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“I’ve simply always lacked even the slightest religious impulse—when people talk about their faith, I can’t connect with what they’re talking about. This isn’t a decision I came to, or a deep belief or principle; I’m just religion-deaf, the way tone-deaf people hear sounds but not music. I suppose my religion is reading.”

AVID READER

By Robert Gottlieb

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Today’s Curse

January 8, 2018

Two paragraphs and an image from a Wikipedia entry:

“May you live in interesting times” is an English expression purported to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. While seemingly a blessing, the expression is always used ironically, with the clear implication that ‘uninteresting times’, of peace and tranquillity, are more life-enhancing than interesting ones, which from historical perspective usually include disorder and conflict.
Despite being so common in English as to be known as “the Chinese curse”, the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced. The most likely connection to Chinese culture may be deduced from analysis of the late-19th century speeches of Joseph Chamberlain, probably erroneously transmitted and revised through his son Austen Chamberlain.

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Today’s Quote

November 1, 2017

“The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”

By Timothy Snyder

Tim Duggan Books, New York

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Halloween Poem

October 24, 2017

The Physics of Pumpkins

By Florence Newman

“The top’s too heavy, too much space below,”

my neighbor says. “’Spect she’ll start sagging soon.”

He’d lugged the massive thing out front for me.

I realize with horror that he’s right.

I’d carved my share of pumpkins through the years,

protected them from predatory squirrels,

from Mischief Night marauders: hubris had

at last undone me. A slightly wider grin,

an extra tooth or two—I should have known

the plan was flawed, the architecture tenuous.

Before too long the carriage will collapse,

sides slump, rind pit and wrinkle, pulp dissolve

and putrify. The oblique eyes, the arching brows,

isosceles nose are doomed to droop and molder.

Look on those overweening teeth, ye mighty,

and descry their graying edges fold and sear,

like the striate skin of a stitched cadaver.

Now soon a press of princesses, pop stars,

pirates, pixies, vampires, ninjas, sprites,

enchanters, supermen, and bumblebees

will throng the street, importunate to take

their turn, while my poor jack-o-lantern, claimed

by gravity, sits rotting at the door

before I’ve even got the candle lit.

Copyright © 2017, Florence Newman

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Today’s Quote

September 15, 2017

By James Thurber When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother’s house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer then twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.

Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.

“The Little Girl and the Wolf”

Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated, 1939

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Today’s Quote

June 12, 2017

“Orwell would have despised Trump as a kind of fat, dumb, uneducated oligarch,” Ricks said last month in a podcast produced by the magazine Foreign Policy. “Churchill would see America as somewhat childish. We occasionally stumble and elect a childish president, and that’s what we’ve done here, but Churchill would also appreciate how robust the American government is. Basically, we’ve had a decapitation strike that we executed ourselves. We no longer have a working presidency. There’s nobody at home, mentally, running the U.S. government. And guess what? It runs pretty well by itself. Probably better. If President Trump were competent, he’d be much more dangerous.”