In my task of cataloging and subcataloging my library, the next book up is a Library of America volume, The Mark Twain Anthology. After the introduction, it gives a sampler of brief comments on Twain by various American figures, from Louisa May Alcott to Barack Obama.

Both Presidents Roosevelt are quoted; both comment on A Connecticut Yankee in ( Read more... )

The following passage from Polybius somehow strikes me funny. "He" is King Philip of Macedonia ( Read more... )

Every so often, while reading one of the classics of antiquity, I get suddenly clubbed by the radical differences in attitude between now and then. In Arrian's book on Alexander, it was the repetition of "We came to a village, and asked them to give us all their gold. They refused, so we killed them all and took the gold anyway." (Not that that ( Read more... )

My father hated Harry Truman - absolutely despised him for his handling of the MacArthur affair during the Korean War. (I once heard him refer to HST as "Hairy Ass Truman".) He and I had more than one loud argument over the matter, but no minds were ever changed ( Read more... )

Pierce was one of the greatest thinkers the United States has yet produced. Logician, mathematician, philosopher - many pies have the marks of his fingers. Here is his account of his life up to age twenty, written when he was twenty. It's rather amusing, I think; I find his notation for the two Miss W's entertainingly indicative of his future.

The talk went reasonably well; in fact, it was a bit short (only 50 minutes). I don't think I could have added more details without adding too many more, so that's all right. Attendance was smallish - four or five faculty, eight to ten students - but that's what you get when you schedule something on a Friday afternoon. (Of course, any other time, ( Read more... )

Yesterday, the song "Easy Come, Easy Go" came into my head, and I decided to look it up. (There are several songs by that title; this is the one with the lines "She wasn't kind / I wasn't smart".) It seemed to me to have a 50s-ish feel to it; I figured it was sung by someone like Frank Sinatra, or maybe Der Bingle. (Not Perry Como, certainly.) Nope ( Read more... )

And this terrible year continues to reap its swath. John Glenn has died.

In my childhood, he was the epitome of the USAn space program. In my young adulthood, he was a Senator and a presidential candidate, though he fell short in the latter race. Now, he's a memory.

Rest in peace, Senator.

For your consideration, a compilation of the Orange One's twitter feed from election night 2012.

I'm currently reading Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age, on a recommendation from desert_vixen. I haven't gotten very far yet, but it's been interesting so far. However, I just ran into the following passage."Every man should have a lord", proclaimed the Treaty of Verdun in 843. Only the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor in Constantinople were exempt from this ( Read more... )