Jane Haddam

This was on Arts and Letters Daily this morning– http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/06/message_to_freshmen_lets_start.html Be sure to click on the link to the full Bard freshman seminar reading llist. And remember that Bard was always considered to be a hotbet of faculty leftism when I went to college… And before bitching about what is or isn’t on the reading…

While all the rest of this stuff has been going on, I finally finished my afternoon book.  It’s called The Secret Language of the Renaissance:  Decoding the Hidden Symbolism of Italian Art, by Richard Stemp, and it leaves me with a couple of things to say. The first is that I really hadn’t realized, before…

I never know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that I sit down to write the post in the morning and I don’t know where to start. This morning, however, I’d better start with the most salient point. I never said that William Henry was a conservative. What I said was that…

So, to get back to where I was yesterday–Henry’s book isn’t actually about literature, or even the arts, specifically.  He has something to say about them, but it’s in passing.  His major bone of contention is what we would now call “multicutluralism,” which is an approach to cultural diversity that says that all culturals are…

So, Robert thinks I’m going to yell at him–but I’m not.  I’m much more fascinated by the fact that a) we have been defining “deference” differently all this time, and b) we’ve been talking past each other on the subject of the Canon and objective standards for art. Let me start with deference. I do,…

There are a lot of books in my house, hundreds of them at least, maybe thousands.  There have also been a lot of books in my life.  In that case, the number is almost certainly many, many thousands over the course of the years. One of the peculiarities of my life has been the fact…

Yesterday, I went crazy, looking all over the web for an image I wanted to post here.  Usually, this is not a problem.  I know it isn’t really true that everything is on the Net, but it sometimes seems like that. In the end, I found only one image, and it’s from the Powell Books…

Well. Okay.  I feel a lot better than I did yesterday.  I’d say I was getting too old to pull all-nighters, or even mostly all-nighters, but the fact is that I never felt anything but awful when I pulled those in college.  It’s the same with exercise.  Exercixe makes you feel great! all those programs…

So.  Last night, the entire state was under a severe thunderstorm watch except us.  Which sounds good, until you realize that the facilities for all our utilities are someplace else, in another county which was getting the storms.  Lots of them. The result was that our power kept going on and off.  This messed with…

Hi. This isn’t really the post that was meant to follow yesterday’s post.  I’m having one of those days when I have to do thirty gazillion things right away, so I wasn’t going to post at all. But some interesting things came up in the comments, and I thought I’d cover them, more or less.…