Wewak My browser tells me, whenever I pull up a page from my own website, that the page is in Russian, and would I like it translated? How odd.
Monthly Archives: September 2011
The Brilliant Internet.
20-Sep-11Just Before the Color Starts.
15-Sep-11Garden and Gun.
15-Sep-11Amazingly, there is actually a magazine called “Garden and Gun: The Soul of the New South.” And more amazingly, it’s not that bad. There’s an article this month about Wendell Berry, along with an article on “the new generation of women who are redefining the Southern Belle.”
Understanding and Virtue.
15-Sep-11“I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here…. It is a spiritual ambition, like goodness. The wild creatures belong to the place by […]
Not Light Reading.
15-Sep-11Someone has objected to my description of Bertrand Russell as “light reading.” I stand by the characterization. As an example of something which is not light reading, I offer Montaigne. He runs through an entire plot in one sentence: enough for five New York Post articles. In one sentence! No filler whatsoever. This was when […]
Bertrand Russell’s Atheist Essays.
14-Sep-11There is a fine little collection of essays about atheism by Bertrand Russell, entitled Why I Am Not A Christian, which I read on subway rides about the city the past week. It is light reading, and his mature essays are in a lucid style which offers no difficulties (some of his earlier essays, such […]
Staten Island in the Times.
11-Sep-11I could have posted this awhile ago, but wasn’t sure it was all that interesting, but since I am considered a minor expert on things Staten Island I suppose I should. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/nyregion/todt-hill-in-staten-island-offers-a-different-new-york.html?_r=2&hp In unrelated news it appears the Staten Island book is now officially out of print, all the copies having been sold.
Scott Moringiello recalls Simone Weil on Homer and violence: “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force, that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” “Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” […]
Camus.
10-Sep-11Reading Bertrand Russell lately, I remembered a photo I had seen, which I had always thought was him, of a mid-twentieth-century intellectual, a handsome man, well-dressed, with a kind of hopeless seriousness in his eyes. I know no more of faces than to say that we are all affected by them, and such a face […]
Grit, Drive, all that, whatever.
20-Sep-11buy isotretinoin amazon Someone sent me a video called “The Secret” – apparently a pop-culture phenomenon – which claimed that the secret to everything, riches, love, fame, power, all that, was, more or less, desire mixed with positive thinking. If you want it enough, and believe you can and should have it, you can have it. This probably […]