- Les cigares du pharon – Hergé, 1934. Not my favorite Tintin, but a good one – a comfort re-read.
- Astérix en Corse – René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo, 1973. Another comfort re-read; this one is a favorite from the Astérix and Obelix series (number 20). I think I learned from this book that people could get very angry but still calm down – the image of Octarinetabellatchitchix furiously nose-to-nose with Obelix and then saying essentially “I like you, kid” stuck with me.
- This Book Made Me Think of You – Libby Page, 2026. Ask a Manager commentariat rec, a charming rom-com set in a bookstore. I wanted to compile all the books mentioned in order to look some of them up, and thank goodness Page already did that.
- The Left Leg – Phoebe Atwood Taylor writing as Alice Tilton, 1940. Massachusetts Center for the Book‘s May challenge is “A book set in Massachusetts,” and coincidentally Jonathan had just recommended this Leonidas Witherall mystery. Alas it has very little state content, and although I found bits mildly amusing (like the annoying young woman they call “the Scarlet Wimpernel,” the take-charge Topsey Beaton, and the recurring joke that everyone calls Witherall “Bill” or “Shakespeare” because he looks so much like the playwright), it didn’t grab me. I wrote “A mildly-amusing mystery, indeed set in Massachusetts but without much local color.” I did look up one thing: “Stop-before-Entering streets” which as far as I can tell (see “Stop and Go”, top of page 4 in this Andover newspaper) was an early way of describing a street that has a stop sign at an intersection where cross traffic does not stop.
- James – Percival Everett, 2024. Re-read, this time for Second Monday. Quotes TBD.
- A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon – Kevin Fedarko, 2024. Nature/Enviro; quotes TBD.
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1962 (tr. Ralph Parker). Great Books; quotes TBD.
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë, 1947. Re-read, this time for Amherst Book Group. Quotes TBD.
- Still Running: The Art of Meditation in Motion – Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, 2020. An interesting cross-over of running and meditation. I enjoyed it, and I’d like to try some of the excercises (like running while focusing on the breath, and stopping whenever you lose focus), but it didn’t blow me away.
Articles – all by Peter Caws
Papers by my dad that I’ve been digitizing – focusing on the ones from which his philosophical aphorisms were drawn.
- “The Case of the Athenian Stranger: Philosophy and World Citizenship” – Teaching Philosophy 8:2, April 1985. A great one!
- “The Ontology of Criticism” – Semiotext(e) 1:3, Spring 1975.
- Lévi-Strauss, in his report to the Smithsonian Institution on the tribes of the Upper Xingu River, describes a magic use of certain tobaccos for what the natives called “seeing-smoking,” the inducing of a narcotic state in which they received messages, warnings, and visions; “the natives, he says, interpret reading as a sort of seeing-smoking.”
- syntagma
- “Critical Innocence and Straight Reading” – New Literary History V:XVII, Autumn 1985.
- polysemy
- gavagai
- “the possibility of literature is the most spectacular gift of language”
- “Instruction and Inquiry” – Daedalus, Fall 1974.
- Re universities: “taking in a homogeneous age group and putting them in courses by twenties or thirties can only be regarded as a form of lunacy. Students in universities are usually educated by accident, and this might be institutionalized by trying to make the university a higher-order analogy of the ‘biological soup’ out of which the earliest forms of life are supposed to have developed.”
- “Science, Computers, and the Complexity of Nature“, Philosophy of Science, v. 30, 2 April 1963.