There are a couple of things going on here today, but my attention got distracted by an article posted to Arts and Letters Daily this morning.  If you’ve never been to ALDaily, you should go–they’re run by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which took over for the now-defunct magazine Lingua Franca, and what they do…

Right now, I’m really grateful that I’m not dead, because I’m so tired I can barely see straight, and I keep having to drive places.  Long distance places. Of course, the day before yesterday, this ninetten year old kid killed his brother in a town near here and then took off in a panic.  He…

Well, I said I was going to get into trouble, and I did.   And I know from long experience that the people who love Georgette Heyer are fierce on her behalf. Let me start, however, with this: >>>The FIRST purpose of fiction—any fiction—is to entertain—at least in the sense of attracting and keeping the reader’s attention.…

I’m about to get myself in a lot of trouble here, but it’s Monday morning, and I suppose that’s as good a time as any. Robert complains that books he likes fully as well, or better, than ones designated Literature have the same story, and yet are dismissed as–well, I don’t know what as, since…

So, somebody says, he reads books, and I read Literature. I used the capital there deliberately.  All written work is literature, it’s just that some of it is bad.   But what the writer meant by Literature is what I think would have been called in my childhood  Great  Books, and that would definitely leave out…

In novels,  I mean, this time, and especially in  American novels. But first:  I’ve learned a number of really odd things over the last week, the least important being that if you have a fever, cats will sleep on you.  Somewhat higher on the list was that atheism might get better press, and have a…

Hello. I had this absolutely wonderful plan.  I  was going to drop my younger son off at school, come home, and go immmediately to sleep until I had to pick him up again, because the way my life is going at present, Friday is the only day I don’t have something I have to do. …

That’s how I feel, at the moment–both because I still seem to be feverish enough to be floaty and because I took some Benadryl this morning in spite of the fact that it makes you drowsy, because now I’m stuffed up, too.  I absolutely refuse to be responsible for how anything is spelled. I do…

Tosay, I really, really, really apologize for the typing.  First, I’m the sickest I’ve been yet, with one of those fever making me floaty feelings that results in a lot of rambling if I start talking.  Second, I’m on an excellent computer that has, for some reason, been set up so that I can’t actually…

I  want to apologize up front today for my typing.  I’m never very good at it, but today I’m sick with something or the other.  I thought it was strep, since we’ve got strep in the house, but my strep test came back negative–the little initial one–so unless the back up test says something different…