William John Park

Old Nestor Speaks

Nestor ~

In the Iliad, Nestor was the oldest Greek at the Siege of Troy. He looked upon the great Achilles, Ajax, and Diamedes as puny compared to his generation of heros at the Siege of Thebes…That was a real battle! So much for Homer’s view of cranky oldsters…

Filters
Reset

Thoughts On The Production Code

In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled in the case Mutual Film Corporation versus Industrial Commission of Ohio that motion pictures were a business, not a form of expression. Therefore movies were…
read more

Hitchcock and Film Noir

Film Noir was a movement and genre of crime films made by Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. It consisted most often of a murder, sometimes accompanied by a robbery;…
read more

Letter to a Grandson

For Arthur Rules of the Game 1. Be benevolent. Benevolent means willing the good of others. 2. Be honest. Even when it hurts. 3. Be as good as your word.…
read more

Family Background

In 1870, my father’s mother was born in Bergdorf, Switzerland. As a teenager, she migrated to Philadelphia where she met my grandfather, a plumber. He was the child of Irish…
read more

Art and Religion

All the great religions have produced great art. But just as Pascal argued that of all the religions, Christianity was most closely aligned with human nature, so I would argue…
read more

On Going Blind

Isn’t it ironic that a person whose life was devoted to reading books and watching movies should near the end of his journey going blind? Over twenty-five years ago my…
read more

Letter to Cornel West

Thomas Woodrow Wilson graduated from the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, in 1879. In 1886, he was awarded a Ph.D. in history and government from Johns Hopkins University, then in…
read more

Dr. Robert Lustig’s Metabolical*

Not since Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring (1962) has a book so alarmed and awakened me. Dr. Robert Lustig is Professor Emeritus of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of California,…
read more