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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Bergoglio’s Garden

The maudlin 1970 movie made from Erich Segal’s chart-busting novel Love Story passed into blessed memory. All that remains is Ali MacGraw’s line to Ryan O’Neal: “Love means never having to say you are sorry.” On the list of the American Film Institute’s top movie quotes of all time, it is up there with Casablanca’s “We’ll always have Paris” and “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Love Story’s one-liner became one of the most referenced chestnuts in post-Woodstock popular culture. Winding its way into song lyrics and subsequent movie dialogue, it was also one of most parodied. Continue Reading

Independence Day

I am fond of vintage American history textbooks. Rifling through dumpsters, library discards, and second-hand bookstores, I cannot resist bringing them home when I find them. I am drawn to the temper of older histories, particularly ones written for students. Prior to the revisionist animus of the Sixties, school texts shared a sympathy for the American experiment, the fragility and genius of it. Sins were acknowledged but without the rancor that scours the past for new sources of accusation, new means of destruction. Continue Reading

Mainstreaming Homosexuality

Homosexual behavior has been with us forever. Homosexuals elevated to an ethnicity separate from the rest of us—a Queer Nation—are recent phenomena. The successful fashioning of homosexuals as minorities, its members akin to a racial group or a protected species like pandas and black rhinos, trumps what is left of a normative approach to sexuality and sexual ethics. The roots of our Foucaultian “reverse discourse” are deep and tangled. Civil society has a critical stake in recognizing their origins and implications. Continue Reading

Crowley, Hubbard, And The New Individualism

Straightaway, let me clarify. In the previous post I quoted  Ron Hubbard as saying: “The one super-secret sentence that Scientology is built on is ‘Do as thou wilt—that is the whole of the law.’” The words belong to L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., not Sr.. Speaking of Scientology, the son added: “It came from the black magic, from Crowley.” Hubbard Sr. was a confessed admirer of Crowley, calling him “my very good friend.” According to Hubbard Jr., his father prepared for his Philadelphia Doctorate Course lecture series, taped in 1952, by reading Crowley. Continue Reading

Aleister Crowley Lives

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. —Aleister Crowley Aleister Crowley (1875 – 1947) and the nineteenth century’s enchantment with esoterica grew up together. Born in the year the Theosophical Society was founded, he was an Oxford educated, pansexual playboy, rock-climber, Swinburnian poet, yogi, cabalist, and something of a monster. He was also a born sorcerer, a natural magus given over to the enthusiasms of his era: narcotics, the unconscious, and the occult. Once dubbed “the wickedest man in the world” by the British press, Crowley is often called a Satanist. Continue Reading
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