I have a standard ritual for Sunday mornings.  I get up and put on water to boil for the tea.  I sit down and check a few things online, then do any work I have to do.  I write the blog, if I’m inclined.  I go listen to music. For what it’s worth, I often…

So, give me a few moments here. First, I think I definitely agree with Robert–Rome fell, as a government, but  Rome did not fall, as a civilization.  And, for that matter, Greece didn’t really fall as a civilization, either, although other and odder things happened to it.  A Greek of the Classical period would not…

Here is the thing about the fall of Rome–it should be a matter of straightforward reporting, but it isn’t.  And it’s the way in which it isn’t that interests me. We know more or less when the civilization of Egypt ended, and the civilization of Sumer, and the civilization of Babylon.  What were once great…

A couple of days ago, one of my cats decided he was still really a tiny little kitten, in spite of weighing nearly thirty pounds, and started bouncing off the walls like a ping pong ball in pursuit of…well, who knows what cats are in pursuit of. What happened was the eventually he toppled one…

My first impulse, after yesterday’s comments, is to say–smug, self-important, smirking student government types?  Exactly–that’s Sarah Palin to a T. And that would be truthful, from my experience, which did not include any contact with student government at all after ninth grade, and that only included contact with jocks in graduate school, when I taught…

First, to correct one thing–what William F. Buckley actually said was that he’d rather be ruled by the first three hundred names in the Cambridge telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard, not Yale–maybe not so small a point as it seems, given that Buckley himself was a Yalie. And I don’t think he…

So Robert said: >>>So we’re back to “Why are todays yahoos ignoring our Ivy League (or First Tier) Great and Good?”>>> And it took me aback, because I don’t remember ever saying a thing in that last post about the Ivy League, or people with degrees, or who you voted for. I did complain about…

Guys? I don’t want to be snotty or anything here, but “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is not in the US Constitution. It’s in the Declaration of Independence. And I think all it’s supposed to mean is that citizens get to set their own priorities without interference from the state–that the state shouldn’t…

So, I’m sitting here at a halfway decent computer–not one of the really great ones, but better than anything I have at home–and the first thing that comes into my head is this:  is it possible to teach people to be happy? Traditionally, this was the great question for philosophy and religion, and there’s a…

I don’t know why, but I’m really having a lot of trouble getting over this particular novel–no, not getting over the novel, exactly, but getting over the weird physical side effects of writing.  I have no idea if this is something every writer, or even every writer of fiction, experiences.  When writers get together, they…