Call me a slow learner, but it took me until my early forties to realize that some of the best and most inspiring things in life, besides girls, are the things I was obsessed with as a 10-year-old boy (i.e., just before I discovered girls). At 10, I was a typical nerdy 1970s kid, curled […]
M.J. Harper and others at the lively and interesting site Applied-Epistemology.com are more than a little suspicious that Beowulf, and with it most if not all of the texts written in Anglo-Saxon (“Old English”), are forgeries created in the 16th century. It’s a really interesting argument. The Tudor period was a time of incredible cultural […]
On the back cover of my Ballantine paperback edition of Dune, by Frank Herbert, is a review that sticks in my mind from my childhood: “I know nothing comparable to it except … the Lord of the Rings.” That ellipsis, I always imagined, was a dramatic pause. Is Dune comparable to Tolkien’s masterpiece? In the […]