Causerie Origin: French, 19th century An informal article or talk, typically on a literary subject. “Causerie” is based on the French expression “causer,” meaning to talk, which itself is based on the Latin “causārī,” meaning to debate or dispute.
I can give you that historical birds eye view. But I cannot readily explain the mystery of Leonard Side’s inheritance. Most of us know the parents and grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain […]
“Dear Mr. Chinaski: We are returning these four stories but we are keeping ‘My Beer Drunk Soul Is Sadder Than All The Dead Christmas Trees Of The World’. We have been watching your work for a long time and we are most happy to accept this story. Sincerely, Clay Gladmore.” Factotum by Charles Bukowski
“It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle […]
“With some writers, style not only reveals the spirit of the man but reveals his identity, as surely as would his fingerprints.” EB White, from ‘The Elements of Style”.
From 1920 (pre-internet): The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little […]
For all judges, sovereign and subordinate, if they refuse to hear proof, refuse to do justice: for though the sentence be just, yet the Judges that condemn without hearing the proofs offered are unjust judges and their presumption is but prejudice…In like manner, in ordinary trials of right, twelve men of the common people are […]
[Aside] He was an honest man, and a good bricklayer. It was not his most famous line from Henry VI, Part 2, but at least it’s a positive contribution to the plot. In the end, we want people to like and respect us. Reputation is an important – but not the only – thing. These are […]
This Keats quote made me think of something I posted a year ago. Lawyers’ war stories typically revolve around raucous and sometimes hilarious exaggerations (or not) of tumult and upset: epic fits and crying jags … confusion or hysterical screaming, crying, or babbling … horrifying threats and recriminations. All the better when those are punctuated […]
I originally posted this on Feb. 18, 2018, titled “The Post Horn”. For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by US Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. […]
