Jane Haddam

What follows is likely to sound a bit confused, because I’m not sure how to approach what I want to say here. I spent an awful lot of time on this blog talking about education, and how it should be structured, and all the rest of it.  You would think, since I’d gotten that far…

So, a couple of days ago I posted what amounted to a half-assed book review, and I said, in doing so, that I’d put it on a list of intelligent conservative books if anybody ever asked me for one–and that on that same list I would include a number of other works, includind Roger Shattuck’s…

So, in the middle of everything else I’ve been doing, I’ve been reading a book.  The book is called The Wages of Appeasement:  Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America and it’s by Bruce Thornton, who is Victor Davis Hanson’s second-most-published writer on the VDH Private Papers website.  He’s also a professor of classics at CalState/Fresno. …

So, here is a link, posted by several people on FB, including a couple who sometimes post comments here: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/how-to-have-a-rational-discussion/ It’s an interesting link, and I’ve got no argument with it in theory.   In fact, I think it sums up the definition of “rational argument” pretty well. My problem is that I think it largely…

I know when I’ve been away from the blog for a longer time than usual, because the program suddenly starts to demand that I sign in.  And then, of course, I start to worry that I can’t remember my password. This appeared as a link on Arts and Letters Daily this morning: http://www.tnr.com/book/review/thats-offensive-stefan-collini What it…

Well, it’s Wednesday.  And since Wednesday is the only day of this week when I really need to have gotten some sleep the night before, I did not, of course, get much in the way of sleep tonight.   I got so little, in fact, that I’m pretty much walking into walls. Beyond that, there are…

Well, sort of.  This was at Arts and Letters Daily this morning: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Intellectual-as-Courtier/126640/ As articles about this kind of thing–the craving some intellectuals have for power and celebrity, not necessarily for themselves,  but in other people–it’s rather standard stuff, not anything we haven’t noticed before. I think the quoting from Rousseau on the utter vileness…

Every once in a while, somebody commenting on this blog will have a conniption because some book or the other that he (or she) wants to buy and read isn’t in print anymore and isn’t available. I’ve got a similar complaint–there are too many books out there I don’t really want to spend money on…

So, I am sitting here in my office, having had the first decent night of sleep I’ve managed in over a week, and a very odd thing is going on.  Playing behind me is my favorite Bach piece–Concerto in D Minor–and the steady hum of my sons talking on and on about some ancient Teenaged…

Okay. Terrible title for a post.  It is, however, very early in the morning, and I’ve decided that I’m going to ditch the last chapter of the new Gregor I edited and start again.  Part of the problem with having nonstop family crises is that it makes it difficult to get past them and into…