Ted Balaker re-ran my college advice on his blog. Welcome to y’all who’re arriving via Ted! 👋
I’m editing a book of King family history, and @ayjay’s Breaking Bread With The Dead has been a welcome companion. It’s yielded a few quotes that may find their way to the top of a chapter:
LP Hartley in The Go-Between:
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun:
The past is never dead; it’s not even past.
Francis Spufford in The Child That Books Built:
Usually Americans focus on the future, and kick yesterday impatiently out of tomorrow’s path. On the prairie, on the other hand, people shrewdly suspected that the past had survival value, and they were, to boot, stubborn. You had to be stubborn to stay. You had to be stubborn to go on making the farmer’s bet against drought and deluge every year… You keep the past connected to the present, and to the future, by keeping your promises.
Meet Joseph Ducreux, diplomat-turned-meme-lord.
If you’ve spent time on the internet, you’ve seen his “Self-Portrait of the Artist in the Guise of a Mocker:”
But I bet you haven’t seen his other oddball gems:
“The Silence”
“Self-Portrait, Yawning”
and my fave, “The Surprise in Terror”
Wendell Berry, in Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition:
It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.
Berry, who’s 90 now, wrote this almost two and a half decades ago. He no longer needs to imagine this great division; we’re living it.
“I need a logo for my website!” WRONG.
On Choosing A College
Thursday, January 23, 2025
I was invited to be part of a panel about college choices at my alma mater. Not knowing how much time I’d have to share, I decided to write up my thoughts. I’ve got strong opinions about this. Why should you care what I think? I’ve plowed a lot of ground with my chin. Twenty one years ago, I was the valedictorian of my class, with an almost-perfect SAT score. I basically had my pick of schools.