The book report for February 2023
Or, seriously, Tao Te Ching twice?
Lingering covid-19 symptoms, plus a new cold and possibly bronchitis, provided Dr Essai with
G-L-O-R-EYE-EYE-EYE
Coiled in the 2:37 of that track was all the explosive energy and carnal appetite and wild joy that the grownups in charge had been trying to tamp down since Plymouth Rock.
Happy break-a-tooth-on-a-hard-candy-heart day
A Christian martyr named Valentine was executed around 270 CE by Emperor Claudius II Gothicus, despite having healed his jailer’s daughter of blindness. Talk about ingratitude.
“He always has his nose in a book,” said his mother
Nothing increases one's literary consumption like a coronavirus.
We have all been there before
In his 60s and 70s, David Crosby stared himself down, squared up to what he had become, got clean and as healthy as he was going to get, and forged the most artistically productive years of his life.
On Christopher Columbus's diary
Or, somebody's mom just threw out history
When wind and current and vague navigation brought Cristoforo Colombo to the shores
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.
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.