Eliot on Parade

November 16, 2008

For those of you in the neighborhood, the TS Eliot festival is about to get underway in London. I haven’t revisited Eliot in years, but reading The Wasteland was an early transformational experience for me. Should be ample incentive to dust off the old facsimile editon. Festival details can be found here. It consists of [...]

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The Art of Eating Ortolans

November 15, 2008

“Ortolans are one of France’s smallest birds of passage. They are brownish-grayish, gregarious buntings; but the peasants have always affectionately called them sparrows . . . The method of their capture and the subsequent stuffing of them to the limit of corpulence within their small measure has not changed since they figured as dainties on [...]

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The White Tiger-Yay or Nay?

November 9, 2008

Was thinking of grabbing a copy of Andiga’s Booker prize winning “The White Tiger,” but have been a bit put off by some of the criticism I’ve seen. The Irish Times’ Eileen Battersby lives up to her name:

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Thoughts on the Election of Barack Obama

November 9, 2008

I didn’t want to write about the US election results right away. It seemed too immediate and too raw to be all that useful. With some time to reflect, here’s what occurs to me. I’m still not sure it’s worthwhile to anyone but me, but it is personally necessary. (If you’re reading this, it may [...]

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A House Through Time

November 2, 2008

The House by the Thames Gillian Tindall, Pimlico, 2007 I walk by the modest house that is the subject of Tindall’s book with some regularity, and I have often wondered about it. It’s clearly a remnant from a time when the south bank of the Thames was of a considerably different character. Its white stucco [...]

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Paris, 1944

October 31, 2008

“For five years, Europe has been the victim of cannibalism, with one country trying to eat the other countries, trying to eat the grain, the meat, the steel, the liberties, the governments, and the men of all the others. The half-consumed corpses of ideologies and of the civilians who believed in them have rotted the [...]

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File under: Are you Kidding Me?

October 31, 2008

So let’s see, the party of the “real America” believes undermining the right to vote is somehow a good thing. I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising given the myriad other shabby ways they have treated the principles that underpin our society, but

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Bachmann is Nuts

October 19, 2008

Oh, my. Dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann came out and publicly suggested Obama be investigated for holding “anti-American” views. She also thinks the media should investigate the rest of Congress to see if there are any other anti-American types hiding out, while noting that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid both hold “far-leftist views.” So apparently, [...]

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More Flip-Flopping (not that there’s anything wrong with that)

October 18, 2008

This is just sad. McCain and the GOP are now resorting to automated negative phone calls in swing states. This after he had promised to run a dignified campaign, then went negative in a panic, then went positive again when he saw that it was costing him votes. I frankly never understood the Bushies’ praise [...]

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Leadership Vacuum

October 12, 2008

That may fly for a senator from Arizona, but it’s not what you want from the man with his finger on the button, and it’s not what we need to confidently lead us out of the mess we’re in.

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