by sumac | Dec 22, 2018 | Artistic apologies, Historical Apologies
Here’s a problem: how to talk about an apology embodied in a long, arch, ornate, annoying poem without making people read the long, arch, ornate, annoying text. Because that would be annoying. Excerpts? Summaries and excerpts? We’ll try. The poem is “Lines...
by sumac | Nov 22, 2017 | Historical Apologies, Personal Apologies
In one of those “One Hundred Years Ago” columns newspapers sometimes run, SorryWatch came across an interesting 1917 account of a soldier, Thomas J. Ryan, whose mother was having a hard time letting go. Ryan was stationed at the Presidio Army Base in San Francisco....
by sumac | Jan 9, 2017 | Historical Apologies, Youth apologizes
Back in the day – the eighteenth century, I mean – Emily Fitzgerald, Countess of Kildare, set up a school for her many children (by the end she had 22). She and her husband, the Duke of Leinster, bought Black Rock, a bathing lodge south of Dublin, and fixed it up so...
by sumac | Nov 28, 2016 | Historical Apologies
When the late poet Maxine Kumin had to defend her Radcliffe thesis, the committee asked questions about the thesis – “Amorality and the Protagonist in the Novels of Stendhal and Dostoevsky” – and also questions to test her general knowledge. She called it “torture.”...
by snarly | Feb 26, 2016 | Funny-on-Purpose Apologies, Historical Apologies
According to the charming web site The Irish Aesthete, this framed item hangs in a bathroom at Birr Castle, County Offaly. As a lowly American Jewess not of the peerage, I don’t know whether the contrite Earl of Rosse is the current Earl (the 7th, for those...
by sumac | Nov 17, 2015 | Historical Apologies
SorryWatch hopes it will not give reason to apologize because one of its members (Sumac) is off to Antarctica for several months, under the auspices of the NSF and the US Antarctic Program. But SorryWatch is not worried yet. At Palmer Station, Sumac will have email...