writers almanac

ok, so.....on my way home from my last class of the semester i was cheered up somewhat by garrison and his writer's almanac.....i needed cheering up because 2 students not only blew off the final, but also blew off the 4-page wellness project.....and i know that i must grade them according to undone work, and not to my suppositions about mitigating circumstances for non-traditional students.....neither called, emailed, nothing.....but i digress from garrison....whose soothing voice can smooth over the roughest of days......i especially liked this portion of his broadcast.....It's the birthday of novelist and critic Edmund Wilson, born in Red Bank, New Jersey (1895), the son of an attorney who succumbed to mental illness and a woman who went deaf shortly thereafter. He went to Princeton and then worked for The New York Evening Sun, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Wilson wrote all sorts of opinions about major writers of his day. He was an early appreciator of Hemingway, and he said in 1922 that "F. Scott Fitzgerald has been left with a jewel which he doesn't know quite what to do with." He wrote that Yeats, Proust, and Joyce "break down the walls of the present and wake us to the hope and exaltation of the untried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art."

He said that "Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals" and that "No two persons ever read the same book."

no two people ever read the same book.....true words.....as i look forward to bookclub.....and i ponder whether to drag out the white twinkle lights to string through the oak tree above the deck....so that we can imagine ourselves as billy pilgrim, drinking flat champagne in his yard while waiting for the spaceship......there will be those who didn't recall that part of the narrative.... as well as those who will remember the silver-painted army boots and think that billy wore them while waiting for the spaceship.....and i will become unable to try on goodwill coats without feeling for 2 carat diamonds in the lining......just in case.....