Two Poems by Lionel Johnson
These two poems of Lionel Johnson, included by his friend William Butler Yeats in a little volume of 20 Poems of Lionel Johnson, attest to Johnson’s deep sense of the sacred.
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Happy Thanksgiving, and All Praise to John Smith!
Happy Thanksgiving to you all. We are having a simple dinner: vegetables a la grecque–leeks, mushrooms, cucumbers; fresh turkey with corn bread , apple, onion, sage, and sausage stuffing; Southern green beans with bacon and onion cooked in broth; rice of course to honor South Carolina; and pecan pie.
Modern Philosophers Against Revenge
No argument drawn from biological necessity would impress philosophers who, since the Enlightenment, have often written as if man were either naturally good or was only weakly endowed with a bundle of propensities known by philosophers as human nature or, by Christians, as “the old Adam.”
Biden Goes After Trump
If Biden and Merrick “Vyshinsky” Garland want to “get” Trump, they will be able to. Henry Silverglate described how in his 2011 book titled, “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.”
Wednesday’s Child: A Ripple of Hope
In other news of the week, I note with a sour mien that the British expatriate formerly known as Prince and his spouse, a sometime television actress, have been awarded a prize called “Ripple of Hope” by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation.
War Poems of Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, though best known for his novels, was a poet who exercised significant influence on the next generation.
Gone to Texas
As we drove south out of Rockford, the blowing snow and freezing rain threatened to accompany us like bad news all the way to Texas. The snow stopped just beyond Bloomington-SubNormal, Illinois, and we made it to Rolla, Missouri without incident.
Wednesday’s Child: Off to Modena
To Modena next week, where the Amici della Musica are hosting Olga with a program of Azeri composers, including the formidable Fikret Amirov whose centenary this is. Later on in the year the same program may take us to Turin.
Revenge is Natural Justice
Revenge and marriage, as the institutionalized means of expressing love and hate, have much in common: Both are found in a variety of forms, but the forms and tendencies that converge in societies around the globe encourage us to think of them as generically human phenomena
From Golding’s Ovid
I’ve just finished reading what is sometimes called Shakespeare’s Ovid because the playwright borrowed from it extensively. The passage below comes in the twelfth of the poem’s fifteen books.
