This should clear things up

Okay, okay. Slow down! I have had hundreds of readers e-mail and demand an explanation for the name of the blog--especially after seeing that the first entry was sports-related. So here goes:

I like W. Somerset Maugham. Heard of him? I had read most of his novels, plays, and short stories when I decided to return to college to get an English degree. I live in Boise so I enrolled at Boise State. I planned on reading a little more Maugham, and learning more about him and his contemporaries; I figured I might like some of them, too.

Wrong: I learned that academia despises Maugham as trite. And it hurt. I had learned so much and been so many places and felt so many things as I had read his words. What would I be learning over the next few years? Would I still like Maugham when I finished my degree? Well, in my studies I have come to love British literature (well, novels, anyway) from the two centuries before Maugham. There was only class in which I read anything at all by his contemporaries--20th Century British fiction--and I hated what I read. Woolf, Waugh, Lawrence? Please. I've had more satisfaction reading the side of a cereal box.

Now I am done and I still like Maugham, and my blog has his name. I will write about Maugham here, but--know this about me--I am a sports fan. And I love the Orioles. I can't explain why--since I was born and raised in Idaho--I just do. I check the box scores almost every day, and my wife always knows when the O's blow a late inning lead: I am in a bad mood the rest of the night. And if they blow a late inning lead to the Yankees? Cover your ears.

So on this blog I will write about my two passions: sports and English literature. I figured two things so closely related should naturally occupy the same space.

[I reserve the right to write about anything else I feel like, as well. Just thought I would make that clear.]