This morning's Lull Report …

… courtesy of Dave Lull:



… Well worth learning:  Lane Cooper’s lessons by Michael Dirda — The New Criterion.

In those days it still seemed obvious that the Homeric poems, the tragedies of Sophocles, the dialogues of Plato, and the Old and New Testament should stand at the center of an educated person’s interior life. Cooper blamed their neglect on the elective system, the notion that “one subject is just about as good as another.” As he complained, “the main principle in a general education no longer is ‘Let a man deny himself, and take up his cross daily,’ but ‘let every man follow his bent.’ ” Study, he believed, should actually be hard work, while familiarity with the classics obviously provided a foundation for every sort of humanistic learning.

…  Hmm: Adam Gopnik asks When did faith start to fade? — Bigger Than Phil.

We know that men were not invented but slowly evolved from smaller animals; that the earth is not the center of the universe but one among a billion planets in a distant corner; and that, in the billions of years of the universe’s existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession with the laws of nature. We need not imagine that there’s no Heaven; we know that there is none, and we will search for angels forever in vain.

Really? Augustine believed in God and also posited a theory of evolution. Nobel Prize-winning physician Alexis Carrel thought he had witnessed a couple of miracles at Lourdes. And we know there is no heaven? How exactly do we know that?

… Q&A — Genre-Bending Novel Uses Body Swap As A Metaphor For Reading.

I wrote the book to entertain. I wasn't going to be held back by notions of what was sensible or good taste. If I was going to bring back an 18th-century lexicographer, hell, I was gonna bring him back.

… How A Stressful Night For Miles Davis Spawned Two Classic Albums.



… Finale — The end of Yeats: work and women in his last days in France.



… Adding, not subtracting: AMAZON ANARCHIST.

The Post’s new owner wants more real, lively debate.