A note on table manners:
“She oozes; she chortles; and she half blew her rather red nose in her table napkin. Then she poured the cream–oh the blackberries were divine–into her beer; and I had rather dine with a dog. But you can tell people they are murderers; you cannot tell them that they eat like hogs.”
* * *
A note, closer to home, about academics:
“But why teach English? . . . all one can do is to herd books into groups, and then these submissive young, who are far too frightened and callow to have a bone in their backs, swallow it down; and tie it up; and thus we get English literature into A B C; one, two, three; and lose all sense of what its about [sic].”
From Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters.
Erin
Alan Schmierer