While that last piece was read at Santayana‘s death, I’m slightly more enamoured with a piece he wrote on the death of a friend, simply entitled “To W.P.“. It’s not too long, so you could go read the whole thing. Here are two bits that particularly resonate with parts of my personal philosophy: Another, if I would, I could not… Read more →
Month: April 2008
The Poet’s Testament
George Santayana began as a poet, and, though he came to be known as philosopher, teacher and critic, a poet he remained. There was nothing blank, free or modern about his verses’; they rhymed, and what he had to say often sounded like a translation from the Latin classics, with which he was intimately familiar. When he died in Rome… Read more →
The use of time
Sunday: 3 hours of packing. 1 hour of back-and-forth. 11 hours of driving (5 hours of music, 6 hours of radio plays.) 3 hours of reading. Monday: 9 hours actually in the office. 7.5 hours of meetings.I normally have several hours a day of tele-meetings. Attending a meeting is much less onerous when it can be done with continuous partial… Read more →
It Can’t Be Done
Why? Why would you try to take not just one, but two “highly complex” novels and try to make a film out of them? Hyperion deals with a space war, with most of the action taking place on a planet named Hyperion, known not only for its electricity-spewing trees but also for the Time Tombs, large artifacts that can move… Read more →
Scottish protection rackets
Things I Learned Today #1: “blackmail” is a Scottish word, and the Highland Scots invented the protection rackets. World Wide Words: Blackmail The mail in blackmail (at various times also spelled maill, male and in other ways) is an old Scots word for rent. This was usually paid in what was often called white money, silver coins. It comes from… Read more →
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Is the Wizard Of Oz really a political cartoon?
Over the last couple of nights I’ve re-read all of Grant Morrison’s brilliant and bizarre run on the Doom Patrol. Some of this run was previously mentioned here in the context of a discussion of Borges and Serafini. (An aside: this run started almost 20 years ago! I am so old.) It’s great, great stuff, and if you haven’t read… Read more →
Today’s Must Read
TPMMuckraker | Talking Points Memo | Today’s Must Read More than five years after its composition, we finally see a copy of John Yoo’s March 14, 2003 memo to William Haynes, then the Defense Department’s general counsel. It was, as The New York Times and Washington Post report, a green light for military interrogators to use just about any technique… Read more →
Today’s Only Content
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present for your edification, a highly-trained Canadian actor who has spent 30 years working in Britain (on stage and screen, and in over 200 BBC radio plays, among other things) playing the part of a stage actor from Tennessee in the 1960s, who is in turn playing the part of a British narrator in Victorian times,… Read more →
