The Book of Knowledge: 3
Back in the Mesozoic of my life, I came across a quotation from Giacomo Casanova that, as far as I can remember these days, went “No man can know everything,…
Books & Reviews
The Book of Knowledge: 2
Last post I mentioned I had rescued a set of encyclopedias from the dumpster at the end of this year’s Mother Of All Yard Sales (MOAYS; an Optimist Club event).…
The Book of Knowledge: 1
When I was growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, having an encyclopedia in your home was the bee’s knees, to use my grandmother’s phrase. It was a sign of…
Ars Poetica
Horace’s Ars Poetica, or the Art of Poetry, was written as a 476-line poem in a letter to his friend, the Roman senator Lucius Calpurnius Piso (Lucius) and his two…
Milton Was Wrong
In 1644, the English poet and pamphleteer John Milton wrote an impassioned defence of free speech (or, more factually, against censorship of print and in favour of restriction-free publication) called…
Smith, Rock, and the Trivialization of Western Culture
If Neil Postman were alive today, sitting in a bar or café with Chris Hedges, I wonder which one would say “I told you so!” first after seeing social media…
Kerouac’s Haikus
Haiku is like a razor blade: small, light, but yet strong and incredibly sharp. Haiku says “Look over there!” and then smacks you from the other side. Haiku is the…
Wild Fruits
When he died of tuberculosis in his mother’s home, in 1862, 44-year-old Henry David Thoreau had already made his mark on the world with the publication of several books and…
Musings on the First Tercet of Dante’s Inferno
Back in December, before Godaddy broke my blog through technical incompetence, I had written a piece about the first stanza in Inferno, the first book of Dante’s trilogy, The Divine…
Midway Through This Life’s Journey V.2
For some inexplicably serendipitous reason, I pulled Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Dante’s Inferno (Graywolf, 2012) from my bookshelves this week and began re-reading it. I didn’t like her version…
The New Odyssey
Much has been made of the fact that Emily Wilson’s recent translation of Homer’s The Odyssey (Norton, 2018) is the first translation of that great work by a woman. But…
Ammon Shea is My New Hero
Eyyyyyyy Wssup guys This was the entire first post that started a thread in a group I belonged to on Facebook. I think seeing it aged me a decade, and…
Are Secular Nations Happier?
Are less-religious or more secular nations happier than religious ones? Studies suggest yes. Personally, I would certainly be happier in a more secular nation if it meant fewer angry, nasty,…
Casanova Dies in Bohemia
At the end of his long and storied life, Giacomo Casanova found himself a lonely man in a damp, cold castle in Bohemia, a small German kingdom distant from all…
A Meeting of the Minds?
Niccolo Machiavelli and Michel de Montaigne never met, nor could they have — Machiavelli died six years before Montaigne was born, and they lived about 1,200 km (800 miles) apart…
The Beatles: Songs and Lives
This week I finished re-reading The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz, the best biography I’ve read of the group that defined music, culture, and style in the Sixties: the…
Musings on Reading Literature
There’s a passage from the novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog (by Muriel Barbery, Europa Editions, 2008, p. 116-117) that so delighted me when I came across it that I…
Musings on Shakespeare Guidebooks
Unless you’re an academic who has studied The Bard for your entire career, you really need a guide, a Virgil if you will, to enter the dark forest of Shakespeare…
Books of Quotations from Shakespeare
A good book of selected quotations from Shakespeare is a nice complement to the collected works. Properly arranged, it lets you find relevant aphorisms, and speeches on a wide variety…