cafard

Trollope eventually got quite responsible work at the post office.

Some writers found consular and diplomatic posts: among the Americans, Hawthorne, Howell, and (James Russell) Lowell; among the French, Chateaubriand and Stendhal.

Louis Auchincloss was a lawyer.

I am not in that market, but this seems implausible. My neighborhood is pretty prosperous, but I doubt that $400k/year is the standard. Yet kids do go off to daycare.

That was the story that was current back then, at least the tying to a tree part. It may have been invented, but not by the New Yorker writer.

This is in the US? I have rarely heard political homilies.

What does this have to do with the post?

An acquaintance made some money as cantor to a synagogue around here. He was not Jewish, but I gather that the combination of singing and getting paid felt just fine.

In 1982 the Secretary of the Interior, James Watts, announced that Wayne Newton would perform at the National Mall on Independence Day, at least implying that the Beach Boys, who had been there the year before, really didn't reflect good American values. He was mocked for his, and the next year the Beach Boys came back. I did not go to the Mall, but heard some of their performance on the radio. They were terrible, and a musician I knew said that this was because men's voices deepen with age but the Beach Boys were still trying to sing in the original keys.

Jaroslav Pelikan's history of Christian doctrine runs to five volumes. I haven't read the last, but the first four are very readable. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) runs to something under 400 pages. Given the word "Catholic", I will add that Pelikan started off Lutheran and ended in one of the Orthodox churches.

Elite distance runners are likely to be running farther than a half marathon every day. There used to be a notion that your weekly mileage ought to be triple the distance you are training for, which for a marathon is about 79 miles per week, eleven-plus miles per day. My body would not tolerate much more than 60 miles per week, and honestly I don't know what most other recreational runners did.

Kids today miss the chagrin of damaging a protruding door handle, and the entertainment of one of their elders entirely removing one against some obstacle.

The most important Latin scholar in the world at that time? That is quite a claim. My recollection from Bernard Knox's essay "Closet Modern", collected in Essays Ancient and Modern is that Houseman's work, whatever its quality, was primarily on an author of limited interest.

But good for Houseman recovering from bilged examinations. Jonathan Swift did terribly on his examinations, but then made up for it.

[added}

>> Virgil and the Greeks would have made Shakespeare not merely a great genius, which he was already, but, like Milton, a great artist, which he is not.

Really?

Housema praises Matthew Arnold's essay "On Translating Homer*. When I read it, I found its premise odd: "My one object is to give practical advice to a translator." If this is to say "a translator of Homer", then there are few in any generation who attempt the task. If to translators in general, then an essay of Hilaire Belloc's strikes me as much more to the point. Then "or what he has in common with Milton--the noble and profound application of ideas to life--is the most essential part of poetic greatness." seems to me to offer cover for some pretty bad poetry.

The FBI used to like to hire the young from southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, and such places: generally the kids wouldn't have traveled at all far from their birthplaces, and so security checks were that much easier.

I don't use TikTok, but I can think of more than one Epstein who is not Jeffrey but whom I can imagine somebody sending a message about, for example Joseph Epstein.

This seems to be the week for retrenchment in Bezos World. The Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores are closing, The Washington Post is laying off half of its foreign correspondents, and the Post was planning to send nobody to the Winter Olympics but reversed that decision.