Anecdotal Evidence

I’m skeptical of prophecy, weighing even the scriptural sort against the evidence and the suitability of the prophet.

“The futurists claim that the book as we know it will disappear, like that magician’s egg, and that it will be replaced by ‘electronic data retrieval’ through our home computers.

“Until recently, I considered David Copperfield to be the best English-language novel I’d read.

My review of Vasily Grossman’s From the Front Line: Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin (New York Review Books, 2026) is published in the Fall issue of Portico.

In his Spectator essay for January 15, 1712, Joseph Addison tells us he spent the day with friends, “an Assembly of Virtuosos,” one of whom describes “many curious Observations” regarding human anatomy.

In 1939, Louise Bogan reviewed for The New Yorker new poetry collections by Archibald MacLeish and Muriel Rukeyser.

It was probably the first wildflower I learned to identify.

“Style means the necessary word.

“The words you see are all there is worth seeing.”

“This day proving wet, we should have passed our time very uncomfortably, had we not found in the house two chests of books, which we eagerly ransacked.”

Readers often ask interesting questions.

On August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to the secret non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The stuff starts as white powder at the bottom of a one-gallon plastic jug.

Fifty-one years ago I was working as a clerk in Kay’s Books in downtown Cleveland, perhaps the best job I ever had though my six-day-a-week paycheck never topped the double digits.

Because of something I wrote, an old friend tells me he is reading at last, in his seventies, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton’s prose compendium of marvels.

Dr.

Weeds I can’t name crowd the front garden, adding to the lushness of our greenery.

Here’s a book I haven’t read in some sixty years: Antony van Leeuwenhoek and His ‘Little Animals’ by Clifford Dobell, published in 1932 by Harcourt, Brace and Co.

Like the rest of us, poets often favor certain times of the year.

I think we both sensed it might be our final conversation.

In 1950, the poet J.V.

“But to politicks and literature there must be an end.”

The poet W.S.

A reader expresses surprise at my admission that I once read William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

When we think of ferocious predators among animals we likely think of sharks and grizzly bears, big creatures with teeth.