“The staff of life,” meaning bread, apparently gained wide currency in English in the wake of a misquotation of the Book of Psalms by a seventeenth-century Nonconformist, though I note that Jonathan Swift had used it some decades earlier. “Bread is the staff of life,” wrote the great English satirist, as therein is contained, “inclusive, the quintessence of beef, mutton, veal, venison, partridge, plum-pudding and custard.”
An earlier less humorous version I meant to keep in draft mode got posted (by me). If you read it, please read the new version. I have post neither column nor comment since August 1. This slacking is not due to heat–it has been in the very low 80’s here in Rockford–nor pique with anyone or anything. I’d spent much of a day eating out, smoking a cigar, and talking for hours and was not surprised to find I had a minor sore throat.
We’re now in what British journos call the Silly Season, and what could be sillier than the silly invitation for silly President Zelensky of Ukraine from silly U.S. President Biden to come and see him in Washington at the end of August, when Congress is in recess and there’s nobody to say they’re being silly?
If you are unwise enough to be on one or another social medium, you will have read something like this: “If you want to disagree with my futile ill-thought out and clumsily expressed opinion on X Y or Z, go ahead and make my day. I can’t wait to unfriend you”? Do you ever wonder what is going on in someone’s mind, when he issues such a taunt? I automatically unfriend such people, even if I agree with their position. I no longer have to teach low-achieving American adolescents with exaggerated opinions of themselves. I am speaking of the early...
In reading fiction, especially fiction of the lighter sorts, readers are tempted to see the characters in abstract terms as straw men or lay figures invented to play a part or represent an idea, a virtue, or a vice.
Some movie classics are one-offs. Their makers never made another film or another film nearly as good or even another film that’s now available to the public. Here are five of them.
McNeile’s plots follow the well-worn highway of adventure fiction, The plot of the first is particularly formulaic.
“L’enfers c’est l’autre.” Whatever Sartre meant by “Hell is other people,” he was certainly right about the people he liked to refer to as “salaud”—the scum who think only of their own interests and reduce the universe to their own dimensions, in other words, people like Sartre and his friends.
Though now back in my own bed, thoughts of the fancy hotel where we stayed in Apulia keep me awake at night. What is it about such places? The first answer that comes to mind is that it has something to do with the success of “virtual worlds,”
And now for something completely different! Since Polish novelists and ancient historians have proved to be too daunting or time-consuming for most readers, I am taking a different tack and devoting a few days to Bite of the Bulldog (initially titled simply Bulldog Drummond), a short thriller in which the reader meets one of the great pop fiction heroes of the last century, Bulldog Drummond.
