Category: The Halcyon Days
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Hating on Harvard, Vol. 1
One of the best parts of spending time among the undergraduate population of Yale is the one thing they can all agree on: that Harvard students are–how to say it?–pitiful.
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Mass Art, and Some Thoughts on Romanticism
The afternoon was spent perusing the various art museums here on Yale’s campus. In one there was the standard fare: the oil paintings of Jesus and nobles and the poor at work, the amorphous sculptures characteristic of the middle of the twentieth century, and many other categories not named here. From each, the quintessence of…
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Greetings from 20,000 Feet
Flying due east out of Philadelphia and coming out over the Atlantic, we flew over a small seaside community protected, as if a citadel, by delicate but strong breakers. The propellors’ sound is poorly insulated against, and the tight warm cabin sounds vaguely like the foley tape to a movie involving WWII-era aviation, except without…
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In Philadelphia, Waiting for My Flight
Currently, I’m sitting in the Philadelphia airport in terminal F and looking skeptically at a rickety propellor plane which I am supposed to board.. Looking around, there are the average people one might expect to see in an airport, or a mall, or in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Overwhelmingly plain, some pasty,…
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Go East, Young Man, Go East
For the next week, I’ll be away on vacation in New Haven, CT visiting a couple of friends at Yale. Next weekend I’m likely headed to New York City for 48 hours of solid exploratory misbehavior and adventure. I’d love to make this a longer post, but I’m way behind on packing and I…
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On Reading Habits of Young People
I met the most charming adolescent in a used bookstore. He saw I was reading Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and proceeded to converse with me with astounding alacrity about Fitzgerald’s short stories, the Great Gatsby, and our shared favorite, This Side of Paradise. He was eleven, and said his father had read these before…
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If You Can Read This…
My previous post contained an extended quote from Chris Hedges’s book, Empire of Illusion. Although I finished it a couple of weeks ago, I’ve gone back to the pages which I’ve marked for followup. In the first chapter called “The Illusion of Literacy,” Hedges makes a convincing argument that our media diets are constituent…
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On Thinking Critically
In many ways, the following is a rejoinder to my first Halcyon Days post, Are You Too Smart for College?, but in still more ways it exists as a free-standing entity: a brief, critical treatise regarding the once-venerable “college education.” Late last week, I posted to Twitter a paraphrased quote from Christopher Hedges’s The Empire…
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Why I Am So Happy, a Follow-Up
In looking through the internal statistics of this blog, I found that my post, Why I Am So Happy, was one of the most widely read thus far. In it I referred to the wish to scan and distribute William Hazlitt’s essay, On the Pleasure of Hating. I found a full version of the text…
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Happy Fourth of July
Have a happy birthday, America! Celebrate safely: keep fireworks out of the reach of those with below an 8th grade education, and reduce the amount of processed beef and pork sausage products you consume. I don’t want to subsidize your quadruple bypass operation with my tax dollars. More snarky, lengthy posts to come. In the…