[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

School has started abominably early. This is the first Friday of the new school year for one of my children and I’m disgusted by overreach. The other starts next week. A proper summer vacation starts on Memorial Day and ends on Labor Day. Anything else is a presumption on liberty. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Listen to Roger Waters, and if you don’t know what I mean by that, piss off early and stream Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Learn something worth learning. But first, a little verse.

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The very popularity of Housman’s poems poses something of a problem, an embarrassment, for literary critics, who are more comfortable explaining the glories of the obscure than extolling the virtues of the accessible.
– “The tragi-comedy of A. E. Housman” by Anthony Daniels, The New Criterion, March 2014

Alfred Edward Housman was a classics scholar, and a great one; “beyond serious dispute, among the greatest of all time,” according to Shakleton Bailey, apparently an impressive classics scholar himself, in the pages of a 1959 Listener magazine. He failed to get his degree at St. John’s College, Oxford. The hindsight view is that he focused too much on the lines of study that interested him to the detriment of the whole required to graduate. I’ve also read that he spent too much time with friends.