George Berger’s book is an engaging, useful and well-researched if somewhat scrappily finished account of a tumbledown cottage near Epping in Essex, home to scores of adventurers, outsiders, artists, musicians, writers and assorted Bohemians.
As long ago as 1928 Ezra Pound could write that “The whole system of prize-giving… belongs to an uncritical epoch; it is the act of people who, having learned the alphabet, refuse to learn how to spell.”
Levi Asher is irritated with the NY Times‘ formation of the ontological argument. I don’t like the ontological argument much myself, but I couldn’t agree with him more.
Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be.
I must’ve been terribly annoying when I was twenty.
More than a hundred years ago, Addis was writing about strong, independent and free-spirited heroines and their tempestuous romantic encounters. Her own personal life included poison pen letters and both suicide and murder attempts – all of which eclipsed her prose and earned her the nickname the “crazy lady of Santa Barbara.”
In July 1910, a sensational news story spread around the world through the new technology of wireless communication: An American doctor wanted in London for the gruesome murder of his wife — she was poisoned, flayed, deboned and buried in the couple’s basement — was fleeing justice on an ocean liner headed from Antwerp to Quebec City.
At first sight it seems unlikely that Hans Christian Andersen could have much to do with S??ren Kierkegaard, beyond the fact that both of them lived in nineteenth-century Copenhagen, and that they are the only Danish authors who are famous outside Denmark. What do fairy tales have to do with philosophy?
An expert on the economics of online gaming received a $240,000 grant yesterday from the MacArthur Foundation to develop a game called Arden: The World of Shakespeare.