The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
From London, though I’m yet to arrive there, with stops at Vienna and Paris, but what’s a little topographic imprecision among friends? Vienna, because the eccentric diva who, as the reader may recall from my New Year missive, wore three different wigs in a single night, has invited us there; Paris, because a benevolent friend there gives my wife sound advice with regard to her concert career; and finally London, because there Irina has just had published a monograph on her collection of paintings, a massive tome entitled Flying in the Wake of Light. Irina Stolyarova – such is...
The word is out from the highest bully pulpit in the land: Donald Trump will not be President. Why, because being President “is a serious job.” President Obama went on, by way of the via negativa, to define the presidency by saying: “It’s not hosting a talk show or a reality show, it’s not promotion, it’s not marketing… It’s not a matter of pandering and doing whatever will get you in the news on a given day.” It is pretty obvious that the President has been spending a lot of time looking at his image in the mirror, and...
Dear Readers Technology is supposed to be a tool we use. If it’s reliable, sometimes we can be shocked at its letting us down. Last week Dr. Fleming and I spent 45 minutes trying to get him properly and digitally into our virtual studio so we could record a podcast. We had performed the exact same actions just a few days earlier with absolutely zero trouble. Ah, the idiosyncrasies of our digital masters. Dr. Fleming showed remarkable patience throughout and while we could have persevered on that afternoon to try for a makeshift solution, he wisely relented, and planned a...
Here in Rome I read Midwestern news stories many hours late or, if the events took place at night, seven hours early. In the morning, while my distant neighbors were still asleep, I read about the machete-wielding maniac in Columbus, Ohio, who attacked the diners in a Middle Eastern restaurant. It was hard to get any hard facts. The one fact that stuck out was the image of the Israeli flag in the window of a restaurant named Nazareth, along with other symbols and words in Arabic. Some report did either report or conjecture that the owner had tried...
“Centuries after Great Schism”–well, some ten of them, to be more precise–“Pope and Patriarch are to Meet.” So a headline in the Financial Times. It makes me wonder if, in their editors’ and reporters’ view, all news with only a remote historical precedent is ipso facto grounds for optimism. Now, seeing as God isn’t really these people’s beat, let’s poke around for an example closer to their hearts to illustrate my misgivings. What about “Corporate Tax in France without Parallel at 99%”? Or “Germany: Banks Nationalized Overnight”? Or “All Private Property Abolished in Britain”? “Ah,” I may be told, “but...
About On the House. From time to time I am posting free pieces, many of this old (this one dates back to 1999), partly to remind people that the truth has been “out there” for more than a two years and partly to entice casual readers into subscribing. A Silver level subscription costs nothing per month–two packs of cigarettes, a bottle of cheap wine, a month of Netflix. This is a non-profit operation, believe me, but I am no longer convinced of the wisdom of giving things away. I recall hearing something about casting pearls before swine. Then, come on, do not...
I used to try to understand Italian politics. This meant I had to read the newspapers, no easy task back in the primitive times before anyone had heard of the Internet. By the late 90’s I could keep up by looking at La Repubblica online, watching RAI television broadcasts, and checking up on the new faces entering the arena in the aftermath of the communist coup known as the “Mani Pulite” (Clean Hands) investigation of “Tangentopoli” (bribe city). After a while, it got to be more trouble than it was worth. Who could really care which lying scoundrel beat...
“Don’t be a statistic!” was, as I recall it, a didactic phrase widely used by our elders to check a youthful tendency to irresponsible behavior of various kinds, such as driving while under the influence of cheap alcohol or crossing the road without having first looked both ways. What this meant to communicate was something like “33.000 people will die in motor vehicle traffic crashes this year in the United States alone, and if you aren’t going to be careful you may be one of them.” As a sometime compulsive gambler, now long cured though as ever unrepentant, I...
On this episode Dr Fleming starts with an excerpt from the Gospel of St. Matthew. He uses the passage as a teaching device to look at endings of words. This discussion segues into nouns and verbs, declensions and conjugations, and hints and tips for learning and studying. We also address some listener feedback from Episode Zero, before finishing with our “Latin Word of the Month” in which Dr. Fleming discusses English words and their Latin ancestors. The text of the second passage that Stephen reads is: “In diebus autem illis venit Johannes Baptista praedicans in desert Iudaeae et dickens penitential...
Kenneth Patchen, in his novel Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, created a hapless character whose greatest ambition in life was to write a Perry Mason novel. Although an extremely ordinary man from nowheresville—Bivalve, New Jersey—and although endowed with a quintessentially nondescript name: Alfred Budd, it was his name that kept on landing him in bizarre adventures. Walking down the street, some shifty character would say, “Hey bud, come here, and, thinking he was being called by name, he stopped to listen to the con. I know how he felt. I lived like this for decades, and when I ended up...
