Spared
“‘Why are they doing that?’ my companion whispered. ‘It’s a scrum,’ I said, divesting myself of one of the two things I know about rugby. ‘Yes, but why are they doing that?’ she persisted.” While visiting South Africa, Claire Potter goes to see Invictus.
“Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves. A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night:” A dispatch from Great Britain, where the negative symbolism of an act is overcome by its pragmatism.
Meanwhile, at Bibliographing, Nicole Perrin looks back at her year in reading and runs the numbers: “Mean page length was about 234 and median was 224.”
Over at Open Letters, they’ve started a blog of readings from Walt Whitman. Here‘s a memory of Manhattan omnibus drivers of the Knickerbocker era, from Specimen Days: “They had immense qualities, largely animal—eating, drinking, women—great personal pride, in their way—perhaps a few slouches here and there, but I should have trusted the general run of them, in their simple good-will and honor, under all circumstances.”
Why does the verb form of “refrain” mean something so totally unrelated to the noun form? Language Hat discovers a word with two histories.
At Boston Review, Stephen Burt considers Rachel Zucker and the poetry of motherhood: “The point is that these long, long lines, these stutters and splutters and blanks and lists, can portray, with more verve than anyone else has brought to such tasks, what it is like to be this person, this mother and teacher, at wit’s end: exhilarated, exhausted, exasperated, and able to show how it feels.”
“‘Are we still strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them?’ [...] ‘Does the cosmos contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared?:’” At the Guardian, Stuart Walton reads G.K. Chesterton’s odd book What’s Wrong With the World, which is now 100 years old.
Finally, Churm passes along a recipe for his Aunt Margie’s famous Great Northern beans and ham, which is reputed to have magical powers: the more you eat, the more you’ll earn in the new year.
“It’s food for the poor, who dream of dollars one at a time …”
That sounds delicious.
