Noontime roundup …

Courtesy of Dave Lull:





… Janus and "The Snow Man" by Thomas O. Rover - The New Criterion.



I didn't know that snowstorms now have names. They never did before. Janus is a good name for a storm.



… Screeds, or Essays for the Near Future?

… the history of literature is “littered” with vanished journals along the lines of Image, which publish work for a time, often framed in terms of ideals and agendas, and then fold or disappear, only to be remembered, if at all, for a work or two or three published there.

My unsolicited suggestion for the next step in this discussion is to determine what the participants definitively agree on and then for each to determine why that is so.



… By the numbers: What Does the Owlet Say? On the competitive squabbles of barn owl siblings.



… Sunk into Being: What lies beneath Samuel Beckett's half-buried woman in Happy Days?



… An unpleasant job, but somebody's got to it — pointing out The pointlessness of Jerry Coyne.

As is typical of the New Atheist genre, we are confronted with a blizzard of sweeping and tendentious assertions, straw men, begged questions, missed points, well-poisoning, and other evidence that the writer has read a book about logical fallacies and mistaken it for a “How-To” guide. 

… The envelope, please — Based on a True Story: The Fiction-Free Finalists for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.


… Dialogue: Other Places: Teachout And Iverson On Ellington.