Skip to main content

So long and thanks for all the phish

By
It's been fun but I decided to start a new blog with a new host as there just isn't much action in Blogger.  Wordpress, Medium and Tumblr draw much more readership and well, I want to be heard.  Besides, I was never able to get any satisfaction from Blogger in eliminating the embedded viral ads that redirect many readers.  I'll keep this blog up for awhile, as I want to go through the material and see how much is worth keeping.  Feel free to peruse.

I'll post a link to the new blog once I get it up and running for those who are curious.  Meantime, you can reach me at dzimas61@gmail.com

Comments

  1. TripplerJanuary 13, 2017 at 5:38 PM

    So sad to see this great site ended. But I am partly at fault for not contributing very much anymore as my eyes have dimmed from illness and age. This is why I cannot read written books anymore and must use recorded books.


    The other day I had a thought - you know how some schools give you college credits for life experiences. Well, when you consider how many history and fictional books we read here, and all the notes we posted, I could well have earned 50 college credits or more for all this work. Some of my posts would easily have sufficed for mid term exams and if I put a few of them together, they could have sufficed for a BA or MA thesis.

    Wish there was some way to keep all those postings but I do not have a printer and cannot preserve them. Hopefully, they will be stored somewhere.


    Good luck in your new site!


    And Happy New Year!

    ReplyDelete
  2. James FergusonJanuary 26, 2017 at 5:27 PM

    Happy New Year to you too Trip! As you can see, I couldn't resist one more post.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more