On writing and reading...............

Victor Davis Hanson writes on the importance of reading good
books - here.  He's a pretty fair hand at stringing words together
himself.   Enjoy a small sampling:

"The mind is a muscle. Without exercise, it reverts to mush. Watching most TV or using the normal electronic gadgetry does not tax us much - indeed that is by design the very purpose: to eliminate effort, worry, unease, and afterthought."

"In short, Hitchens was a voracious consumer of texts, and the result was that he achieved what the Roman student of rhetoric, Quintilian, once called variatio, the ability to mix up words and sentences and not bore. He could hold, even shock, the reader or listener from sentence to sentence, moment to moment."

"We don’t need more technocrats who fool us that their Ivy League law degrees are synonymous with wisdom. They can be, but now are more likely not much more than tickets that allow an Eric Holder or Timothy Geithner into the first-class seating. I am not calling for us to be academics or scholastics with our noses in books or our heads up our posteriors; but to match physicality and pragmatism with occasional abstraction and reflection from the voices of the past - just a little, now and then, to remind us that Twitter or Facebook speed up communication, but can slow down thought."

"Somehow we must convince this new wired generation that speaking and writing well are not just the DSL lines of modern civilization, but also the keys to self-mastery, a sort of code that one takes on - in addition to others, moral and legal - to uphold standards of culture itself, to keep the work and ideas alive of our long gone betters for one more generation - as if to say, 'I did my part according to my time and station.'  Nothing more, nothing less."

Thanks Michael