I don’t know if it’s the pandemic or what, but the above tweet had some resonance. (NB in the Walter Mitty sense; I have neither the interest nor, probably, disposition to be an assassin.) I’ve been working on a short story and remain displeased with the opening sentence. It’s fine and all, but it ain’t …
Author Archives: Pete
Man, Interrupting
“Tell me I’m not your man from Porlock. I’d never forgive myself.” I read that in David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue and was like: huh? So I looked it up. Jeepers! Shared it with my friends, and one one of them, Jim, proposed the term be employed à la Good Will Hunting badinage, e.g. “I …
Lost and Found
When I first started teaching, I received the gift of a plant for my classroom. It joined me from school to school, from Washington State to New York State to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Then, when my dad went into an old folks home, I moved it to his room, where, after a few months, …
Shows Effort
… [Jean-François] Champollion had been fascinated with the ancient Near East; he had a gift for learning languages and went on to study, among others, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Aramaic, Syriac (a form of Aramaic), and even Chinese. But his passion soon became Coptic, the language still spoken by a religious minority in Egypt. During his …
Question Time
When I was doing teacher training in New York, one evening we had to attend a lecture by a panel of administrators. I remember two things. First was discovering the multiple galaxies of responsibility that principals have. (It’s bananas. I wouldn’t last a week.) Second was an Assistant Principal who ranted that if a student …
Bright Ideas
1. Dress Blues This teacher intends to write “The Ballad of Draper James.” 2. Apart From That, Mr. Easterly Part of my youth was misspent studying economics. I remember this one class in development economics where I barely passed the final. The professor wrote in the blue book that it was a shame I …
John Prine
I saw him play in Boston a few years back. I’d recently had eye surgery, and kept having to put drops in, so it was like seeing him through tears. I left the show early because I wanted to get home to check on the puppy – it was the longest Roosevelt had ever …
African MiGs
I developed an interest years ago after seeing one take off in Guinea. The first volume, alas, I left at my quarantined school, but here are three interesting sentences from the second: Canada, keen to gain a foothold in Tanzania since 1963, took the place of West Germany and in 1965 launched a project worth …