P.G.Wodehouse and A.A. Milne were the same age and in 1941 they were both close to 60. As young men about town in Edwardian London they had moved in the same social and literary circles, belonged to the same club and played on the same cricket team. They were friends. Bertie Wooster and Christopher Robin are of course fictional characters…
“Phosphorescence is a process in which energy absorbed by a substance is released relatively slowly in the form of light. … When the stored energy becomes locked in by the spin of the atomic electrons, a triplet state can occur, slowing the emission of light, sometimes by several orders of magnitude.” Phosphorescence is also the title of a book by…
One book leads to another. Six Degrees of Separation comes via Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Readers start with the same book and see where their connections take them by the first Saturday of the month. The starting point for January 2021 is Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2020). Follow the hashtag #6degrees on Twitter to check out…
The November #6degrees is freestyle. Instead of everyone starting in the same place with the same book, each participant starts with the last book on a previous chain or – if a newcomer – with the last book they read. #6degrees is the book version of Six Degrees of Separation. It usually starts with a book suggested by Kate at…
Long before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, bookish teens had Iris Murdoch. As the poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) explained in Annus Mirabilis, sex was invented in 1963 Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban And the Beatles’ first…
Always fun to find half-remembered books. One bonus of this decluttering lark is that you find so many of them. What to do? Choices: Keep: The book has an enduring value. While there is no more room you just have to hold on to this one. It’s either irreplaceable or just a core component of your identity and emotional furniture. …
In September we heard Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Oprah Winfrey at the Apollo in NYC. The topic was his first novel The Water Dancer and the ticket price included a copy of the book. The conversation was interesting – Oprah is really good at this kind of thing and she clearly loved the book. And so did I. It’s…
Scooterons-nous vite. It’s Back to School with Angela Brazil Long before Harry Potter – and indeed long before all those school story authors who gave us Malory Towers and St. Clare’s and the Chalet School and the Abbey School and Jennings and Billy Bunter – there was Angela Brazil. Brazil – rhymes with dazzle – didn’t invent the school story…
Just over 20 years ago now a teacher walked into my office and said that he had just found a bag of books on the street and would I like them. Of course I said Yes and in the books came. Quick look at the top of the bag – looked like a whole load of pornesque pulp fiction from…
Two Sundays, two documentaries and two very satisfactory movie experiences. The first was Maiden at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY. The second Toni Morrison: The Pieces I am at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck. And before say anything about either film I have to comment on the pleasure of film-going at Indy cinemas like these. Two recent movie going experiences at…
It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the…
I began this post in 2017. The original focus was Louis MacNeice’s’s poem “Brother Fire”. MacNeice was a fire-watcher during the London Blitz which meant that he spent nights on rooftops watching for, and reporting, fires caused by incendiary bombs. The poem expresses a human kinship with the destructive power of fire: O delicate walker, babbler, dialectician Fire, O enemy…
I’m not giving anything away by quoting the deep irony of the last lines of Saplings: Turns you over, don’t it, to think of the children? I was saying to my daughter only yesterday, we got a lot to be thankful for in this country. Our kids ‘aven’t suffered ‘o’-ever else ‘as. – (361) That last sentence translated from the…
I once worked in a school where the librarian arranged the non-fiction by the color of the spine. It made for some serendipitous browsing. He was a friendly fellow with a big bushy beard, a scholarly demeanor and who claimed to have a PhD in philosophy. We got along well. There came a day when two men in suits arrived…
We all love to rumble on about lifelong learning . But how does that happen when learning is presented as a series of predefined steps and stages that learners must master and hurdle – the endless hamster wheel of material, test, grade, material, test, grade, move on. Where is the room for the infinite variety of human capacity? Where is…