Dear visitor, if you take the trouble to read : I apologize for all the bad, syrup-thick blog prose here. Man is it bad, so much of it. I wish hereby to take responsibility and express regret for many wrongs committed by keyboard. — pdb
H ere is a nice little Latin phrase, and rare too, (one can’t be too recherché or brief in one’s Latin, it’s getting so common) …
That’s Poe in full smirk, ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ — parody it might have done me good to come across sooner than I did, some years back now.
Quare id faciam I pulled from one of Catullus’ better-known little verses, encountered in low-level Latin courses in college. Embarrassing, yes, that I borrowed it in the first place (albeit without much pretension; just liked the excised snippet for itself) twenty-odd years ago. More embarrassing that I’m kind of using it as a handle still !
Well, I’m kind of attached to it still — what can I say? Not every dumb thing you do when young has to be repudiated utterly.
Solvent
Something recent in threads on Bluesky, an (in my judgment) ill-considered, typo-ridden moment of dudgeon from somebody I like, U.S. politics historian Rick Perlstein, worth paying attention to for (and despite) what’s wrong with it: This isn’t a post for chastising Perlstein, let me say, though certainly it’s about disagreeing …
Theoretical
There [in his autobiography, Jefferson] recalls that on February the seventh, 1779, when he was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, [he] supported an amendment to a slavery bill that would address, early on, the contradiction at the heart of the new-born republic. He supported an amendment that …
Turning point: U.S.A.
I often go to Google News for an idea of what’s current in headlines. I don’t like it, but for this bare, quite specific purpose, it’s the convenient and (so far) all-too-difficult-to-replace tool. Google News disgusts especially for systematically representing news- and newslike-media from every corner as though all were, …
World order
An organization I’m involved in from several years ago now, never as a central participant but nevertheless in a continually deepening way, the National Writers Union, put out quite a strongly worded statement last week calling for coverage of new open warfare in Israel-Palestine that isn’t tilted in favor of …
now on 1 of 15 pages