I’m shutting down my BMAC page and I won’t be posting here, or anywhere else, for (probably) six months. Deo volente, I shall return!
Bible verse for my students: “I did not listen to the voice of my teachers or incline my ear to my instructors. I am at the brink of utter ruin in the assembled congregation.” (Proverbs 5:13-14)
Listening to Charles Mingus: Blues & Roots. One of the masterpieces of jazz. Sounds brand-new every time, though it’s almost as old as I am. 🎵
Everybody who tries to read a page like this — typical of legacy journalism online — hits the “Reader View” button, or saves to Instapaper or a similar service, because if you want to read the article there’s no alternative. (I only saw the above because I accidentally hit the Reader View button a second time.) So how does this kind of thing make sense? Eventually, surely, advertisers will figure out that they’re paying for ads no one will see, and then what?
I had often pressed on [my father] essays and novels of Berry's. Like Berry’s father, mine was a white-collar professional who farmed on the side and deeply loved his rural community. He was perhaps the last of the country doctors to make a home visit and receive a cherry pie as payment. Yet it was also my dad who first pointed me toward a darkness behind the agrarian romance. Once, while handing back to me the book in which appears “A Defense of the Family Farm,” wherein Berry recommends the Amish practice of using family and horses instead of machinery, my father tersely noted that this idyllic vision depends on children doing forced labor.
Yes, but so does sending children to school. (That’s a minor quibble. The essay is superb and superbly provocative.)
