I’m continually amazed by how often this blog brings home to me the very different ways we all read things–so different that I wonder, really, if any two people are ever reading the “same thing.”  Okay, that’s incoherent. Let me tell you about yesterday, which actually hooks up to what it is I found “brilliant”…

It was 102 by midafternoon here yesterday, so I’m in the office–which is a sunroom–early, because it’s either early or nothing until later this week. But I really hate heat.  And I hate cold.  And I got up really early, so Gregor got done. But, a couple of things. First, one of the reasons for…

I knew it was going to be a bad day when I came downstairs this morning, at not quite four, and it was so hot I had to put on the air conditioner. I can usually get away with not doing that until at least ten, even if July and August.  Then I checked the…

It’s the fourth of July, and I should probably be off doing something about something.  I know I’m supposed to be making chicken salad.  There are things. But it’s also just after five in the morning, and I’ve just put away another big hunk of Gregor novel, and I don’t really want to get up…

Last year at this time, I was in the middle of trying to find a way to get to my 40th high school reunion.  That only partially worked out, but it put me in touch with people I hadn’t seen in forty years, and that seems to have cut loose some kind of nostalgia trip. …

This http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/66894/sec_id/66894 was linked to on Arts and Letters Daily this morning. It’s by Theodore Dalrymple, and it’s got some interesting things to say about meritocracies and equality. And, you know, like that, to go along with today’s actual post, below.

Well, we’re now on the third day of the new computer, and things are definitely better.  I actually got a big whacking hunk of work done this morning without yelling at the keyboard even once.  And nobody on earth sympathizes with the fact that I really did love WordPerfect, even if nobody else on the…

Um…guys? I mean, gee. I got this new computer, which is great, and a lot faster than my computer.  I can actually write this blog on the blog site, which I couldn’t do on my home computer before.  I’m in love with the thing. But I’m also me.  I react to change in minor routines…

So, whatI havehere, at the moment,isanewcomputer. That I don’t really know how to work yet.  I especially don’t seem to know how to work the space bar yet. The computer arrived courtesy of my friends Carol and Richard, who understand this kind of thing.    It’s very nice, and faster than my old one–well, snails are…

Okay, let me work this out a little–let me go back to where I started thinking about it, instead of where I started writing about it. In the beginning, not of Western Civilization itself, but of Western Civilization as you and I have lived it–because we are products of the twentieth century, and not the…