Fin Keegan

Here’s what Google makes of “Fin likes to”:

Fin likes to read coffee-table picture books about the railroad in the 19th century…

Fin likes to sit in the space between the wall and the bed…

Fin likes to stare longer than decorum permits…

Fin likes to be and knows he is alone because he is “different”…

Fin likes to rasp through the skin of cucumbers…

Fin likes to get all the way down by my feet…

Fin likes to be poked with a stick…

Fin likes to get the job done when he is on hot pursuit of the criminals…

If only André Breton had lived to use the Internet.

Image: ‘Found 16mm’ by N°1 on flickr

One of the best dramas ever produced by television has just ended in a hail of ambiguities.

The Sopranos‘ dialogue, acting, conceptual wit, and direction have all been praised to the skies elsewhere. Like HBO stablemate Big Love, it is at once both believable and unbelievable that such lives could be lived in our modern world.

But, the deepest appeal of this mobster clan may be their elemental likeness to us: wealthy, or comparatively so, both we and they alike live with a radically split consciousness: worrying over our children, vain about our waistlines, more or less slaves to our appetites, we remain wilfully ignorant of the pain of those (the victims; the poor; the powerless) upon whom our lifestyle is based.

If Chinese peasants-turned-factory-workers, to take but one example, were to successfully organize for fair working conditions tomorrow, our cheap clothing and footwear would be gone in a week.

For Tony Soprano there is “out there” and “in here”, with markedly different rules and moral imperatives at work in each context: aren’t we all a little like him?

Some questions raised by the “Great Books”:

• How did we get here (“Genesis”);
• Who am I? (Hamlet/Oedipus).
• How can I secure myself? (Dante; Machiavelli; Virgil);
• Should I be good? (Gawain; Machiavelli; Dante);
• What is reality? (Cervantes; Sophocles; Shakespeare);
• What is honour? (Homer; Virgil; Gawain; Cervantes);
• Do ends justify means? (Machiavelli; Hamlet; Macbeth; Gawain);
• Is there meaning in suffering? (Genesis; Job; Homer; Proust; Beckett; Kafka);
• Why should I do anything? (Hamlet; Godot);
• What’s important in Life? (Everybody.)