"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Birthdays Today

Joni Mitchell is sixty-seven today.   I'll bet she still sounds great.  Her Blue is one of my all-time favorite albums.  


Also turning sixty-seven today is the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt.  Greenblatt is probably the foremost Shakespeare scholar today, and his biography Will in the World, which tries to understand Shakespeare through his historical context, and particularly the realities of everyday life in Elizabethan England, is a great piece of writing; I remember not being able to put it down.
 

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