Finished (a few days ago, but just getting around to posting) 2. John Polidori, The Vampyre A quick read, and of no great literary value, but historically interesting. In 1816, Shelley and his circle gathered for a few days at Villa Diodati in Geneva, discussed interesting ideas, took ether, Shelley seems to have had a vision, and they challenged each other to write macabre stories. Shelley abandoned his; his wife Mary conceived Frankenstein; and Byron wrote and abandoned a fragment of a vampire tale. Later, his personal physician, John Polidori, who was present, submitted a completed and very different (though based loosely on the fragment) story to a magazine, representing it as written by Byron. Bram Stoker later scavenged the usable parts of The Vampyre for his Dracula, and it's interesting to see the kernel of Stoker's work in Polidori's novella. Besides historical interest, the sheer purpleness of the prose is delightful, though the plot makes no sense whatsoever, and isn't helped by Polidori's confused narration. Fun exercise! The edition I read includes Byron's fragment. Below are two passages: which was written by Byron, and which by Polidori? Hint: one was a literary giant, the other, not so much. :D #1 "In this situation, I looked round for a place where he might most conveniently repose:--contrary to the usual aspect of Mahometan burial-grounds, the cypresses were in this few in number, and these thinly scattered over its extent; the tombstones were mostly fallen, and worn with age:--upon one of the most considerable of these, and beneath one of the most spreading trees, Darvell supported himself, in a half-reclining posture, with great difficulty. He asked for water." #2 "Aubrey's weakness increased; the effusion of blood produced symptoms of the near approach of death. He desired his sister's guardians might be called, and when the midnight hour had struck, he related composedly what the reader has perused--he died immediately after. The guardians hastened to protect Miss Aubrey; but when they arrived, it was too late. Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey's sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!"

:001_smile: Sorry; I'm less pastoral and more rules-focused I suppose. All those legalism threads are probably about me. :) But I have seen too many people, Catholic and non-, abused by Catholic bureaucrats armed with half-understood sacramental theology and canon law, breeding confusion and doubt among people like the OP who just want to live Christian lives. Personally, I now ignore any claim about marriage, baptism, or any sacramental/canonical issue that is not coming from an actual canon lawyer.

Not that fussy. There is nothing wrong with immersion, and threefold ablution is required for liceity, but not validity. If conditional baptism was required, it was for some other reason. Or the priest got a C In his Sacramental Theology class.

As long as a baptism can be determined to have been done with water that touches the body and in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it is valid. Threefold ablution is not necessary for validity. Somebody told you wrong.

Briefly on the marriage issue ... Marriage law is complex, as the Church seeks both to take seriously Christ's strong words about putting aside and marrying again being equivalent to adultery, and to discern whether a true marriage ever took place - a matter which involves determining the capacity and consent of the parties. The rules are thus simple - if one is already married and one's spouse still lives, one cannot take another spouse, because marriage is permanent until death - and yet complicated - a baptized Catholic, for instance, has no right to marry outside the purview of the Church, which likely means your husband was not truly married before (and so was free to marry you) - but for the same reason, was obligated to contract marriage with you under the auspices of the Church. HOWEVER, since you were both presumably free to marry, and presumably gave consent, and have been living as husband and wife, the usual fix is Convalidation, which is just supplying the missing ingredient of having the Church bless the marriage. This is only necessary where one of the couple was Catholic and so had the obligation to marry as a Catholic. This is a sufficiently complicated area, though, that you should consult a priest trained in canon law (not all priests are!) and disregard what you hear from people on the internet. Including me. :) ETA: Regarding your baptism - again, internet advice is what you pay for it - but have you discussed this fully with a trained priest? Don't go by what the well-intentioned people in the pastor's or bishop's office tell you, as their confidence in their knowledge of canon law is generally equalled only by their ignorance of it (I could tell you stories...). Were there witnesses to it who are still alive?

Nm. Old thread.

I preferred War and Peace, but I read Anna when I was much younger and completely unfamiliar with Tolstoy, and in a poor translation. I've been thinking about trying it again. The trick is to start working the new vocabulary into conversation. "You know, I really need to take the snaffle in my teeth and get to work on that project." After all, it's all about making other people worry they're less educated than we are, right? :D Yes, and wasn't there some quite awful movie out several years ago about that famous literary evening? Oh yes, for the excellent reason that it was $1.99 at Half Price Books, and ultra-cheap for the Kindle, which saved me from having to drag a 1440-page novel around with me when I was out and about. From what I read, there are several quite good translations now to choose from. There's a nice discussion here from someone who prefers the Edmonds version; but really, there don't seem to be bad translations current. You might want to be aware that the Bromfield translation is of Tolstoy's first draft, and is substantially different from the more accepted third draft, Tolstoy's final version. Otherwise, it may just be a matter of what you can find at the library or bookstore, and of how comfortable you are with the French and German parts being translated for you. My reading French is pretty good, and for that reason I think I would rather have had the Pevears' translation; but I didn't feel like shelling out the money to buy it new. If you're not up to paragraphs in French (plus the occasional German sentence) and would tire of looking to footnotes frequently, you might not prefer Pevear-Volokhonsky. :iagree: You may also find yourself, like me, playing Tchaikovsky on the stereo quite a lot. You're too generous. But I do love to read good books! Dh brought home Tinker, Tailor from the library (the best thing about his job is infinite-term borrowing privileges from the gigantic university library, hand-delivered to my home! :D ), so I'm going to read that one. But it's awesome! It's as if the New York Post were written in haiku. Or if Hell had a twitter feed. Finding his daughter, 19, insufficiently austere, Jallat, watchmaker of Saint-Etienne, killed her. It is true that he has 11 children left. Neither am I, but dh has taught Greek philosophy before, and is offering to take me through it. We just did Euthyphro together. So I'll probably work through more Plato while I read something else. Wow! I had no idea; I picked it up at Half Price for $8. From the looks of it, I'd guess it was someone's published dissertation, and so has a wealth of useful citations and doesn't make any claims that aren't thoroughly backed up, which is nice. Great Girl read through it (she has an annoying habit of going through my to-read stack considerably ahead of me) and liked it very much; she felt it helped her have a better understanding of how her own education fit into the broader sweep of western non-institutional education. I wonder if it's on-line? Many academics self-publish their work. Bookfinder.com shows some cheap copies, if you don't mind the shipping cost from the UK. I found this in a pile of old Pelican (Penguin's British non-fiction line) books with shilling-and-pence prices on the Half Price clearance shelf. It looks great. Coming up! Hooray! This is the one I've settled on. My ex-library copy is bulky, so I may Kindle it too. This was from the above-mentioned Pelican stack. When I brought it home, dh told me Copleston is a well-known and respected philosophical historian, and I felt vaguely embarrassed never having heard of him before. But living with dh leaves me feeling vaguely embarrassed quite a lot, so it's nothing new.:D The Polidori, the Plato, the Copleston, and Centuries of Tutoring all look like they could be done in a week. And Strunk & White is short, but not short enough. That would be fun! How about the Balzac? He wrote so much, and yet I've never read anything of his.

We live in the same city as our extended families, and these things are awfully casual. (It helps that I have wonderful in-laws.) Usually someone calls someone else, and we decide on a time and place, with some not-very-rigorous rotation among the various houses.

Finished finished finished finished!!!!!! 1. Tolstoy, War and Peace. Rosemary Edmonds, tr. Whew! I think he could have done without that last fifty pages of discourse on the theory of history and free will, but I suppose I'm not his editor. Anyway, a fabulous book, and I can't believe I never read it before. If you think of it as a trilogy - and it lends itself to a nice tripartite division - it's really quite tackleable. Vocabulary I had to look up: jabot, epergne, snaffle, shako, sutler, limber (noun), Martinist, boston, bast, quinsy, hetman, cicatrize

I've actually built up quite the pile over the last month. Feel free to pick one that looks appealing, and then I'll know what to read next! :D John Le Carre, either Tinker, Tailor or The Spy Who Came In From the Cold Felix Feneon, Novels in Three Lines Plato, either Crito or The Apology Edward Gordon, Centuries of Tutoring: A History of Alternative Education in America and Western Europe Strunk & White, Elements of Style Shakespeare, Henry the Sixth Part II Seventeenth-Century Prose, ed. Peter Ure Polidori, The Vampyre Balzac, Droll Stories F. C. Copleston, Aquinas Several of these recommend themselves by their brevity. Any look good? ETA: Not Strunk & White after all. Just read the first few pages (after White's intro) and nearly fell into the soup with boredom.

Glad you asked! War And Peace is my first book of this year, and I hope to finish it today, as a matter of fact. I started it the day after Christmas. It's really quite a page-turner once you figure out who's who. I would be pleased if someone else were to read it this year. I was a little sad last year that my reading list didn't overlap with anyone else's.

Just to add another thought to the discussion.... Dh has never been involved in undergrad admissions, but has a lot of experience in graduate admissions. He tells me all the grad programs know perfectly well that some truly astounding kids don't end up in the ivies/top-tier undergrad schools, whether because they just barely didn't make the cut, or because their parents weren't aiming for that, or because they got a full ride somewhere else and financial need meant they went to that somewhere else. So they don't focus on those top schools when they're doing admissions. Sometimes it's better to go to a smaller, less-known place where you have a real chance of working directly with faculty doing research in your area: it can be a benefit to be a bigger fish in a littler pond.

:grouphug::grouphug:

Absolutely. I think being interested enough in how our language works to have had the conversation with your dh and to have spent brain-power on the question show your qualifications.

Okay, going to scheduled doses. Unfortunately I can't reach her dentist until Monday, and naturally the pain really geared up Friday evening. She had x-rays last week, which is when I found out she had molars (no wisdom teeth) coming in; she hadn't told me her gums had been aching. I'm freezing a homemade teether in a ziploc bag right now so she can get something icy back there.

Great Girl has molars coming in. The dentist advised ibuprofen if it hurts. Well it hurts so much she can't sleep. Orajel only helps a little; she says the pain is too deep for the surface analgesic. Any advice?

Well, again necessarily appealing to the argument from authority, but the guy who wrote a 1000-page dissertation on pronouns says it's percent. Good enough for me.

Or, for a descriptivist: when you use that number (singular or plural) for the verb, does it give you a intuitively normal English sentence? Much easier.

Sorry, typo fixed. I've been drinking with Mrs. Mungo. Shiner, not Mike's.

You do have to look to the of complement for many number-transparent nouns. Another example is majority, which takes an optional singular verb on its own The majority is Irish. but an obligatory plural verb with an of complement The majority of voters are Irish. Come over to the descriptivist side, Bill. We're waiting for you. :D

Actually, the book was using the sentence in an exercise in detecting common nouns (which led us to a dispute about "the Earth" versus "Earth" versus "the earth" but let's not go there). So there wouldn't have been an answer about the subject in the Teacher's Guide, even if I hadn't been so cheap and had bought it. Which I didn't.

That would be a perfect analysis, if the sentence had contained any of those words. :D

Almost entirely books that I own, though I'm currently reading War and Peace in both my Dead Tree version (when at home) and on my kindle when away. Dh had gotten me the kindle and I'd thought I'd no need for it, but it turns out to be a lot lighter than a 1500-page novel in your purse. Page 1076! Only 368 to go! Sacre bleu, the French have taken Moscow! Pierre, don't be a fool, you can't kill Napoleon single-handedly!

Great Girl just got accepted at Big State U., to her great happiness--the notification came on her birthday, just to make it perfect. She only applied there as she really needs to live at home for at least one more year, maybe two, but is sick and tired of auditing courses and not getting credit for them. If she decides not to go, she'll apply to other places next time around. And her parents will be smarter about the scholarshp/financial aid process. :tongue_smilie:

I'm a little puzzled as to how surface in the genitive phrase of the surface could be a d*******r [sorry, blame Bill]; but cardinal numerals in this kind of NP construction are definitely d********rs.