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Walter Carey

On Dickens's Birthday: "More Mush from the Wimp" [by Walter Carey]

DickensWhen it was Megan's turn to pick a sentence we could ridicule, she took out a recent New Yorker and quoted Louis Menand on Charles Dickens: "In life, there is little evidence that Dickens was, in the context of his time and place, a sexist or a prude." 

Johnny said: How about Homer? St. Augustine? Rabelais? Was he a "sexist or a prude"? How about Emerson? Gogol? Gide? Coleridge? Flannery O'Connor? Alexander Pope? Virginia Woolf? Yeats? John Donne?

Katya: "In death, there is little evidence that Dickens was a sexist or a prude." See the difference?

Isabelle: An imperfect example of the historical fallacy: that we today, in our infinite wisdom, feel free to criticize the benighted citizens of the past.

Megan" Why "imperfect"?

Isabelle: Because of the hedging, as Katya pointed out.

Johnny: My professor at Rutgers said write every sentence as if it could be put on your gravestone.

Megan: My vote for most pernicious phrase goes to "It's not your father's Oldsmobile" ahead of "up close and personal."

-- Walter Carey

Happy birthday, Charlie (born Feb 7, 1812)

For other pieces by Walter Carey, the pseudonym of a self-styled "contrarian" writer of our acquaintance, click here, or here, or here, or here, or on these links:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/08/farewell-to-leicester-squares-by-walter-carey.html 

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/06/pitching-a-no-hitter-on-lsd-by-walter-carey.html  

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/the-two-party-system-by-walter-carey.html 

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/a-curse-on-blockheads-by-walter-carey.html 

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2017/10/the-real-reason-linda-amy-carlson-left-blue-bloods-after-7-seasons-by-walter-carey.html 


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July 30, 2021

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June 04, 2021

March 19, 2021

March 01, 2021

February 23, 2014

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"Lively and affectionate" Publishers Weekly

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I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark


from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman

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