11 March 2013: This page needs a rewrite. Just sayin’.

10 February 2009: It has, evidently, taken me a while to get round to writing this page. The Daily Blague was launched, as a MovableType site, in November 2004; in August 2007, it moved to WordPress. But as to answering the question, What is the blog about?, I couldn’t say until late last year.

The Daily Blague is, as its name suggests, intended to be clever and a bit smirky (blague is a French word meaning, roughly, jest), but it is certainly not devoted to humor. On the contrary! The tickling and the chortling are — I’ll be honest — so much sugar-coating on the sometimes bitter pill of my old-master moralizing. I can be a dreadful scold.

But The Daily Blague is not about scolding.

Anthropologists study human beings who believe that their lives are determined by an eternally fixed order, and that the order of the universe will be thrown into chaos if they fail to behave according to their divinely ordained roles.

Humanists study human beings who have decided that they themselves are responsible for the order in their lives, and that, whether or not there are supreme beings who take an interest in mankind, it behooves us not to wait for instructions from the divine. In this sense, The Daily Blague is a humanist Web site.

The Daily Blague is also a portal to a Web site that is not a blog, Portico. Portico, which dates from 2000, is a collection of pages about books, movies, ideas, and occasional forays from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to New York’s theatre district, as well as to Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of At (hereinafter referred to as “the Museum”). The appearance of a new page at Portico is almost always heralded by a brief linking entry at The Daily Blague.

I hope that you will find The Daily Blague intellectually stimulating; I hope that you won’t find it obnoxiously challenging. Comments are most welcome, especially when they engage other comments. I do ask, however, that you direct corrections, and questions that you’d like me to answer, to the email address to which you’ll be directed by the link below.

Copyright (c) 2009 Pourover Press

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