Every once in a while I get to just this point in the day and realize that I really have nothing to say.  I suppose I don’t actually mean this literally, although it feels like I do.  I think it’s more that I feel that nothing I have to say makes much of a difference. …

For a long time I took part on an Internet forum called Rec.Arts.Mystery.   I suppose that, technically, I never stopped, since I still check in now and then, even if I don’t contribute much. RAM was an interesting place for a number of reasons, but the most important was in the fact that it introduced…

Actually, it had better be soon, because they’re due back at SMP on the first of July. Actually, I am, at the moment, in something of a conundrum.  I have never revised a book this extensively in this piecemeal a fashion before.  Usually, if I think I need to make extensive changes, I think I…

So, it’s Sunday morning, and as is usual on Sunday mornings, I’m not much interested in doing anything serious. Of course, there are some serious things I have to do–I’ve got a book in revision, and I can’t stop now–but that’s different than thinking seriously about stuff I just like to think seriously about. Still,…

Several years ago–I don’t really remember when–a short article ran in the National Review magazine that argued that an old-fashioned aristocracy by birth was much better than an aristocracy by merit, because the aristocrats of the first always felt as if they didn’t quite deserve what they had, while the aristocrats of the second always…

A couple of days ago, I set out to write about Edith Wharton and The Custom of the Country, and I got sidetracked. I’m now halfway through with this rereading of the book, and I’ve got some notes. 1) This is not a Victorian romance.  It’s a book more in the tradition of Vanity Fair,…

It’s a miserable, dark morning here, and the only real bright side is that it’s reasonably cool.  Reasonably.  I could still use the air conditioner. I was going to spend the day today talking about Edith Wharton and a character called Undine Spragg, and I’ll get around to it this week, because I’m having a…

So, I’m sitting here, reading through the comments from yesterday, and being thoroughly astonished–yes, of course, on one level and in one very small segment of the world, “social class” is about who gets to go to which parties– But social class in the real world is about who gets to be Secretary of the Treasury,…

A couple of days ago, I started to write a post for this blog on the subject of V.S. Naipaul and Edith Wharton.  For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, V.S. Naipaul is the ethnically Indian, Trinidad-raised, London-resident novelist who won a Nobel Prize in Literature a few years back, and who has…

It’s just possible that I got enough sleep last night.  I say it’s possible because, although I got up at two thirty, I also went to bed very early, and I seem to be functional.  I did not get enough sleep the night before last, however, and that’s how I ended up watching a bunch…