Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche

  A week or so ago Pamela Paul, an opinion editor at the New York Times, wrote a piece that caught my eye: “It’s Easy to See What Drove Jonathan Holloway to Quit”.  Though I correctl...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/10/passion-of-prexies.html

  I have spent a good deal of my life reading books, a certain amount more talking about books, and even a certain amount time writing books.  Books have even been, directly or indirectly,...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/09/biblical-invective.html

The American presidential campaign has witnessed what is apparently a second serious threat within two months against the life of candidate Trump, but thus far most of the news coverage about...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/09/strange-flesh.html

    The subjects of this essay came into my mind by way of a train of thought that began with the beautiful villages of the Cotswold hills of southwestern England, and that topic was stim...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-cotswold-dovers.html

  Maybe other people who love  poetry, as I do, find the “situation” of poetry in America today somewhat paradoxical.  There are probably more active poets in the country than there h...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/09/r-l-stevenson-man-of-letters.html

  Last Friday we rounded out Joan’s birthday week in a delightful way.  The “we” was a group of four.  In addition to Joan and me there was our very dear friend Frank and our deligh...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/08/grounds-for-sculpture.html

  I have been thinking back to some of the political and cultural events of the early decades of my professional career.  In retrospect these years now seem to me rather quaint and distant ...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/08/forty-two.html

               Robert Boyle   The animating premise of Tom Stoppard’s brilliant play Travesties depends upon the strange collocation of eminent people who in actual historic...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/08/two-irish-neighbors.html

    Traditionally the twin aims of poetry, as expressed in Horace’s Art of Poetry are to instruct and to please.  He says the poet aims at either of these goals, but that the best poet...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/08/edification-by-example.html

  Pangur bán, meaning something like “Whitey” in Old Irish, or perhaps “Super-White” or “Snowball,” was the name of the pet white cat made famous by an unknown monastic scribe ...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/07/pangur-ban.html

  “How vainly men themselves amaze to win the palm, the oak, or bays”  Andrew  Marvell   Over the years, in our household, various bits and pieces of poems, songs, Shakespeare pl...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/07/lifes-true-treasure.html

    I honestly made repeated attempts to avoid another political topic this week, but my best intentions were overwhelmed by, first, a generalized panic in the Democratic Party, then an ...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/07/political-roundup.html

     Keir Starmer   WINNER AND LOSER Rishi Sunak               I know little about the Labour Party leader and new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, which is to say tha...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/07/political-dialects.html

Archimedes palimpsest          It is probably not a good sign when a funeral service is more encouraging than a political debate between the only two plausible candidates for the n...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/07/a-hopeful-palimpsest.html

  One more word about teaching what the world ought to be: Philosophy always arrives too late to do any such teaching. As the thought of the world, philosophy appears only in the period aft...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-owl-of-minerva.html

  Now that the ex-President and apparently certain Republican candidate for the presidency in the upcoming general election has been adjudged guilty of felonious crimes, and now that the ba...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/06/vice-presidential.html

                                                      Francis James Child               The expression “fabled in song and s...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-ballad-hunters.html

In this slow news week—yes, I am being ironic--and with the Princeton Commencement now behind us, I find myself reflecting a bit on the state of American higher education.  I did find ...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/06/ecole-des-chartes.html

        One of President Clinton’s most famous quotations can serve as the epigraph for this post: “That depends on what the meaning of is is.”  He was ridiculed for it at the t...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/05/showing-flag.html

    What’s in a name?  Juliet wants to know.  You may have had reason to ask this question with regard to your own surname and come to the same conclusion as Juliet: that a family nam...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/05/menendezes-of-new-jersey.html

      This will be an essay without a topic, more along the lines of the kind of extorted report that might be a parent’s best hope from a twelve-year-old at summer camp.  Since I nev...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/05/summer-camp-early-report.html

  Readers will know that I have been caught up in the news about campus protests.  Circumstances have had me reading lots of stories in the New York Times, many of which are of dubious aut...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/05/more-unquiet-on-campus.html

Hamilton Hall, Columbia University           In this essay I return to the arena of American higher education, which was the arena of my own long professional activity; but I do so ...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-eighty-per-cent-principle.html

Poussin: "Dance to the Music of Time"   This will be a small essay on a huge subject, namely universal harmony, or the “music of the spheres,” called the mundana musica by the learned...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/04/lord-of-dance.html

                Over the past weekend we spent an exhilarating (and for me enervating) day up at our son’s fabulous rural retreat at Kingwood in Hunterdon County.  As the pl...

http://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2024/04/tree-planting.html