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The time may not be very far away when this poem will need a footnote explaining that the speaker is reading a "newspaper," and how they worked. The New York World-Telegram was a daily that ran from 1867 until 1966, and is probably the paper referred to here. The poem was written in 1939. It is
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On Friday I finished reading The Master of Hestviken. On Saturday I had a conversation via text messages with a friend who had just finished Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy. He asked whether I had any recommendation as to what to read next. I replied, "At the moment I don't think any novelist except Undset is really
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This is not one of my favorite poems. So why am I writing about it? Because it contains one bit, one clause of a sentence, that I think of at least once a week, possibly more often than that. The "land agitation" in the title was a series of efforts at land reform in Ireland
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Still thinking about the gun control question: I've had trouble articulating even to myself my reasons for thinking that a definitive repudiation of the right to keep and bear arms–i.e., repeal of the 2nd Amendment–would represent a major change in the culture and the self-understanding of this country, and even imply at least the possibility
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THERE NEVER WAS TIME I wish, he said, the years would linger And fly less fast to make me old; My face is a mask that time’s swift finger Models, moulding wrinkle and fold In sagging flesh youth fashioned true To the ageless image engraved on brass, Of a young face Rome or Athens knew.
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Easter Sunday When I was twelve years old, an aunt and uncle gave me two books for Christmas, both part of a series or set called The Looking Glass Library. These were The Haunted Looking Glass and The Looking Glass Book of Verse. The first was a collection of classic ghost stories, though of course I didn't know
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I came across this poem because the high school literature discussion that my wife and I run was reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame (otherwise known as Notre-Dame du Paris). I wanted to find some Hugo poem and this one caught my fancy. It is very romantic, with a wistful nostalgia for the imagined innocence
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Today begins Holy Week, for Western Christians, anyway…actually I'm not sure how many Protestants use the term–I don't remember hearing it when I was growing up. Instead of rattling on about what I'm reading and current events and such, I'm just going to post a few remarks from Simone Weil. You may or may not
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LITTLE ORPHANT ANNIE Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay, An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away, An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep, An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep; An’ all us other children, when
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I said last week that the big contemporary corporate or government employer is "not meant to produce free citizens. And it doesn't want them." Later I started thinking about how different our biggest corporations–Google and the like–are from their counterparts of thirty or forty or fifty years ago, and yet how similar. Once upon a time there was much
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Light On Dark Water 