I heart the federalists

How about that James Madison! What a writer, huh?

Full disclosure: I haven't read the Federalist Papers before, so taking Constitutional Law this semester promises to be a MAJOR thrill from start to finish.

An initial taste of mind-destroying eloquence: "As far as laws are necessary to mark with precision the duties of those who are to obey them, and to take from those who are to administer them a discretion which might be abused, their number is the price of liberty."

BAM. Could you write a more perfect sentence about the balance between regulation and individual liberty?? I dare you.

On Being Philip Larkin

Does anyone know what happened to Philip Larkin in his mid-twenties to sour him to such an extent on the age-bracket? His poem "On Being Twenty-Six" uses both "putrescently" (an adverb so obscure that blogspot declines to recognize it) and "putrid." I remember the moment when I realized, with a sensation of falling swiftly, that I could no longer say I had "just graduated" from college. The very young are perhaps always shocked by the notion that they may one day become merely...young.

But I don't know yet what to make of this poem...my outlook is certainly not so glum as his and I can't imagine that a mere age -- and a pretty decent age at that -- could bring on such a flood of desolate imagery.

Any Larkin experts want to weigh in with biographical or textual insights?