Thursday, June 30, 2011

To be a Frenchman abroad is to be miserable; to be an American abroad is to make others miserable

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Other quotes from the imminently quotable Ambrose Bierce. Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me! ...

Extremists right and left are cut out of the same piece of cloth

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From Florence King's With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy . Purchased and half read fifteen years ago, then set aside t...
Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Behind the Screens

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Dennis Butts has an essay, Seeking an Oasis in the Spring edition of Slightly Foxed . He references a poem by a nurse from among the Oasis ...

Roofed with lost opportunities

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From Story of My Life by Augustus J.C. Hare, preface. IN the autumn of 1878, the desire to comfort and amuse one of my kindest friends dur...

On contradiction

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Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself” Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Tuesday, June 28, 2011

The new culture spread slowly at first

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From the June 11th, 2011 edition of The Economist, The Neolithic Boom-Time Machine . Reports on a new technique for dating archaeological r...

Why and why not

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In the June 11th, 2011 edition of The Economist, there is a book review of Conservativism by Kieron O'Hara. Apparently the book spends ...

I witness this every year.

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Marilyn Chandler McEntyre's Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies page 19. When I teach Jane Austen, I pause over a description of the...
Monday, June 27, 2011

Cherish silence

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Marilyn Chandler McEntyre's Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies lists a series of strategies for serving as good stewards of language...
Friday, June 24, 2011

The long conversation that is the warp and woof of civil and communal life

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Oh, dear. A couple of days ago I mentioned that I had picked up Marilyn Chandler McEntyre's Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies and w...