I still don’t have the olives pitted, so this is going to have to be short, but I’d like to point out a number of things. First, I’m sticking to “in this country” because I am in the middle of a summer of reading through a great deal of American material, almost all of it…

Let me start out by agreeing with a few of the posts.  There is certainly a lot of moral posturing in the group I’m talking about, and certainly a lot of inauthenticity.  But the fact remains that these people–not just any goup of moral posturers or any herd of independent minds–were first off the dock…

Okay, so here’s the thing.   My two sons read this blog–or, to be exact, my younger son reads it, and my older one (who claims never to read blogs, ever) pumps my younger one about it, and then they both argue about it with me. I figure this has got to be better than endless…

So, here’s the thing.  I am, at the moment, reading The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  For those of you who haven’t read it or wouldn’t read it or whatever, it’s a novel about a utopian socialist back-to-the-land experimental community in antebellum New England. For those of you who thought all that started in the…

So, yes, the Facebook thing- I’m sort of with those people who don’t see the point, although it does seem to me that it might come in handy if you have to make a general announcement an want everybody to see, but for some reason can’t or don’t want to call them or e-mail them…

Every once in a while, I end up having these epiphanies about stuff everybody else knows about, but that I’ve never heard of.  I lead a sheltered life. Anyway, the first of these has to do with country music, and it came to me because the people hired to work my television cable company’s customer…

Okay, I’ll admit it.   There’s really no point to the title of this post except that I was thinking of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, and I really like wombats. I’ve also got to admit that I’ve never read The Turn of the Screw, largely because it always seemed to me that teachers tended…

A few years ago, I reread a lot of Henry James’s novels–I’m a big James fan, and I still think The Princess Cassamassima is the best tourist-at-the-revolution portrait I’ve seen yet–and I got a little shock in the middle of The Bostonians.  For those of you who haven’t read James–and that seems to be mostly…

Okay, let’s start here–human beings are hardwired for language. That means that there is something about the physical structure of our brains that makes language possible for us.  If our brains were physically different, we would not be able to form languages or learn to speak them. At the same time, we’re not hardwired to…

Meaning that sometimes, the responses on this blog fascinate me. I was talking about hardwiring, and practically everything anybody had to say had to do with social construction, or presumed social construction. Let’s start with  Robert.  I’m not sure from the ost, but if he’s trying to imly that I was claiming that some moral…