Random literary observation of the day

I must say that given what I normally read, second-rate Walter Scott reads like Tolstoy. 

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[Nimble]

This reminds me of a blog post I read yesterday about being covered with the smell of cat pee. What I mean is that it's so wonderful *not* to smell like cat pee. But we forget when not exposed to it for a long time. Everything truly is relative.

[nbm]

I once went to an exhibition of the paintings of J.G. Brown. Brown was a popular late 19C artist specializing in poor but spunky children. Slick Victorian tripe, in short. And I thought: The poor curator! Years ago [I speculated] she picked Brown for her master's thesis, and then followed up with her dissertation, and now she is the world's leading expert on him and will spend the rest of her career with these ugly, morally repugnant pictures. (But it has to be admitted they are at least technically highly competent.) (And of course it is possible she actually likes Brown's work. I guess.)