Author: Rufus F.

The Aura of Expertise

I’m preparing to head back to France next Saturday, preparing a Napoleon course for the spring, and trying to land a job teaching at a university in Singapore; so posting will be light! However, I...

A Poem for Sunday

Ozymandias is one of Shelley’s best known sonnets and was actually written in competition with his friend Horace Smith, who wrote a very good (although inferior) sonnet on the same topic. Ozymandias is another name for Ramses...

Friday Jukebox

Maximum rock’n’soul: If you ask me what the problem is with the radio today, I’d start with the fact that I never hear them play the BellRays.

Professor Buzzkill

You think I’m a curmudgeon? Writing about “party schools” and their legacy students, Margaret Soltan ups the ante for scathing, funny critiques of our “Alexandrian culture”. Bless her soul.

Quote for Today

“Librarians are the worst enemies of books there are.” He smiles sardonically when he says this, an amiable old fart that the library keeps around to shelve books. With his fire-hose arms and gut...

Poems for Sunday

I remember a bookstore cashier once flirting with me over my purchase of Catullus, whose poems she considered to be very sexy. I suppose it depends on your tastes. Most of his poems are either...

Love in the Time of Hoopla

A website that facilitates adultery is offering to pay a momentarily-famous adulterer $100,000 to promote adultery. (Insert something flip here about capitalism being ethically-neutral.)

Noted without Comment (by law)

When Hollaback NYC debuted their iPhone application, I mused here that they were soon going to push for stronger anti-street harassment legislation (and got flamed as a heartless, paranoid “libertarian”). Anyway, they’re now pushing for stronger anti-harassment...

A Poem for Sunday

Smoke Smoke has been the sign of human settlement ever since Prometheus’ defiant act, ever since people settled down to roasting, torching, scorching and cremating, ever since human history began its smoldering. The pale...

The Customer is Always “College Educated”

SUNY Albany has decided to cut costs by getting rid of their “underperforming” departments. First to go, a few esoteric fields: classics, all foreign languages except Spanish, and theatre. No news about how this will...

From our Parisian Friend

Scott recently posted about the strikes in France, citing an NPR report from a Paris correspondent who said, among other things: “This strike/protest is only using the pensions as a trigger to fight against...

All’s Fair in Love and Burke

I’ve seen this video linked elsewhere in a condescending let’s-laugh-at-young-conservatives sort of way. And, admittedly, it’s cringeworthy. But damned if it isn’t far more compelling than most discussions of Burke and tradition and how...

Sophocles: Philoctetes and Wounded Warriors

One of the real mixed blessings of modern warfare has been that improvements in medical technologies have allowed more wounded soldiers to survive what would have once been fatal injuries- now there are more...