- Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.—Gravity’s Rainbow
‘Is it about a bicycle?’ he asked.—The Third Policeman
Tag Archives: literature
Homer
I was at work in Virginia, chatting with my kid, who’s in college in Massachusetts. That in itself is wondrous. (I think I averaged two phone calls per quarter to my parents while I was in school. She talks with her mother and me four or five times a week.) She mentioned in passing that she [...]
Armor
I was exploring the hotels of Saint Petersburg on the web and found one called Brothers Karamazov. It opened in 2004 and has 28 rooms with all the modern amenities, including internet access. The hotel boasts four special rooms with 19th-century decor, each named after a female character in a Dostoevsky novel. (I don’t imagine they have [...]
Weltschmerz
The mood evident in a previous post has not lifted, and a phrase has started rattling around in my head: “The world is too much with us …” Where is that from? Not Shakespeare. Shelley? Coleridge? Keats? No need to rack one’s brains—it’s out there, a few thousand electrons cleverly lined up, ready to be [...]
Control
Somewhere in America recently, there was a conference on international strategy. After presentations by three scholars, the floor was opened to questions from the audience. After ten or so, this: “My question to the panel is, What is the path to success in Iraq?” There was a damburst of laughter in the audience … The [...]
Neighbors
Memorable lines come flying unbidden … Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. Writing at Slate, Shmuel Rosner shares some thoughts about the proposed fence along the US–Mexican border drawing on the [...]
Fandorin
I really should be writing the post I’ve been planning on deteriorating relations between the United States and Russia. It’s just a matter of digesting about eight or nine articles and a couple of major policy statements. So instead I’ll write about Fandorin. I’ve passed the halfway point of the set of detective novels by Boris Akunin, chronicling [...]
Meat
The local PBS station is begging for money again, and to get our attention they’re running old episodes of Julia Child‘s The French Chef. Last Saturday she made several dishes using potatoes. It was the first installment, apparently, from 1963— “in glorious black and white,” as they say. She didn’t manage to flip the first [...]
Passion
The subject of passion arose recently in this electronic space, and it sprang loose a quote that I have yet to come to grips with, almost twenty years after encountering it as an epigraph to a book by Don Robertson: Passions are not natural to mankind; they are always exceptions or excrescences. The ideal, genuine [...]
Walden