Dr. Metablog’s Greatest Hits
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One of this blague's more inquisitive readers is a talented young journalist who knows that before Vivian de St. Vrain morphed into Dr. Metablog, he had spent a lifetime either bent unproductively over the ball point or wearily pounding on the word-processor. The young reader has asked this question: what have decades of practice taught you,…
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From 1965 to 1969 we lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Now we've returned for a month-long visit. In days of yore, we were the busy young parents pushing our baby carriage down Broadway. Now forty years more 'mature, we step aside as nannies maneuver the twins (without question there are both more nannies and…
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Today's posting is contributed by the art historian, Alan Saxe-Popette. Jane Austen's quiet private life has been thoroughly explored for events of emotional import. It is therefore a wonder that there has been such inattention to the portrait, identified some forty years ago,in which the novelist, nude, reclines on a green baize fainting couch. One would have supposed…
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So I've been trying, by god, to figure out why the riding mower has been cutting on an angle, the right side leaving the grass higher than the left, and I've been crawling under the machine looking at the cutting deck from all angles and not able to understand the mechanism except it's obvious that…
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It appears to be the case that martyrs of a certain persuasion will be rewarded in the afterlife with the ministrations of seventy-two virgins. It would take a theologian of extraordinary skill to explain why acts of violence should be rewarded with sexual indulgence. I raise a far less knotty question: if the aim is…
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When I lived in Cambridge in the first years of the 1960s, it was not unusual to encounter, on a warm winter afternoon, the poet Robert Frost walking slowly along Massachusetts Avenue. I'd watch him as he strolled over to Plympton Street and to the Grolier — which was then as now, I imagine, the…
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During the 1940s and early 1950s, when I was a pupil at P. S. 217, the school auditorium was given over to formal weekly "assemblies." Boys were required to wear white shirts and green ties (girls had a specified outfit as well, but in those days I was so unconscious of a) girls and b) their…
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According to The New York Times (3/31/2006), the world of prayer science is all in a dither. A new study has apparently demonstrated that "prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery." The study was a big, expensive deal: ten years of work at a cost…
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In Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye are brimming with impetuous youthful lust. They meet at a deserted spot on Egdon Heath — a “vast tract of unenclosed wild” in southwestern England. Here’s how Hardy describes their moment of passion: “’My Eustacia.’ …
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One of the most joyful of nursery rhymes, and a personal favorite, is this: Crosspatch, Draw the latch. Sit by the fire…