When teaching the Comedy, it is often the same student who claims that “all sin is the same in God’s eyes” that also most heartily objects to Dante’s insinuation that gluttony is worse than lust.
Self-Portrait In A Very Old Mirror At The Met

Going Max Fischer
I will say this about Do Not Allow Virtual Learning To Steal Our Snow Days, my latest for Circe: I don’t want to be a celebrity, but I am definitely shooting for “folk hero.”
Children Should Be Seen, Not Heard
And everybody is somebody’s child.
Episode 49 of Proverbial is available now.
An Actual Conversation
Gibbs: How are you?
Kroger cashier: I can’t complain.
Gibbs: You could complain, but you don’t. That’s a virtue.
Kroger cashier: Ooh, I like that.
Real Psychological Wisdom
My favorite single line of dialogue from any motion picture, a line I repeat often to myself as a sort of consolation, comes from Tom Alfredson’s 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and it is, “The fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.”
While the line is original, I was reading the proverbs of William Hazlitt this morning (who is English, like John le Carré) and I came across, “Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.”
After Denis Villeneuve, Christian Petzold Is The Most Exciting Filmmaker Alive

Phoenix (2014) is about marriage, plain and simple.
Commit To Something
This week’s episode of Proverbial is concerned with a saying of Thomas Aquinas: “I fear the man of one book.”
Offensive things are said about modern reading strategies. Enjoy.
A Paradox
If a man would be content with the things he has, he must not be content with things.
Still

Seven years later, I am still sore about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death.
Memory eternal.
