Or something.  I find this all very interesting on a number of levels.  Let me try to sort it out so that it’s not too confusing. First, nobody taught me to read.  I can’t remember learning.  One day I must have just known, but what sticks in my mind is the day other people figured…

Specifically, a link to Erin O’Connor’s blog, the only one I read on a regular basis.  Go here http://www.erinoconnor.org/ :and look for the post marked titled Poe Prompt. It’s the January 23, 2009 entry, so if you’re coming on another day use the clickable calender. It’s a great post on the inherent contradictions of teaching…

I’m at that stage in the writing of a book where it’s sort of a good thing there are computers, because if this was a paper manuscript I might burn it.   It’s not that I hate it so much, but that the whole thing seems unwieldy and recalcitrant.   Plot may not be what I read for,…

Theodore Dalrymple is a pseudonym.  When he’s at home, he’s Anthony Daniels–yes, yes, like C3PO, it must make him nuts–and sometimes he writes under his real name. Here he is http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Guarding-the-boundaries-3979 at The New Criterion, making uncommon sense about moral relativism.  And Robert will just have to forgive him for quoting Matthew Arnold.

Yesterday, I virtually shredded the skin on the tip of the middle finger of my right hand, and today  I’m finding it  very hard to type.  But let me get started.  Robert commented on yesterday’s post: >>>Barring religion and multiple personalities, we are each of us alone in our own skulls, and I have only…

I spent half the night thinking about how to make this coherent, because it all ties in.   So let me give it a try. First,  you have to understand the situation  I am in with teaching.  I do most of that teaching in a special program for “remedial” students, which is a polite way of…

When I was a child, my father used to take us to Florida every winter for three months.  That is, he’d take us, come back north himself, and then see us on the week-ends or whenever possible until April, when we’d all come home.  We had a house there.  He would make arrangements with our…

A hundred or so posts ago now, I started this blog by saying that I wanted to talk about a number of things–including harpsichords, which I haven’t gotten around to yet–and that one of them would the tendency of too many people in too many places to assume that “science” is the only posible valid…

So, I’ve been thnking about Janet’s’ post, and actually I’ve been thinking about the whole “victim mentality” thing for much longer than that.  It’s also  Sunday, and we’re in the middle of yet another snowstorm.  But it’s warmer than it was yesterday, which can’t hurt. Anyway, here’s the thing.  I know the victim mentality, and…

The title of th is post comes from a bit of French (possibly faux French) from something that may or may not be an actual French poem, called La Belle Homicide.  I admit to not having the patience to read through the conversation on the list I saw this on, mostly because  it’s about four degrees…