Winter’s Philosophers by Charles Simic | NYRBlog. “Everyone who thinks is unhappy,” says Sergei Dovlatov in one of his stories. Some crows caw all day, some have nothing to say. I see one of them pace back and forth on my lawn the way I’ve seen Hamlet do on stage. Whatever is bothering him seems insoluble, too much for one crow to figure out on his own. Still, no harm trying, I suppose, even with the racket his relatives are making as they fly to and fro, as if the road they oversee is not covered only with fallen leaves and patches of ice, but also with fresh road kill. My late father, who had something good to say about most things, used to console people who complained about bitter cold weather by reminding them of the joys of a hot bowl of soup and of a strong drink being made permissible early in the day by the extraordinary circumstances.
In addition, he claimed that the cold concentrates the mind. “No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived on,” Voltaire was reputed to have said. ‘In the Basement of the Ivory Tower’ by Professor X - Review. The author, a poorly paid adjunct professor, a man who teaches nighttime literature classes in both a small private college and in a community college, wrote under the pseudonym Professor X. This made him seem intrepid and swashbuckling, as if he might secretly be Julian Assange or Banksy.
He is a bit wicked, this Professor X. His book-length expansion of the article, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” is rippled with mellow sarcasm. Reading one student’s terrible paper about Sylvia Plath, he says: “I pictured her writing it in a bar, or while driving to class or skydiving. Maybe she composed it as one long text message to herself.” Watching his working-class students eat chicken and rice out of plastic foam containers while he’s lecturing, he deadpans: “I feel like Robert Goulet doing dinner theater.” The tone of his essay, and of this impertinent book, however, is as plaintive as it is lemony. Professor X is unruffled. Mild banalities do, too. “Sink or swim,” he writes. Get the Best Possible Picture on Your HDTV. Take control of your TV's picture quality.
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