Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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April 9, 2010Quote of the DayAndrew Manshell in today's Wall Street Journal on
the subject Why Top Colleges Squeeze You Dry:
It could be argued that the richest institutions--such as Harvard, Williams, Wellesley, Amherst, Yale and Princeton--might be free and operate from only endowment funds, if they chose to. Why don't they? Because they don't have to. There are qualified paying customers lined up at the door.
April 9, 2010Still More on "Cool"The gist of this long-running saga (see this blog for April 1 and March 4) seems to be that the word "cool" as a term of keen approval ("Cool!") began to emerge in the second half of the 19th century from the more common meaning of composure, as in "keep your cool". In the Times Literary Supplement for April 2, Sara Atwood of Chandler, Arizona gives the example of William Bell Scott writing to Alice Boyd in 1866 about D.G. Rossetti's relationship with Janey Morris: "Of course, a woman under such circumstances, before people, is a closed book, still I think she is cool." Atwood says Scott is referring to Jane's self-composure, of which (it seems to me) we could also infer approval.
In the same issue, historian Hugh Brogan of the University of Essex writes:
I am surprised that no one has yet dug up the anecdote that when the young Sir Richard Monckton Milnes, the future Lord Houghton, first presented himself in London drawing rooms in 1836, his "ebullience and self-confidence" (the words are his biographer's) earned him the sobriquet "The cool of the evening."
This is not so far away from "cool jazz".