We just finished watching the 14-part BBC series of Little Dorrit. As usual with most BBC series, it was superbly cast, acted, paced and filmed. Each episode was a mere 30 minutes, and almost every one of them ended in … Continue reading →
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The past week I’ve been reading Letters from Nuremburg: My Father’s Narrative of a Quest for Justice by Senator Christopher J. Dodd. The introduction to the book pulled me in, for Christopher Dodd writes comparing Nuremberg to Guantanamo. Nuremberg was the triumph of choosing law instead of revenge, and Guantanamo represents the opposite. In allowing Guantanamo Americans have choosen to act out of fear. He talks of wanting to filibuster the Military Commissions Act of 2006, because the legislation: “allows the president to define our commitments under the Geneva conventions through regulation rather than legislation. It allows the president’s interpretation to (Read more…) Malcolm Gladwell introduced the concept of the “10,000-hour rule” in his 2008 book, Outliers. As Wikipedia describes it, “…the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total … Continue reading → Robert Greene’s new book has me somewhat flummoxed. It’s not at all like his previous books. The other books of his I have were all ‘meta’ books – books about what others thought on various subjects: power, leadership, war, seduction, … Continue reading → I was 8, maybe 9 years old, when my parents gave me a hardcover copy of Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship by Victor Appleton II. Probably a birthday or Xmas present. I can’t recall which. I just recall how … Continue reading → One of my very favorite writers is an obscure Englishman named Edward Verrall Lucas, usually known in print simply as E.V. Lucas. Lucas was the author of over a hundred and thirty books, a few of which are novels and biographies, many collections of essays, and quite a few excellent compilations of poetry and letters. Lucas was born in the Victorian Era but he lived well into the 20th century, making him one of those charming writers who bridged two very distinct eras, the first one the age of railways and second the age of World Wars. But to the end (Read more…) Take one part Brothers Grimm and one part Malory’s Morte d’Artur, add a dash of Tolkein, a pinch of Joan of Arc, a sprinkling of Robin Hood and a sprig of English folklore; mix it in a bowl with copious … Continue reading → Hello, all you phenomenal followers of Polygonic, who’ve put up with both my obtuse rants and my long, long silences with absolute aplomb. Your stamina and support bends my actual mind. I wanted to just update you on new projects (and, as the title suggests, new horizons as well… well, they were, at least last year…!) Rather than blogging about politics lately, which seem to deteriorate into farce with or without me, I’ve been turning my attentions to writing about something I’m feeling more inspired by – travel. Late last year, I undertook a long overland rail trip (Read more…) Hello, all you phenomenal followers of Polygonic, who’ve put up with both my obtuse rants and my long, long silences with absolute aplomb. Your stamina and support bends my actual mind. I wanted to just update you on new projects (and, as the title suggests, new horizons as well… well, they were, at least last year…!) Rather than blogging about politics lately, which seem to deteriorate into farce with or without me, I’ve been turning my attentions to writing about something I’m feeling more inspired by – travel. Late last year, I undertook a long overland rail trip (Read more…) This June we will be a short two years from the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo*. It is expected to be a large event, especially since the 100th anniversary was not celebrated because it fell in the middle … Continue reading → Perhaps no character stands out in pre-Revolution Russia as much as that of Grigory Rasputin. He was influential, enigmatic, charismatic, secretive, held no office, yet had enormous influence on the events and people of the era. How could a barely … Continue reading → Shakespeare’s canon, as it is known today, is incomplete. The Bard is known to have written several plays that were not, for various reasons, included in the First Folio printed shortly after his death. Other plays, several included in the … Continue reading → In the late 1950s, I came across a copy (1912; an original edition, I believe) of Edgar Rice Burrough’s first published novel, Tarzan, The Ape Man, on my parent’s bookshelf in the basement. A forgotten book, one my father had … Continue reading → I spent a pleasant morning, Saturday, browsing through the works of Plato, hunting for the source of a quotation I saw on Facebook, today.* I did several textual searches for words, phrases and quotes on sites that offer his collected … Continue reading → The National Museum of Iraq – known originally as the Baghdad Archaeological Museum – once housed some of the oldest works of literature in the world. Treasures from the origins of civilization, from the cities of Sumeria, Babylon, Assyria were on … Continue reading → April, wrote T.S. Eliot in his remarkable poem, The Waste Land, is the “cruellest month.”* And not merely because of the inclement and unsettling weather that seems to mix winter with spring in unpredictable doses. Nor for the necessity of … Continue reading → It doesn’t begin with Culloden. History is seldom so neat and precise that a single event can be identified as the start or end of a thing. Rather, Culloden was a hinge, a point at which events changed direction, when … Continue reading → Back in the late 1990s, I wrote an essay about the “controversy” over who actually wrote the works of Shakespeare. I wrote, then, Not everyone agrees that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. The challenge to his authorship isn’t new: for the last … Continue reading → I noticed the book The Sky of Afghanistan, by Ana A. de Eulate and Sonja Wimmer, with the library’s collection of new kids’ books. The title of the book brought to my mind images of Canadian and American airplanes, but the front cover shows a young girl flying through the air, her arms outstretched. I checked the book out of the library with a stack of other books. It took my children a little while to get interested in it. The text of the book is somewhere between blank verse and what I don’t quite know how to describe other . . . → Read More: Christy’s Houseful of Chaos politics » Christy’s Houseful of Chaos: Homeschooling Topic of the Week: Afghanistan I noticed the book The Sky of Afghanistan, by Ana A. de Eulate and Sonja Wimmer, with the library’s collection of new kids’ books. The title of the book brought to my mind images of Canadian and American airplanes, but the front cover shows a young girl flying through the air, her arms outstretched. I checked the book out of the library with a stack of other books. It took my children a little while to get interested in it. The text of the book is somewhere between blank verse and what I don’t quite know how to describe other than inspiration fluff. The sky can be full of kites, I think to myself,but it can also be full of dreams…And mine flies up high, high into the sky,towards the stars… The girls dreams are illustrated as the ribbons from a kite and she runs through the streets and different settings until . . . → Read More: Another Step to Take: Homeschooling Topic of the Week: Afghanistan A magnitude 8.0 earthquake shook through Wenchuan County in Sichuan province of the People’s Republic of China on May 12, 2008. Official figures listed 69,197 dead, including 5,335 children, mostly killed as a result of shoddy school construction — a horrible tragedy, particularly due to China’s one-child policy, that caught the attention of a couple of artists, including the now infamous Ai Weiwei. Ai had courted controversy before by being publicly outspoken about the Beijing Olympics, but his response to the Sichuan earthquake brought him into the sharp focus of the Chinese government. Working with a number of locals (Read more…) For Boethius, it was the Consolation of Philosophy*. For me, it’s literature. Not to write about it so much as to read it. Consolation from the act of reading. And read about literature. Sometimes literature is made more meaningful, brought … Continue reading → Have you ever heard of the island of Saipan? It is an American territory in the pacific, which as a Canadian I had never heard of it until an email arrived from Walt Goodridge, who offered me two ebooks to review. One tells the story of a Chinese woman working in textile factories in Saipan. The other is a children’s book about a Philippine boy who wishes to be reunited with his father who works in Saipan.The books are great books. The children’s book, by Bonnie Riza Ramos, is called The Boy Who Dreamed to be With His Parents on Saipan and it captures . . . → Read More: Christy’s Houseful of Chaos politics » Christy’s Houseful of Chaos: the complicated problem of sweatshops Have you ever heard of the island of Saipan? It is an American territory in the pacific, where I had never heard of it until an email arrived from Walt Goodridge, who offered me two ebooks to review. One tells the story of a Chinese woman working in textile factories in Saipan. The other is a children’s book about a Philippine boy who wishes to be reunited with his father who works in Saipan.The books are great books. The children’s book, by Bonnie Riza Ramos, is called The Boy Who Dreamed to be With His Parents on Saipan and it captures both happiness and sadness. The boy has what he calls a long-distance family, and he dreams of being reunited with his father who works in Saipan. Yet this goal takes his mother away from him too for a while in order to obtain the training and work experience for the job she wants in Saipan . . . → Read More: Another Step to Take: the complicated problem of sweatshops “When confronted with a problem involving the use of the reasoning faculties, individuals of strong intellect keep their poise, and seek to reach a solution by obtaining facts bearing upon the question. Those of immature mentality, on the other hand, … Continue reading → |
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