So I was thinking today–it’s not the best of Sundays, because Matt has to go back to school later this afternoon.  That means that I’m going to have to get into the car and drive him all the way down to New Haven, but it also means that my day is just not going to…

Okay, Thanksgiving worked out okay, and I’m up to early in the morning because I am.  On the other hand, this is a non-workin week-end, which means–to answer Mary F’s question from a few days ago–I get to have Bach (Handel’s Messiah today, I think, actually) on a day other than Sunday. It’s n ot…

Let me start with a little background here-it is the day before Thanksgiving, and I do not have a working refrigerator in th is house.  I was supposed to get one delieverd by a certain well-known national chain of bargain department stores, but they managed to decide not to deliver until next week and then…

So, yeseterday or the day before–I get a little lost here–I got an e-mail.  Part of it went like this: <<<One related point: remember the old saw about anyone who isn’t a communist at 20 has no heart, and anyone who is still a communist at 30 has no brain? I’d like to think one can…

Okay, some of this is just semantics–a result of the fact that the way we say things sometimes makes it seem as if we’re talking about the same thing in two different statements, when we’re actually talking about two different things. There, that should break your head open on a Sunday morning. If you ask…

I’m back on the computer that was giving me problems the other day, so I have my fingers crossed.  I’ll do the best I can, and then after the sixth reboot I’ll give up and post what I’ve managed to get. In the meantime:  I’m with  Cheryl, in that I think that there are things…

Okay! So let me apologize, first, for yesterday.  For some reason beyond my comprehension, the program just would not work right.  I would type the post, the program would disappear and shut down, I’d reboot and find that it had only saved part–and the lesser part–or anything I’d written, and on and one and on.…

Sometimes I think it’s my mission in life to make modern Americans–and, you know, others–understand that the Middle Ages was not a time when everything was religious. It wasn’t even close to such a time.  If you’re looking for societies obsessed with religion, and in which religion became virtually the only focal point of existence,…

So, I was thinking about it–it has been mentioned here before that the split in “taste” between the more highly educated and the less highly educated, or maybe the general public and the high art tradition–is of relatively recent vintage.  Everybody in classical Greece heard Homer and saw the plays of Sophocles, who was a…

I was going to go in a different direction with this today, but right now I want to tr to head off yet another problem–and that is the constant tendency to equate “objective judgments of literature” with “what English Departments teach.” Virtually every single time we have this particular discussion, common sense observations about objective…