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Here is a Sup—I mean repository of the texts of my together with some readings of them. The essays were broadcast by WXXI 91.5 Classical of Rochester, NY on Salmagundy each Saturday at 9:35am Eastern Time, from the beginning of time (1985) till May 2009 when Entropa (evil Goddess of Change-for-the-Worse-or-Possibly-the-Worst) troubled the minds of the WXXIites and they retired Simon and Salmagundy, and Rochester went into a terminal decline---for ever.
I continued on that brilliant bastion of all that's good and kultured, WCLV's syndicated Weekend Radio on many (mainly NPRish) stations traditionally on the first and third weekends of the month, though weekendage varied, till the horror crept ever onward and that too was devoured (in August 2023, a date which will live in infamy or at lease mild irritation)... and only I remain, defiant though wimpering.
Richard Howland-Bolton
There are pop-up pics and links all over the place here. In text they are indicated by a double underline like this:
mouse-overing brings the pop-up up and clicking (usually) goes to the link |
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I was having breakfast in Einstein Bros. bagel thingy the other day with Melanie when we got to talking of how things were when we were young; how they were:
a) better for kids and
b) safer and
c) well...
really not THAT much safer once we had considered; but that the dangers then were much more self-inflicted. And so she told me how she had quite willfully broken her arm on a disused swing set, and how it had taken her at least three tries to do it.
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Well, just like the next guy I enjoy a bit of praise, a modicum of flattery, a smattering of applause. So imagine my delight when an English Teacher from a district in one of our more plush, up-market suburbs begged me for a copy of one of my essays.
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Well, as the times get all Epiphanoidal, and the various turn-of-the-year-ish thingies start to fade into the old backward and abysm 1, this must be absolutely my last legitimate chance to tell you all about my New Year's Resolutions, and specifically (among all the usual boring ones: to exercise less; and to eat more fatty foods; and to drink more strong drink; and to take up smoking and the like) specifically the one that applies to these essays. So: solemnly I resolve to stop treating these essays as a sort of personal diary, or even worse, as a blog, and to, henceforth eschewing all personal references, to make them more generally applicable and therefore more interesting to someone other than me. |
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A recently discovered, old and tattered M/s, which by its hand and from internal evidence can be dated with some certainty to the middle of the Twelfth Century, tells a strange story.
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Ay me! and Oh no!
No longer can I claim in these essays to have been sitting in the Coffee Haus eating my bagel some morning other than this one, when things other than that very bagel could have then hit me out of the blue and saved me from having to actually think about subjects for my essays.
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I was sitting eating my bagel the other morning when it hit me. ---Not the bagel, Dumbo! No, no it was the sudden realization, indeed the sudden epiphany, that if you guys were English, like normal people, I wouldn't have anything to write about! And then as I was sitting there, symbolically rubbing my metaphorical hands together at the prospect of finally and at last having come up with a subject for the week, the blinding light of another epiphany eclipsed that totally and completely and I was certain that I had now come up with my real subject, even more finally and even at laster.
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Big (...not to be confused with little Amanda-at-work, though sometimes it does happen: or rather sometimes it did happen before she left us thus simplifying our at-work nomenclature, and potentially simplifying the beginning of this essay, though ultimately, as I'm sure you can see by now, her departure was unsuccessful in that last endeavour) ...anyway, big Mandy-at-work has this thing about badgers1 ---though actually, considering the sort of thing this thing is, that really ought to be "Thing" with a capital "TH". She surrounds herself with them, pictures and toys and cartoons in her office (and, of course, the one she drew on the whiteboard in mine), various computer screen names and signatures she adopts, and I believe she even sleeps with one, though taking into account everything that I have ever read or heard about badgers, I sincerely hope that that one is merely a stuffed one.
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I vaguely remember seeing an old manuscript in (I think) Balliol's library (or, wait a minute... was it in the Bodlian? ...it's just too long ago to remember exactly---in fact it seems so long ago that I fancy that when I saw it its ink was probably only just about dry, though they wisely didn't offer me the opportunity to test my radical hypothesis): anyway, ...anyway wherever the bloody thing was it contained that famous macaronic poem from the later fifteenth century, you know the one, the one with the refrain "Of alle creatures women be best / Cuius contrarium verbum est"! And, you know after the last couple of weeks wildness I've started to think that those old misogynistical monkish buggers who presumably wrote the thing might just have had a point in there---I mean one beyond the fact that they got their jollies from refusing to teach to girls.
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If you ever happen to visit my web site I probably need to give you an explanation or an excuse or something because...
well...
well...
I suppose it's really rather a lot like that old joke (or perhaps it's not actually a joke, but more properly an old philosophical crux or perhaps even a kōan ), you know it, I'm sure; it's the one where the man goes into a strange town (at least it's strange to him) and then he decides that he absolutely must have a haircut.
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Of course this very weekend, as you'd expect, I'm all set to prepare my New Year's Resolutions. I have two in mind, and, again as you'd expect of me, the first one is my usual promise never ever to make any of those stupid New Year's Resolution things.
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