Whoa! Down the rabbit hole I tumbled this week. I started reading about tea in several books I recently purchased. What a story. What a delight! Many hours spent between the pages absorbing culture, history, types, classifications, production, terroirs and marketing.* I’ve read bits and pieces about tea before; mostly
Continue readingTag: reading
Scripturient: Blog & Commentary: How to Spot a Communist
As I just learned from a recent piece on Open Culture, I must be a Communist. Based on my preference for writing (and reading), that is. (This would definitely surprise my left-wing friends who often think I’m right of Stephen Harper… himself being so far right of the iconic Genghis
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: Reading the Dhammapada
One of the most inspirational, moving books in my library is the Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha, originally from the Pali canon. I’ve had a version of the Dhammapada in my library since the late 1960s, and read it through many times. It’s good to reread it
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: The Strange World of E-Writers
There’s always been a place for amateur or new writers to present their efforts and hope to see print: publications where you could submit your work and hope the editors found it good enough to print in an upcoming issue. That’s how some famous writers got their start, in the
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: Our 21st Century Library
In the 20-plus years I’ve been on the Collingwood Library board, I have watched the functions of the library and its role in the community evolve and change to keep pace with the needs and demands of its growing number of users. It’s been a remarkable, exciting journey. Of all
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: The Hunting of the Snark
I’ve always wondered why Lewis Carroll’s wonderful poem, The Hunting of the Snark – an Agony in Eight Fits – has never been redone, rewritten in a modern version, with modern references and people. It seems to lend itself to revision, at least to my eyes. Perhaps it’s because this sort of
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: E-readers: worth the investment?
I have a passionate, somewhat obsessive, relationship with books. Real books: paper, ink and glue. Not digital books. I have a lot of books and I treasure each one like an old friend. I love reading – I read books at least an hour every day, and usually much more. The feel
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: Reading music and music theory
I write about reading a lot, because I read a lot of books. There are other kinds of reading – other languages, too – that I don’t write much about. Reading music is one of them. It’s a different language; a symbolic language with its own grammar, punctuation and rules.
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: More reasons to read
On the Inside Higher Ed website, Joshua Kim recently asked the question, When do you find the time and energy to read books? That surprised me. What energy does reading take? It’s not like running, or swimming or playing sports. Sitting down in a comfortable chair, cat on the lap,
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: Just Six Songs?
Author, musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin says all music can be classified into a mere six types of song. That’s part of the premise in his 2009 book, The World in Six Songs. I recently started reading it and it has opened some interesting areas of thought for me.* A
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: Manners, bloody manners
I was in a local grocery store not long ago, standing mid-aisle and peering at shelves of canned products, trying to find the ones I wanted for my cart. As I reached out to snag a can in front of me, a cart appeared between me and the display. To my
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: The difficult art of reading poetry
Synecdoche. Metonymy. Not exactly words that trip lightly off the tongue. Unless, I suppose, you’re Harold Bloom. Those are two of the four fundamental tropes in literature, Bloom tells us. Identified originally by Kenneth Burke, who, as Bloom calls him, was a “profound student of rhetoric.” Bloom references Burke in
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: Feetish or Fettish?
I was surprised to recently read in David Crystal’s book, The Story of English in 100 Words, that fetish – which I pronounce “feh-tesh” – was once pronounced “feetish.” In fact, in the 1920s, Crystal writes, the BBC had that pronunciation in its guide for radio broadcasters.* It makes sense,
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: The ethics of politics via Aristotle
Politics, Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics, is the “master science of the good.” The good of which he wrote is the greater good, the “highest good” that benefits the state, not the personal. For even if the good is the same for the individual and the state, the good
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: Marcus Aurelius
I continue to be profoundly moved by the wisdom of the classical authors. It’s often hard to accept that some of them were writing two or more millennia ago: many seem so contemporary they could have been written this century. Of late – within the past year or so –
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: What’s in a missing word?
There’s a line in one of Horace’s epistles that really caught my eye. In Latin it reads: Utque sacerdotis fugitiuus liba recuso, pane egeo iam mellitis potiore placentis Horace: Epistles, Book I, X No, I can’t translate it.* However, I was reading David Ferry’s 2001 translation and he renders it
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: Reading: A Canadian tragedy… or not?
The map above might show the making of a serious tragedy for Western and especially Canadian culture. It indicates in colour which nations read the most. Yellow is the second lowest group. Canada is coloured yellow. In this survey, Canada ranks 10th – from the bottom! Twenty countries above us
Continue readingMolly'sBlog: Milton: A Master of Run-On Sentences
MILTON: A MASTER OF RUN-ON SENTENCES: I’m about halfway through the collected works of John Milton. It’s a project that’s taking some time. Mercifully the poetry is at the front of the volume. That’s good because most of Milton’s prose writings have little intrinsic interest. Aside from a few
Continue readingMolly'sBlog: Milton: A Master of Run-On Sentences
MILTON: A MASTER OF RUN-ON SENTENCES: I’m about halfway through the collected works of John Milton. It’s a project that’s taking some time. Mercifully the poetry is at the front of the volume. That’s good because most of Milton’…
Continue readingMolly'sBlog: Milton: A Master of Run-On Sentences
MILTON: A MASTER OF RUN-ON SENTENCES: I’m about halfway through the collected works of John Milton. It’s a project that’s taking some time. Mercifully the poetry is at the front of the volume. That’s good because most of Milton’s prose writings have little intrinsic interest. Aside from a few
Continue reading