Most of the respondents to Carolyn Heilbrun's “Guest Column: From Rereading to Reading” (119 [2004]: 211–17) seem generally to accept her rather dismal view of what is and is not possible in retirement. I disagree. Two of the fine scholars (and teachers) who were my dear friends and mentors did some of their best work in their eighties and nineties. One of these was John C. Pope, who was nearing ninety when those of us attending the Medieval Academy meeting agreed that his latest article on an Old English poem was the model of what a scholarly article ought to be; he had just mailed off another important contribution when he died, very suddenly, at ninety-three. Another was Ruth J. Dean, whose prizewinning masterwork, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, was published about three years before she died, at the age of one hundred.

The 2003 Guber natorial recall campaign in California was a perfect political storm. The extraordinary result—the democratic removal of a sitting governor before his term expired (for the first time in California history and the second time in United States history) and his replacement by a bodybuilder turned movie star with not the slightest governmental experience—depended on the improbable conjuncture of several factors, each pretty odd in itself: the special severity with which the Bush recession hit the California economy, largely because of the latter's unusual dependence on high-tech corporations; the California power crisis engineered by Enron and other denizens of the Houston energy industry; the astonishing charmlessness of Governor Gray Davis, whose political career had been based not on attracting strong loyalty or admiration but on fund-raising, negative campaigning, and convincing core Democratic constituencies that he was marginally less repellant than Republican alternatives; the willingness of the multimillionaire United States congressman Daryl Issa to spend two million dollars of his own money to get the recall on the ballot in the first place; and, of course, the overwhelming star power of Arnold Schwarzenegger. One might suppose that the evident contingency of the whole matter precludes finding historical importance in it. It is after all possible, even likely, in what Guy Debord brilliantly analyzed as la société du spectacle, for an event to be sensational without being tremendously significant.

Boston, on the coast of lincolnshire, is a handsome town, writes his man. The tallest church steeple in all of England is to be found there; sea-pilots use it to navigate by. Around Boston is fen country. Bitterns abound, ominous birds who give a heavy, groaning call loud enough to be heard two miles away, like the report of a gun.