History has many cunning passages. Bryan Talbot, author and illustrator of comic books, moves to Sunderland (England, not Massachusetts) for reasons unrevealed. He then commences on a multi-year examination of his adopted town. The result: Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment. The book is like a giant game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Charles Dodgson, better known by his penname Lewis Carroll, spent some time in Sunderland. That is the primary connection which gives the book its name … [Read more...] about Alice in…Sunderland
Life Advice
Burning Books
“School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work.” Ray Bradbury wrote that in 1953 in Fahrenheit 451. Fast forward 67 years. The same thing could be said today, which all by itself in incredibly curious. If Bradbury was right in 1953, then shouldn’t we be further along in the destruction of books and learning … [Read more...] about Burning Books
Bearing Life
A question I have long enjoyed posing to anyone who is willing to listen to me pose unanswerable questions is: Why does everyone consider Shakespeare’s tragedies to be more realistic and deep than his comedies? A related question: why doesn’t everyone realize P. G. Wodehouse is a Great Books author? Milan Kundera points the way to an unusual answer in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is a bit hard to classify the book. It is most certainly one part novel; it is also one part … [Read more...] about Bearing Life
Knightian Unhappiness
Given the choice, would you rather have happiness or knowledge? Seems like an easy question to answer. But, it is not so obvious. I first ran into this question decades ago when I was reading a collection of Voltaire. “The Good Brahmin” tells the story of a learned intellectual in India who is absolutely miserable; nothing in all his learning has brought him joy and he is miserable at the thought of not knowing the secret of happiness. The story then tells of a poor old woman who was … [Read more...] about Knightian Unhappiness
The Love of Scrooge
“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one … [Read more...] about The Love of Scrooge
A Conversation Between Friends
“[There] is a certain kind of activity (not yet extinct) which can be engaged in only in virtue of a disposition to be conservative, namely, activities where what is sought is present enjoyment and not a profit, a reward, a prize or a result in addition to the experience itself.” Michael Oakeshott wrote that in “On Being Conservative.” (The essay is in the book pictured to the right.) I was reading this essay for a conference I recently attended on the definition of conservatism. (The … [Read more...] about A Conversation Between Friends