October 2024
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Happy Friday! Here is a quote by Virginia Woolf to carry into your weekend. There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. Read more
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Growing up I regularly watched Saturday matinee movies on television with my brother and my cousins on winter and rainy days. If it was summer, or the weather good, we were expected to be outside in the afternoons, out of the way of my mom and my various aunts. But if the weather was bad, Read more
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During the regular season, I have a subscription to MLB.com. It allows me to watch just about any baseball game I wish to watch. So during the regular season when I wanted to catch the Mets, it was an easy thing to do. Not so though now that playoff games have started. In a misguided Read more
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Dracula is one of those books that everyone knows but few probably actually read much anymore. The details of Castle Dracula, Transylvania, Count Dracula, bats, wolves, sleeping in a coffin, casting no reflection in a mirror, fear of garlic and crucifixes, stakes through the heart, and all the others vampire cliches are well known. They Read more
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On Tuesday, October 6th, 1903 after two days of rest, Pittsburgh Pirate Deacon Phillippe threw his third complete game victory of the series against Boston American Bill Dinneen, who was making his second start of the series. The Pirates won the game and took a commanding 3–1 series lead. But they would end up losing Read more
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A classic of the genre, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is the story of a haunted mansion where a group of people gather to investigate the supernatural. Led by Dr. John Montague, they include Eleanor Vance, a shy woman, Theodora, a bohemian artist, and Luke Sanderson, the young heir. Despite the house’s Read more
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Like London, Dublin is one of those cities that seems to be filled with literary history. Turn a corner and there you are at some building that some writer once lived in. I was not looking for Sheridan Le Fanu shrines in May of 2020 but by luck just stumbled across this one. It is Read more
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Twenty-five years before Bram Stoker wrote and published Dracula, the novella Camilla was published by another Irishman, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu. Like Dracula, Le Fanu’s Carmilla features a vampire. But this one is quite different than Stoker’s famous Count. Carmilla is the story of Laura, a young girl living in a secluded castle. She recounts her Read more
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October baseball is Playoff Baseball. It is Reggie Jackson and Bill Mazeroski. It is the best and worst time of the year if your team is still playing. It is a time of great hope balanced with great despair. My local team, the Minnesota Twins, are done after an epic collapse. My other team, the Read more
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