This: http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=1192#.UDT_mjyypY1.facebook is in honor of the fact that the term will be starting soon.  Have fun. Real post for the day is the one before this.

One of the things I have been trying to do this summer is to find out how to get my younger son–turned 18 this winter–registered to vote. This is not as simple as it sounds, because Greg was born in London, and because he doesn’t have a driver’s license.  The driver’s license thing I thought was…

I usually get up just about an hour from now.  Today,  however, I have been up since 1:30, having gone to bed at ten, because–well, whatever.  I have cats.  Two cats, to be exact.  Tonight, one of them decided I needed to be awake. Of course, once I was awake, he paid no more attention…

One of those books that have been lying around my house for a while without my being able to get to them is a volume from the Yale University Press of the major works of John Locke.  The first of these is the First Treatise of Government, which is one of those odd things. I…

I can’t usually say that.  I’m actually a very slow and deliberate reader most of the time.  I wasn’t when I was younger, but the older I got and the more interested I got in understanding what I was reading–well, there you are. But before I get to the book of the day, let me…

Okay–the program that runs this blog  just had an update, and now it looks different and kind of odd. I’ll get used to it, but in the short run, I’m going to be referring to it every once in a while, when it does things I’m not expecting. But that’s not what I’m talking about…

So, yesterday, I found this http://junctrebellion.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/how-the-american-university-was-killed-in-five-easy-steps/ on Facebook, posted to share by Cathy F. It’s from a blog called The Homeless Adjunct, which I may look into over the next few days.   What struck me about it was that, although the author is obviously left wing, his core observation about what has gone wrong…

A short note on vocabulary. Because I’ve just hit one of those walls I never anticipate, even though, given everything, I should have anticipated. So– No novel can be a good novel if it is not true.  The opposite of true is false.  In other words, a novel that is not true is a lie about…

With all due respect to Lymaree–no, that isn’t what I’m doing. It’s got nothing to do with keeping things in separate compartments. It has everything to do with the music. To  me, prose plays in my head the same way music does.  There is a music to written prose, different for every writer and for…

The Jupiter is for Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, which is what I was listening to while reading this morning–and on a Saturday and not a Sunday, too. Mostly I only take Sunday off, and not even Sunday when I’m in the middle of a book, either writing the first draft or cutting it.  But this year,…