Podcast: Why Language Matters
Language in the Republic of Letters and gibberish in the Empire of Propaganda
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Victorian Verse Satire
I’ve been reading in anthologies of Victorian verse in preparation for the summer symposium. I’d like to share a couple of poems I particularly like, both satires, progenitors of satiric currents that flow throughout twentieth-century commentary, high and low, to our own times. Both I found in Victorian Verse (1969), edited by George Macbeth.
Ray Olson
Wednesday’s Child: The Boot and the Cage
Aldous Huxley, it may be remembered, was not only George Orwell’s senior, but, as it happens, one of his masters at Eton in 1917, teaching the young lad French…
Attention, Lovers of Italian
After completing, sort of, the three levels of Living Language Italian, I am happy to continue with a little further study. There are several lines that might be pursued:
Decadent Verses
First, a French manifesto of the Parnassien school that preached art for art’s sake, and then a few English poems by Andrew Lang that give some small idea of the French style.
The Burden of Personal Responsibility
Here is my take. Crimes should be about a human being harming another human being against the latter’s will (this includes property crimes).
Wednesday’s Child: The Young, the Cheap, and the Frugal
Hopper was very frank in his pronouncements, and one of the truths he imparted was that Clint Eastwood fled California and made for Italy in the 1960’s to escape persecution, ostracism, and unemployment.
