All Purls. No Swine.
I don't know if I'd want to adjudicate a competition for "most quoted man in English literature" between William Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson, but I thought I'd celebrate the 314th anniversary of the great man's birth with a few of his bon-mots. (Or should that be bons-mot? There is a rule about such things, but… Continue reading Happy Birthday, Dr. Johnson!
The quote in the title is from As You Like It, but that’s not really the Quote of the Day. April Fool! Today’s actual quote of the day comes from Charles Lamb, who was born in 1775, in London, to a middle-class lawyer’s clerk and his wife, in a house in which he lived in an… Continue reading April 1, 2023: “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool”
No, not the Rolling Stones kinda blues. March 28, it turns out, is the anniversary of the death of two giants of American music. W.C. Handy was born November 16, 1873, in Florence, Alabama, to Charles and Elizabeth Handy. His strict Methodist minister father forbade musical instruments in the house, believing them to be tools… Continue reading Tuneful Tuesday–I Got the Blues!
You find out who your real friends are when you're involved in a scandal--Elizabeth Taylor Oh, boy howdy. She should know. And yet. To be clear, there are scandals, and then there are "scandals." Those of the first part are limited to celebrity and worldwide interest. Such as that surrounding ET (I see what I… Continue reading Quote of the Day: On Scandal
It's a relatively short tome (about 250 pages), written by British journalist and author Simon Winchester. It tells, in extremely readable prose, the fascinating story of the two men most important to the publication of the world's greatest dictionary, whose first volume (A-ANT) was published 139 years ago today, on February 1, 1884. Two more… Continue reading Book Recommendation: The Professor and the Madman
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free us, An' foolish notion Ah! The sainted Rabbie Burns. Scotland's national poet. Romantic to the end. Socialist. Raconteur. A man who dropped his seed wherever he felt like it, upon whichever woman struck… Continue reading Burns Supper Night: 2023
Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there's just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about… Continue reading Quote of the Day: On Narcissism and Truth
Cross-posted from Ricochet: And a conclusion: If you only buy one book in 2023, make it this one. I hope I’m not alone in my annual habit of buying myself the occasional Christmas present, wrapping it up, and labeling it “with love from the dogs–we tried not to slobber on it” or “from the sheep–thanks for the hay!” or “affectionately,… Continue reading From Utmost East to Utmost West: A Very Preliminary Book Review
A recent, and very enjoyable, perusal of a book review in the Daily Telegraph (apologies if you can't get behind the paywall, but it was of this book: From Utmost East to Utmost West--My Life of Exploration and Adventure, by Colonel John Blashford-Snell**), put me in mind of a post from almost exactly a year… Continue reading Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Gift for Adventure
I can't review it, because I haven't read it yet. But I'm charmed by a lengthy excerpt which the author himself has posted on Lapham's Quarterly. It's the story of an unlikely friendship that developed towards the end of Blake's life, and one which reminds me--as do so many biographies and vignettes of eighteenth century… Continue reading Not A Book Review: William Blake Verus The World, by John Higgs