Reading Scanning the diary (published regularly during his lifetime) of John Wesley (1703-1791) this afternoon, looking for a quote to which I have misplaced the proper citation. Came across this interesting entry for Thursday, October 26, 1786:

In the evening, I preached to a large and serious congregation at Wandsworth. I think it was about two in the morning that a dog began howling under our window in a most uncommon manner. We could not stop him by any means. Just then William Barker died.

Not what I was looking for, but interesting nonetheless.

From this morning’s Washington Post: “Halliburton’s Deals Greater Than Thought”:

Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, has won contracts worth more than $1.7 billion under Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more dollars under a no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to newly available documents.

The spokesperson for Halliburton is quoted as saying that calling this war profiteering is “an affront to all hard-working, honorable Halliburton employees.”

Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, is said to have liked this riddle:

How many legs does a donkey have if you call his tail a leg?

I don’t know, Mr. President. I guess five.

Wrong. Even if you call the tail a leg, it’s still a just a tail.

I’ll repeat my earlier suggestion for the United Nations: pass a resolution that says that any country that wages war on another country is required by international law to pay for the rebuilding, but make it illegal for any corporation from the aggressor nation to receive a contract to take part in, or profit in any way from, the rebuilding.

Well, aren’t they all?

I’m prepping for teaching Beowulf (the Seamus Heaney translation) in one class tomorrow and Fantomina in the other. Depending on whom you believe, a thousand years or so separate these texts.

But I’m tempted with other readings, having learned from Edith that there is a Bonny ‘Prince’ Billy tour diary that’s pretty blog-like and from Grumpy Girl (scroll down, if necessary; no permalinks in this blogspot, I think) that Harvey freakin’ Pekar has a blog.

The issues chewed over in the identity thread keep coming up, don’t they? Is that Bonny ‘Prince’ Billy’s blog or is it Will Oldham‘s? Do I refer to “Grumpy Girl” or “Meredith”?

Edith, who records for Drag City, like Oldham, er, Billy, er, you know what I mean, writes

Being very blog-aware I can’t help but compare his and my writing styles. If I were an outsider I think I’d prefer reading his blog over my own, but I’m not an outsider and who wants to read their own writing?

I like reading both of their blogs, but one thing I like about Edith’s is that she comes across as a real person while the Bonny ‘Prince’ Billy blog feels more like a performance. But as Ryan astutely points out, just about everything could be said to be a performance, even the the behavior of “real people.” I also like the fact that I can comment on and trackback to her blog while the BPB blog (and the Pekar blogs) are impenetrable by such interlinking. You can email BPB, but that’s not the same thing.

And just to wrap this entry up with a neat little bow: Fantomina is a 1724 novella by Eliza Haywood about a young woman who adopts a variety of different identities in order to maintain the romantic interest of the clueless and fickle man she has fallen for. At one point, he cheats on one of her identities with another of her identities. That Haywood was something else.