Our blog | Blogads

Archive for the ‘Wordsmiths’ Category

Prancing with an abacus

by henrycopeland
Monday, June 8th, 2009

David Carr wanders around a dotcom party in NYC:

I wandered the rest of the party and noticed people staring at me. Had I become the dad in the basement at the teenage party? No, as it turned out, it was the analog act of taking notes with a pen on a notebook that was freaking people out. I may as well have been prancing around with an abacus.

BTW, I just finished Carr’s brilliant and terrifying “Night of the gun.” Adjectives don’t do it justice, so I’ll just say my heart pounded and ached throughout.

Hofi marches in

by henrycopeland
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

Hofi Geza, right, was Hungary’s comic genius 1950-90s. Around 30 seconds in this clip, Hofi reprises “Go marching in” as “Go Nanci Neni” (or “Go Aunt Nancy.”)

“We’re going to be in the Hudson”

by henrycopeland
Friday, March 27th, 2009

Rot wiles

by henrycopeland
Monday, December 15th, 2008

A friend sent my father the source for one of his famous quotations.

Macmillan was writing nostalgically in The Times in 1965 (two years after his resignation as PM) about his grand experiences at Oxford. The don in question was J. A. Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, who, according to Macmillan, opened his course in 1914 with the passage I cited, which ended: “. . . if you work hard and diligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.”

Heather again

by henrycopeland
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

Always stunning.


Our Tweets

More...

Community