Find Something Beautiful Today

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The English Edition Is Set for Release on Bastille Day

 

Back By Popular Demand

 

By the Numbers

This blog began on December 28, 2005.

As of this morning, it has had a total of 24,650,928 visits.

Many thanks to all of you and especially to those who come by often.

[Now if only a fraction of those who like and support the blog purchase a copy of Pilate's Magician, then there will be big smiles all around.]

First Paragraph

 I have an ingrained fear of auctions dating back to the third year of my life. In that year my father attended an auction as a means of passing an aimless afternoon, and he came away from it the bewildered possessor of thirty hives of bees and all the paraphernalia of an apiarist. Unable to rid himself of his purchase, he became perforce a beekeeper, and for the next two years I lived almost exclusively on a diet of soda biscuits and honey. Then the gods smiled on us and all the bees died of something called foul brood, enabling us to return to some semblance of a normal life

- From The Boat Who Wouldn't Float by Farley Mowat

Fitted to a Smith-Corona

 William Kennedy suffered first the indignity of nonpublication, then the commercial reproach of poor sales before, in his mid-fifties, becoming one of the most admired novelists in America with the publication of Ironweed, which won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. When success came, he was confident enough to enjoy it. He bought a Jaguar, made some celebrity friends, gave lots of interviews. But he never left Albany, New York, the setting of nine of his novels, for very long. Nor could fame keep him away from his writing desk. A journalist for many years at the San Juan Star and the Albany Times-Union before committing fully to fiction, he was fitted to a Smith-Corona like a jockey to his thoroughbred. All that was missing were the shirt garters and the fedora.

Read all of Jonathan Clarke's essay on William Kennedy in City Journal.

On My List

 

The Brilliant Idea from the Night Before

 This morning I reviewed a brilliant idea that I'd had the night before. 

I'd jotted it down and then typed it up in anticipation that the polished version would look even more brilliant today.

Upon review, it was not only bad, but award-winningly bad.

So bad that I will not only drop the idea but will purge it from my computer.

If possible, salt would be plowed into its ground.

What was its key problem?

The idea would have been a great answer if it had been matched to the right question.

This morning, I pinpointed the right question.

 Delay can be a powerful ally.

The Pope on A.I.

Magnifica Humanitas: Pope Leo XIV on safeguarding the human person in the time of Artificial Intelligence.

Nitish Pahwa on the Pope's views.

[Photo by Chad Greiter at Unsplash]

Imagine Belonging to This Club

The members of The Literary Club were Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, James Boswell, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Joshua Reynolds, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, and David Garrick.

To its members, it was simply known as "the Club."

[Source: The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch.]