Been busy and out of town a bit recently, so the posts have been few and far between. A few notes:

Yes, last night's Boston-EE game was a hair-puller, and, yes, poor Scooter the corgi was hiding underneath the desk for much of the night. Go Pedro. Please.

A belated happy first birthday to Mr. Soames, a font of culture and good taste in the world 'o blogs. The pleasure is all ours.

A new addition too: We've added Blimpish to our link roll, a lover of Strauss (Leo, not Levi), with the charming byline "In which, reaction." Here, here. As Paul Elmer More said of being a reactionary: it is essentially to answer action with action, to oppose to the welter of circumstance the force of discrimination and selection, to direct the aimless tide of change by reference to the co-existing law of the immutable fact, to carry the experiences of the past into the diverse impulses of the present, and so to move forward in an orderly progression.

I've been reading T. S. Eliot lately, Russell Kirk's biographical study plus an old short collection of his works.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

The Wasteland, 1922

O perpetual revolution of configured stars
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Chorus from "The Rock," 1934