2008

“If I can’t drink my bowl of coffee three times daily,...”
— Lieschen, from J. S....

Dark Knighthood

Dark quests for redemption, whether religious or secular, abound in contemporary culture. As...

Attention, Residents of Aberystwyth: Your...

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with Young Man Reading (1898). ...

1915 British National War Savings Committee poster...

Subjective messiahs

What happens now in professional criticism is that you start where you like, write about the object...

“May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me.”
— J. M. Barrie

Fear of the Dragon; or, Why the Oracles...

In the next-to-last decade of the seventeenth century a certain priest of the Diocese of Ely, Robert...

“If men had made no more progress in the common arts of life...”
— Sydney Smith (called to mind...

Recentalgia

Listen

stumblng: more is expected of American lawyers than...

"Breviary" (2), Zbigniew Herbert

portraitoftheartistasayoungman: Lord, grant me the ability to compose a long sentence, whose line,...

“I won’t go into greater detail. I wouldn’t want to “spoil”...”
— Reihan Salam on Hellboy II

Vladimir: Moron!
Estragon: Vermin!
Vladimir: Abortion!
Estragon: Morpion!
Vladimir: Sewer-rat!
Estragon: Curate!
Vladimir: Cretin!
Estragon (with finality): Critic!
Vladimir: Oh!

Listen

“Clarity begins at home. Knowledge puffeth up, but clarity...”
— D. J. Enright (NYT)

Counterfeit charity

As we were walking away from a tobacconist’s, my friend carefully sorted out his change: into...

“Sexual humor does not so much corrupt us as remind us that...”
— Jim Holt

“I have devoted my life to slime moulds.”
— John Tyler Bonner

A Life Worth Living

[In] the 1960s […] I was pastor of a very poor, very black, inner city parish in Brooklyn, New...

“To the Christian love is the works of love. To say that love...”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals

Books and men

If I had been asked in my early youth whether I preferred to have dealings only with men or only...

“Two days of abortion produce more deaths than the number of...”
— Hadley Arkes.  I don’t...

Faith and Doubt at The New Yorker

Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos

The Nietzsche Family Circus

The Truth about Sancho Panza

Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by feeding him a great...

July 4th -- at a time near the end of...

Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting...

“[Martin] Amis always surprises me. He’s of slight build but...”
— Richard Madeley (via Nigel...

Group Asks for Divine Intervention to Ease...

“…if September 11 taught us anything, it was that...”
— Terry Teachout, “The...

Waterboarding Christopher Hitchens

The benefits of swearing

stumblng: presumably, this product from here via this,...

preciseandtowering: The Fell Types - Free fonts in...

What is it like being Timur...

What is it like being Timur Bekmambetov? No artist should be confused too closely with his...

I am a despairing toad

Darkling (A Threnody)By L. Bassington Mulliner (Copyright in all languages, including the...

“The best chapter in the book (or perhaps I should say the...”
— Theodore Dalrymple,...

A retort from Bibbles

Whenever, in his writings, [D. H. Lawrence] forgets about men and women with proper names and...

Has modern life killed the semicolon?

“It is very dangerous to turn on the television in America on...”
— Bryan Appleyard

Joseph: How then am I to know, Father that you are just? Give me one reason.
Gabriel: No.
Joseph: All I ask is one Important and elegant proof That what my Love had done Was really at your will And that your will is Love.
Gabriel: No, you must believe; Be silent, and sit still.

“The last time I played rugby, I was sent off for reading on...”
— Theodore Dalrymple

BibliOdyssey

Ayjay's 'other' new book

The Aria of Prince Algorino

ayjay: via Jon Hicks

The Audacity of Death

“But I think that, really, the fair thing would be, in...”
— Thank you, musical pundit

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are...”
— Printed on the trade cards of...

“They wanted me to write ‘Son of Virginia Woolf’...”
— Edward Albee

The House Was Quiet and the World Was...

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like...

stumblng: … but for someone named Schmidt, not so good the...

YouTube Comment Snob Filters Stupid Comments

The Gospel According to Kurzweil

And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered,...

“Holiness the magnet is, / And love the lore that woos thee...”
— Henry Vaughan

“Mem: do not want to stroke cat’s genitals. ...”
— E. M. Forster, Commonplace...

Preachers face arrest in Birmingham

Obama Practices Looking-Off-Into-Future Pose

“I got a telegram from the Customs saying that the frequency...”
— Roberto Unger (qtd. here)

Fecopoetics?

An Inconvenient Opera

Civitas Peregrina

Buy a car, get a handgun

“Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks, which...”
— The sign Charles Dickens put...

Two lines of inquiry

What else am I? Let me imagine this: I am not that structure of limbs known as a human body. I am...

Prototopological world map [Strange Maps]

“One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the...”
— Hanif Kureishi

This list of Cornish phrases contains...

Myttin daGood morningDohajydh daGood afternoonGorthugher daGood eveningFatla genes?How are you?Meur...

“I do not yet know for certain, but I believe gardening is...”
— The Deliberate Agrarian

Retribution will come; truth remains...

But why is it that “truth engenders hatred”? Why does your man who preaches what is true...

“Veritas otium parit (“Truth engenders hatred”).”
— Terence, Andria

“Beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil war for...”
— Mitya Karamazov, qtd. in Roger...

The heavenly library

I sympathise with those mediaeval Jewish rabbis who, asked to describe heaven, pictured it as a...

At home with our homelessness; or, why I...

We live at the end of the modern world because we now see the consequences of the modern reduction...

Why the Americans Are So Restive in...

The inhabitant of the United States attaches himself to the goods of this world as if he were...

A Letter to His Imperial Majesty, Aslan

To His Imperial Majesty, Aslan, the Great Lion, he who rises from uncomfortable and broken stone...

McCain : HDTV :: Frankenstein : Monster

Callahan

A marvelous object full of contrasts

I have no need to travel through heaven and earth to discover a marvelous object full of contrasts,...

Married to the Sea

The universal lyre

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the...

“…a side-by-side translation would be nice.”
— A LibraryThing review of...

Lovers die into their union

Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at...

American Alien

I was parked in a strip mall in Palm Desert outside some sort of emergency medical centre. It was...

Pinkerism

The literature of Psychological Darwinism is full of what appear to be fallacies of rationalisation:...

Agenbites

Nobel Tits

The Neural Buddhists

“If countries were named after the words you first hear when...”
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Purity's time is always now

Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we...

Edward Lear

River and spirit

Neither is that city, the heavenly Jerusalem, watered by the channel of any earthly river, but that...

The Quiet Sigh of the Cauliflower

I was delighted to read the Manichaean ramblings of Danel Paden, director of the Catholic Vegetarian...

We flee ourselves, whom we can never...

If, when men sense a weight upon their mindsA trouble deep within that wearies them,They could but...

Words and the Word

“You know, these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness....”
— Bob Dylan (qtd. here)

From the Lovely Books Flickr set (via timoni)

Libertarian Paternalism

“We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us.”
— Thoreau (qtd. here)

This is Undoubtedly the Sausage of the...

But how few, after all, the books that are books! Charles Lamb let his kind heart master him when he...

“He was the first important composer since Mozart to show...”
— Constant Lambert on Emmanuel...

Hay to Lepers: Get a Grip

In 1977 or 1978 — she can’t remember which — [Louise] Hay found out she had cervical cancer, and she...

It must come to an end

When I saw burials, corteges passing under the windows of the house where I lived, I asked my mother...

Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine

The Death of Victimless Leather

“I feel, my dear Lucilius, that I am being not only reformed,...”
— Seneca the Younger

The Perfectly Bad Sentence

The Hip Hop Prayerbook

The Lord is all that, I need for nothing.He allows me to chill.He keeps me from being heatedand...

On a Poem by Arthur R. Gold

                                    Do youRemember slow-moving trolleys?Do you remember men...

The Ascension

Love urges one thing: reason another. I see, and I desire the better: I follow the...

Paging Isaac Bickerstaff

Obama was born with his sun in Leo, and his story exemplifies the quest of the Solar Hero.  His...

[via stumblng]

Oh for a pair of Roomy Richards! [Monoscope]

Correction

Newspapers constantly call for more vigilance and trans­par­ency in government and other...

T.S. Eliot, Kentucky-style

He woos us by his beauty

This beauty and “splendour of the divine Majesty,” is it that draws all creatures to it,...

Ex-Classics

Why Beautiful Art Matters

The Raising of Lazarus

by Rainer Maria Rilke ...

Language as Sacrament in the New...

To these and other sacraments I would like to add the sacrament of words. I would like to talk about...

Less than a week away

“A bosomy woman on this reasoning would lose her...”
— Fred

[Gustave Dore, Marco Lombardo follows the Poets through the...

America's Leading Flimflam Man

At 60, He Learned to Sing So He Could Learn...

From Nicole Oresme, Livre du ciel et du monde (The Book of...

“Certainly nothing jolts us more rudely than this doctrine,...”
— Blaise Pascal on original sin