I know this is not a time for silly, wild-ass speculation, so forgive me, but … you don’t suppose the Trump campaign could have been bullying pollsters to make the former president’s numbers look a bit better? Nah, didn’t think so.
Today’s Talk about books post was supposed to be about three Roman plays by Shakespeare but I didn’t manage to get as far as Coriolanus, so I’ll probably do a separate post about that later. All honourable men: Shakespeare’s Romans
All honourable men: Shakespeare’s Romans
Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus are all formally tragedies. That’s not to say that they all follow a similar pattern, such as the pattern of a noble, admirable hero destroyed by a trafic flaw, which may be detectable in the first play.
Computer guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to walk in. The cautionary tale of Goldman and Apple’s credit card
Clint Eastwood has just directed another movie, at 94: Juror #2 🍿
I’m going back and forth about whether I should be worried about the US presidential election. On the one hand, the result will certainly have repercussions for us in Europe. On the other, there’s nothing effective that we can do to influence it. So, should we be tearing our hair out or not? 🤷🏻♂️
I’ve decided what to do about LinkedIn (something I was dithering about a few weeks ago) and updated my profile there accordingly.
I’ve changed the way I do the “description” for my newsletter posts. Now, I’m using Hugo’s Summary method, with the first paragraph styled using the CSS pseudoclass :first-of-type to distinguish it from the rest of the post. But it seems that most mail clients don’t support that pseudoclass ☹️
The latest Talk about books is about the second of Wilkie Collins’s four major novels of the 1860s, in which the Vanstone sisters, Norah and Magdalen, suddenly find themselves without parents, money or a home. Incontestable wills: Wilkie Collins, No Name
Incontestable wills: Wilkie Collins, No Name
The novel that Wilkie Collins published between The Woman in White and Armadale might at first seem less compelling than either of those but it’s a powerful tale about the response to a legal injustice.
Unintended consequences: deposit return scheme leading to more litter
This summary is written at average reading age and whilst it does not form part of the judgment it must be reproduced with it.
Maybe because I’m used to legal language the “average reading age” summary strikes me as stilted and artificial, as if she were making a special effort to avoid the obvious or normal phrasing. Like a Martian postcard.
Hi @manton, I deleted templates authorslist.md and layouts/authorslist/single.html because they wouldn’t behave as I wanted. Instead, I made a new redirect from /authorslist to a static html page. But the old /authorslist still loads in priority to the redirect. Is there a way to get rid of it, pls?
Cecily Carver doesn’t want to use her Substack to do literary takedowns of buzzy contemporary novels by women, but in the case of Miranda July’s All Fours 📚she has made an exception.
An unusually wrongheaded post from Terence Eden: How to make Markdown footnotes start at zero. First, footnotes in HTML (and so in Markdown) are a kludge, and not a good way to annotate a page. And, whatever about indices starting at 0 in hackerdom, the first note should be first, i.e. numbered 1.
Nicholas Carr is on Substack now, with New Cartographies, and he’s closing down his old blog, Rough Type where he’s been posting only sporadically in recent years. And there’s a new book coming.
“ It is probably the most ill-advised legal action since Oscar Wilde put pen to writ.”
What, worse than Gillian Taylforth’s? (Or William Roache’s, for that matter?) No misconduct by Coleen Rooney’s lawyers
The latest from Talk about books is about the “Ode to a Nightingale” and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Terrible beauty, unpalatable truth: Remarks on some of Keats’s odes 📖
Terrible beauty, unpalatable truth: Remarks on some of Keats’s odes
In which I follow up a post on my personal site from a few months ago, about the regrettable narrowness of my taste in poetry, with a look at two of Keats’s odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. I thought I’d fit more Keats in but there was a lot to say about these two.
I’m already having second thoughts about automatically crossposting from Micro․blog to LinkedIn. I’m afraid it might make me more reticent about what I post to MB. I need to think some more about what to do about my LinkedIn profile.
TIL that the site of the former, much missed, AMT kiosk at Heuston is now occupied by a Caffè Nero Express. That’s a lot better than nothing and will have to do. Significant delays to Heuston trains following incident ☕️
Now that I’ve retired and don’t expect to be looking for work again, I’ve been thinking about how I use LinkedIn. For the past few years, I’ve been using it mainly to post links to my newsletter, Talk about books. To start with, I’m going to try automatic crossposting from Micro․blog
Today’s Talk about books post is about the short stories of Shirley Hazzard, particularly those from her first collection, Cliffs of Fall, and the ones that weren’t collected before the Collected Stories (2020)📖 Trying to keep the poetry separate
Trying to keep the poetry separate: Shirley Hazzard, Collected Stories
Shirley Hazzard’s short stories fall into two broad categories, those about working for the UN (“the Organization”), and those about men, women, relationships and social situations. This post is about the stories in the second category.
What was a dead judge doing in the courthouse anyway?
