Thought Snacks

So my significant other began subscribing to The London Review of Books, mainly to read Terry Eagleton's entertaining, idiosyncratic criticism. The whole magazine makes for lively subway reading; the most recent one I'm looking at has a fascinating look at the multiplicity of Hamlet editions. But it's Eagleton, a Catholic Marxist, who provides the corker in this issue, in a review of a new book about proto-postmodernist Bahktin:

As the first movement in history to consecrate the common life, Christianity stands at the source of Bakhtin’s preoccupation with the everyday, just as it lurks distantly behind the current fascination with popular culture.

From the Mount of Olives to Paris Hilton? I'm not sure I'm convinced, but it's food for thought. As is this amazing line from Tom Waits' Alice, which blows my mind every time I hear it:

Everything you can think of is true

Bakhtin would have loved that, I think.