I've never read his children's books but I did learn something about his life and I do think he had a kind of genius. I think he was a man who was willing to pay the price that came with living what he actually was. That, it seems to me, is fairly rare and I deeply admire it when I see it. What was ...

I have to say I adore Sherri Tepper. The first book of her's that I read was Gate to Women's Country . I read it during a patch of watching my women friends get run over by the men in their lives and Tepper became a touchstone. I haven't read all of her stuff but so far I think I have liked The Fres...

Thank you for your reply Penelope, and for your reflection. The work you have done viz how you think, what you believe and how you choose to act in the world has its own reward regardless of the circumstances that first set it in motion. In other words, the work you have done transcends its instigat...

I haven't read Dorian in years (decades actually) but something I have always thought interesting was the relationship between Wittgenstein's "the body is the best picture of the soul" and the Dorian's decay. Of course Wittgenstein was born in 1889 and Wilde died in 1900 so there is no dir...

I much prefer a good honest atheist.

Penelope, I haven't been here for long (and was gone for a while as well), so forgive me if I am asking what is already well known. What do you mean when you say "a good honest atheist?"

And do you fit in that category?

Or Encomuim - a praise poem of a person rather than a god but strictly "a Greek choral lyric performed "in the revel" to celebrate a person's achievements." Encomium of Helen (Brian Donovan translation) is here: http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/gorgias/helendonovan.htm or Anne Bra...

How about "Elegiac distich?" "In Gr. poetry, a distinctive meter, consisting of a hexameter followed by a pentameter, which developed in the archaic period for a variety of topics but which came to be associated thereafter with only one, i.e. loss or mourning, hence elegy (q.v.) in th...

Dissident Heart: of course MLK's religion was not a side issue for him. The question is whether he would have been a good person if he had been raised in some other context. Just speculation of course, but I suspect that if he had been raised in a Buddhist household he would have still gotten up aga...

I was staying at a friend's house, having been stranded in town by a rather bad snowstorm, and woke in her home's attic apartment from a dream. As I awoke and rather abruptly sat up, I was saying the name "Mary Lupin." In the dream I had just realized, rather ecstatically, that it was my n...

I remember reading such reports as well. I suspect that the tendency toward "anti-social" behaviour is far more complex than such research suggests. For example, a particular behaviour can be read as either social or anti-social depending on the context. I think much of what such studies a...