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	<title>Against the Grain</title>
	<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog</link>
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		<title>Welcome</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This Website will be devoted to essays and insights related to diversity, addiction/recovery, psychological growth issues, global perspectives, the disenfranchised,  aesthetics, and cultural values. The core value streaming throughout the essays I write will be about returning to our innocence, which sometimes requires a trauma, a jolt, an invasion of the “other,” or a paradigm [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/uncategorized/welcome/</link>
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		<title>Addiction, Another World</title>
		<description><![CDATA[(This is another blog essay on addiction and may help non-addicts understand the many-layered world of addiction, a world I once inhabited and continue to recover from. My drug of choice was booze. But the behavior and emotional patterns I exhibited could apply to all addicts. Each addiction obviously has some unique differences, but, in [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/alcohol-recovery/addiction-another-world/</link>
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		<title>Michael Haneke&#8217;s The White Ribbon</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Michael Haneke&#8217;s films are never easy to watch. I believe it would be safe to say the Haneke tends to assault his viewers out of their complacencies. If you like your films to have a soft-edged, feel-good resolution, you should definitely save your ten bucks&#8212;twenty-five with popcorn and a beverage&#8211; and wait for Hollywood&#8217;s romantic-comedy [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/international-film/michael-hanekes-the-white-ribbon/</link>
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		<title>Overconfidence</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Imagine, for a moment, that you are overhearing a male neurotic narrator talking about his steamroller overconfidence. You are the listener and observer. Feel free at any time to interrupt him, to offer him advice, or, if you are willing, to identify with him. Be patient with him; he does manage to offer himself some [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/personal-growth/overconfidence/</link>
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		<title>The White Tiger, Capitalist India</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The White Tiger Aravind Adiga HarperCollins, 2009 321 pp “Sweet-maker&#8230;that&#8217;s my caste, my destiny,” says the protagonist, Balram Halwai, in Aravind Adiga&#8217;s novel, “White Tiger.” Another character in the novel asks the question, “Do you think sweet-makers can manage fourth gear?” Western readers are not used to reading about castes, an historically rigid class system [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/literary-criticism/the-white-tiger-capitalist-india/</link>
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		<title>India, Land of Contradictions</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Before I began reading “White Tiger” and V.S. Naipul&#8217;s “India: A Wounded Civilization,” I had developed several stark stereotypes of the country. As Buddha&#8217;s birthplace, India had become mythologized for me as a culture steeped in self-examination, the interior life, meditation, and the renunciation of the material world. Gandhi was the other part of the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/globalism/342/</link>
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		<title>Man of My Dreams</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The mottled crowd Had refused to interrupt My slowly raised head, Feeling, as I did, Like a dazed bird Rushing from an Aging falcon. I crawled up the stairs, Stopping to rest My right arm on The damp concrete As I lifted the strands Of my hair, Imagining, for a moment, A daffodil-of-an-Austrian Prince leaning [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/uncategorized/man-of-my-dreams/</link>
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		<title>Addiction&#8217;s Curse: Not Being Present</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Woody Allen once said that whenever he was somewhere, he always wanted to be somewhere else. We are never satisfied, it seems, to be where we are. There is always some other goal to attain, some other fantasy to fulfill, some other dessert we haven&#8217;t tried. I say that to all my twitter friends because [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/alcohol-recovery/an-addicts-curse-not-being-present/</link>
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		<title>Patriotism</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I am not willing to go far as to say freedom is the last refuge of the scoundrel. But Tea Party patriots often make me feel as if my own patriotism can never possibly match the depths of their own brand of flag-waving and highly demonstrative calls for pledges of allegiance. I am not and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/cultural-values/patriotism/</link>
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		<title>Louise Erdrich&#8217;s Novel, Shadow Tag</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Shadow Tag Louise Erdrich HarperCollins, 2010 255 pp Reading theorists have told us many times that readers take an active part in creating the very narratives they&#8217;re reading. A text is not static, no matter what the intention of the writer. Once the story goes out there, we, as readers, begin a kind of paint-by-numbers [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/cultural-values/louise-erdrichs-novel-shadow-tag/</link>
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