Linking to the essays A.A. Milne

Now that I have completely polluted your minds with more business advice than you can possibly swallow, I’m bringing you a calming, refreshing mental yoga pose to get you through the weekend: The Essays of A.A. Milne.

Milne, as we all know, was a fiction author. In fact, a children’s fiction author. Dorothy Parker, reviewing books for the infant New Yorker in 1928, famously dissed him big when she quoted a passage from The House At Pooh Corner with the comment, “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.”

Why on earth anyone thought Dorothy Parker, of all people (author of light verse on different ways to commit suicide, known to subscribe to mortuary magazines for fun), would get a bang out of a children’s book I could not say. I guess The New Yorker was an extremely small enterprise in those days.

Regardless, she could hardly fault him for his essays. Milne was blogging long before blogging was possible, writing with charming casualness on the joys of cupboards (“It was a silly trap, because none of the mice knew how to work it”), goldfish (“Ants’ eggs are, I should say, the very last thing which one would take to without argument”), and, of course, the pleasure of writing (“The nib I write this with is called the “Canadian Quill”; made, I suppose, from some steel goose which flourishes across the seas, and which Canadian housewives have to explain to their husbands every Michaelmas”).

And when you have completely pacified your nearly-hysterical authorial senses back into a comfortable state from which to write, please note that this is only one site of an entire anthology of classic essays called Quotidana, and you can read essays by a whole slew of other great authors simply by visiting the handy-dandy set of links to the right under the heading Essayists.

Enjoy your weekend.