Garbo of letters2” in the New York Times obit. “Famous,” the Times continues, “for not wanting to be famous.”
What Salinger is even more famous for is, of course, his 1951coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye, which struck a chord with rebellious youth. Holden Caulfield, the novel’s protagonist, was not not comfortable in this world. Nor were Salinger’s other characters, such as the Glass family. The Times article observed, “That the Glasses (and, by implication, their creator) were not at home in the world was the whole point, [journalist Janet] Malcolm wrote, and it said as much about the world as about the kind of people who failed to get along there.”
A statement released by Salinger’s literary agents reads in part, “Salinger had remarked that he was in this world but not of it.”...
As Eli (Denzel Washington) listens to “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” by Al Green on his I-Pod-like relic in post-apocalyptic America, the real question is, how do you mend a broken world? This film captures tikkun olam on a major scale...
