Be happy, don't worry, and don't try to write about it
For reasons that ever elude me, I find it much easier to craft language to convey anger or sadness or poignancy or fear than to convey simple joy.
On Christopher Columbus's diary
Or, somebody's mom just threw out history
When wind and current and vague navigation brought Cristoforo Colombo to
On birds, Low Country sun, and waiting for the sublime
They fly with grace and a lovely sinuous curve of the neck. Then they land like drunken doofuses. As they slow near the ground, they are barely in control of their own bodies, like a cyclist losing the stability of momentum.
An addendum to what the gods do not confer
By this point Gene Kelly could have settled for doing what his adoring public expected — dancing like Gene Kelly for the remaining years of his career. But he didn’t.
On being a gentleman well unread
Why have I read On the Road, twice, but not Jane Eyre or Don Quixote? Why The Thirty-Nine Steps and Three Men in a Boat but not David Copperfield or Pride and Prejudice? I’ve no idea.
What does not cometh from the gods
Dr Essai has observed time and again how the finest artists are the ones whose idea of fun is spending hour after hour, day after day doing the same thing over and over and over and over.
Could you speak a bit more slowly?
Cicero recognized the problem and charged Tiro with inventing a form of Latin shorthand. Tiro created a system of letters and symbols that was topped by Seneca to 5,000 symbols. Yes, 5,000.
On not saying what it all means
Dr Essai does not read entrails post-election. But he was heartened by a few things in the 2022 mid-term US election.
