The American Enterprise magazine has published a column of mine on books on its website. This is my first publication there, and I'm very pleased with it. I started reading the magazine many years ago, back in Canada, and was always impressed by the amount of knowledge in every issue.
Read on to find out if Billary is to blame for debasing books, for the good news that grammar is gold, and why The New York Times Book Review doesn't want you to read.
“Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.”
—G.K. Chesterton
The American Spectator Online has published my review of Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. It is heartening news that a British book about grammar has become a surprise runaway bestseller. Punctuation is not just for pedants. As Truss warns, “Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.”
And yes, I haven't been around here too much lately. My excuse is that my life has changed, or is changing, in just about every way possible. But things are finally settling down and I will devote more time to this space very soon.
"I need so little: a bottle of ink, and a spot of sunshine on the floor — oh, and you. But the last isn't a small thing at all."
—Vladimir Nabokov to Véra
(RIP, Ronald Reagan Edition)
Requiescat
Strew on her roses, roses,
And never a spray of yew!
In quiet she reposes;
Ah, would that I did too!
Her mirth the world required;
She bathed it in smiles of glee.
But her heart was tired, tired,
And now they let her be.
Her life was turning, turning,
In mazes of heat and sound.
But for peace her soul was yearning,
And now peace laps her round.
Her cabined, ample spirit,
It fluttered and failed for breath.
To-night it doth inherit
The vasty hall of death.
—Matthew Arnold
“Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those who have no imagination?”
—George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan