Word: dicta
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During summer months, these green dicta issue from an ivory bower, a rustic, century-old house near Bennington, Vt. (winter headquarters: Mill Valley, Calif.). Carrying his 76 years lightly, Professor Overstreet is up at 4 on most mornings, dawdles over breakfast till 5:30 a.m. From then till 1 p.m. he writes in his barn. Afternoons are spent puttering about the garden and feeding a pet chipmunk. Since the nearest neighbor is half a mile away, the professor pretty much limits his interpersonal relations to his wife, with whom he spends the evenings studying a new enthusiasm, the mandolin...
...murals, which earned him a lot of money but little self-satisfaction. Today he concentrates on the minor easel-painting he is best at, and to teaching at Manhattan's Art Students League. Bouché's students are apt to be startled at first by such obiter dicta as: ¶ "Artists are multiplying to such an extent it's a national disease. Their terrific concern is with art and not with life." é"Art isn't the only thing in the world -the cemeteries are full of great people who never made a name. And what...
Every general has his pet dicta. One of Almond's favorites is "no tanks to the rear," a logical sequence of his conviction that a soldier must use every weapon he has to the uttermost to kill the foe and save his own skin. "The place of the tank," he explains, "is at the front destroying the enemy. If it goes back, even though for gasoline, we lose two things: firepower and the morale of the foot soldier. The foot soldier moving up can well ask himself, 'What the hell?' if a tank passes him going...
...does not sound as if it had been written, but as if it had been talked-between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m.. in a Bloomsbury attic. As with most such nocturnal monologues, which always seem dazzling in the dark, a lot of Pound's dicta could not survive the dawn; but some would stand up at high noon, e.g., his tribute to Walt Whitman: "One may not need him at home. It is in the air, this tonic of his. But if one is abroad; if one is ever likely to forget one's birthright...
Football & Mumbo Jumbo. There had been time, though, to speak his mind, and some of his dicta on U.S. education had made him a controversial figure. He had called academic freedom "mumbo jumbo," said that "a piece of rubber hose is at times worth ten years of the new [educational] psychology." He had come to Fordham in the days of its great mid '30s football teams, had taken a wartime opportunity to halt football altogether, allowed it to return (in 1946) on only a very chastened scale. Said Gannon: "We want to get [it] off the vaudeville stage...