Archie Goodwin
@ArchieG1946
Logocentric literature professor | Classical-Christian educator | Father & husband | Foe of faddish fanaticisms | Laudator temporis acti
Men of letters at work. —Jacques Barzun, W. H. Auden, and Lionel Trilling.
I am very sad to report that the wonderful Catholic poet Jane Greer @NorthDakotaJane has died. Please keep her soul, her family and her husband Jim in your prayers.
Two of the very best short-lived Western series of TV’s Golden Age. Both of them still overlooked and underrated. Sam Peckinpah’s talents were behind The Westerner and Rod Serling’s behind The Loner. Real artistry and intelligence at work.
A surprising donation to @washulibraries of correspondence between Howard Nemerov and a Philadelphia woman offers a new glimpse into the secret life of the poet. bit.ly/4kD42L0 #WashU
“We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve. ... We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of this world,’ in art and song.”
Ava Gardner’s MGM Employment Portrait — 1941
“Decadence is ‘falling off.’ The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are the great historical forces.”—Jacques Barzun
Philosophy friends, any recommendations for which sections of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil are imperative to teach? I recognize that the only good response to this is “teach the entire text.” However, I’ll only be able to spend two days on it before moving on. Thanks!
Out now, the Ignatius Critical Editions volume on Melville's short fiction, featuring my chapter on ambiguity and symbolism in Benito Cereno.
WILLIAM FAULKNER on the TIME MAGZINE COVER of JANUARY 1939 This cover was in honor of Faulkner's 15th book, The Wild Palms. A sentence in the article says, He "lives about as close to the heart of the South as it is possible to get - in Oxford, Mississippi" I keep tellin' y'all…
Historian David Starkey discusses the liberal world view. Bang on the money as usual. 💥💥
The proper response to a great poem, writes Howard Nemerov, is “silence, or the acknowledgement that it is so, it is as it is; that the miracle has happened once again: ‘something understood,’ as Herbert says finally and ever so quietly about prayer.”
In October of 1975, Louis L'Amour became Bantam Books all-time best selling author overtaking John Steinbeck. With more than 42,000,000 copies in print, Louis was only on his 54th title, less than half-way through his eventual catalog of over 124 books. Louis' works have…
My magnum opus has arrived. Magnum as in 1249 pages, 800 illustrations, most in color, 75 maps, well over a hundred extracts from primary sources, chronologies and lists of key terms. I wrote Volume 1, from the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance, and my oldest friend in academe,…
Some nice finds at the local thrift store. The Classics Club Library editions of Defoe and Swift look nearly new on the inside.
“Men will learn eventually, and if they insist on rejecting the received wisdom of generations past, they do not thereby succeed at invalidating it; they merely condemn themselves to learning it, time and again, by ever grimmer experience.” Hilaire Belloc
They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. . . . On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust. —Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper
