There’s a small industry in the book review business consisting singularly in reviews slating John Updike. I’ve never read Updike, but I’ve enjoyed reading and re-reading David Foster Wallace’s essay “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?”. In this micro-genre comes the quote of the [...]
If I were a rhymer I’d rhyme hymn with limn. In other news, you really get a sense for the bewildering diversity of contemporary physics when a review of a popular survey book designed for a general audience is recommended to heads of physics departments—on the grounds that it will enable them to more [...]
“Don’t be inquisitive”.
(From the section “For Children”, in Fannie Dickerson Chase, Good Form and Social Ethics, Review and Herald Publishing Assn, Washington DC, 1913, p. 115).
Realising today the Russian anarchists would have killed me for being too old. Though I still have some time before reaching Dostoyevsky’s immoral, vulgar, bad-mannered age of forty.
“Many of the current philosophy publications have the glossy look of books that are designed to be left lying around on coffee tables, advertisements signalling the possibility that there just might be something other than the pursuit of profit going on in the household; that the possessor of these books has a cultured side to [...]
Title of the Day
“I will not deny, though my memory is uncertain and indistinct, that this witness of yours may have seen us together as he says, on the Gainesville pike walking towards Big Cyprus Swamp, at half past eleven on that awful night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, and a curious coil of [...]