August 2008
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According to Charles Dickens, who visited the United States in 1842, American men were constantly masticating tobacco. He was thoroughly shocked by the "two odious practices of chewing and expectorating" — a habit that he found to be both "offensive and sickening." "In all the public places of America," wrote the novelist, "this filthy custom…
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My father smoked cigars and later a pipe; my mother smoked Lucky Strikes — lots of them. When I was a boy, the air in our house was a blue-gray haze. I believe that my mother smoked throughout her four pregnancies. Why shouldn’t she have? The tobacco industry advertised that smoking was good for you. …
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I’m just back from Lebanon (that would be Lebanon, New Hampshire) where I heard a performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. If you pay no mind to the ridiculous racist orientalist anti-American story, it’s a pretty good opera. The orchestra, though small, was excellent and the singers top-notch. The music is a little on the overwrought…
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If someone had asked me, a month, ago, whether I’d read Crime and Punishment, I’d have sworn up, down, sideways, and seven ways from Sunday that I had done so. And I would confidently have specified the date: during the early 1950s, when anyone who read anything at all knew that "existence preceded essence" and…
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Ain't it shocking that Gene Chandler's excellent song is now almost half a century old? Seems like just yesterday. This be the verse in its full splendor. Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl Duke,…
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Knowing little of the finny tribe, I borrowed the Bradford Public Library's copy of Langdon's introductory Fishes of Vermont (2006). It's an excellent, informative, helpful guide. With Langdon's help, I can now declare that it's undeniably the brown bullhead, a species of catfish, that has been multiplying in our pond, The bullhead, a villainous omnivore,…
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Praise for what is not praiseworthy is mere flattery. All the more so, if fair words gain advantage. Praise even of the dead is suspect if it flatters survivors. Persons in authority must be wary of false praise: be mindful that for every man who praises you, ninety-nine hold their peace or mutter imprecations aside.…
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It was the evening of a cloudy day and I had my face in among the clumps of blooming day lilies, which I was trying to protect from the constant encroachment of witch grass. It's a minor art — to lie on the ground and reach arm's length into the forest of leaves, careful not…
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The most widely-known as well as the most notorious poem of the second half of the twentieth century is Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse." For those of you who don't know the poem by heart, here it is in its brief and startling entirety. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They…