Alan Jacobs

The Quest Hero often encounters an old beggar or an animal who offers him advice: if, too proud to imagine that such an apparently inferior creature could have anything to tell him, he ignores the advice, it has fatal consequences; if he is humble enough to listen and obey, then, thanks to their help, he achieves his goal. But, however humble he may be, he still has the dream of becoming a hero; he may be humble enough to take advice from what seem to be his inferiors, but he is convinced that, potentially, he is a superior person, a prince-to- be. Bertie Wooster, on the other hand, not only knows that he is a person of no account, but also never expects to become anything else; till his dying day he will remain, he knows, a footler who requires a nanny; yet, at the same time, he is totally without envy of others who are or may become of some account. He has, in fact, that rarest of virtues, humility, and so he is blessed: it is he and no other who has for his servant the godlike Jeeves.

Perfectly happy now, he looked at his estate. An exile making watches glanced up as he passed And went on working; where a hospital was rising fast, A joiner touched his cap; an agent came to tell Some of the trees he’d planted were progressing well. The white alps glittered. It was summer. He was very great.

Far off in Paris where his enemies Whispered that he was wicked, in an upright chair A blind old woman longed for death and letters. He would write, “Nothing is better than life.” But was it? Yes, the fight Against the false and the unfair Was always worth it. So was gardening. Civilize.

Cajoling, scolding, screaming, cleverest of them all, He’d led the other children in a holy war Against the infamous grown-ups; and, like a child, been sly And humble, when there was occasion for The two-faced answer or the plain protective lie, But, patient like a peasant, waited for their fall.

And never doubted, like D’Alembert, he would win: Only Pascal was a great enemy, the rest Were rats already poisoned; there was much, though, to be done, And only himself to count upon. Dear Diderot was dull but did his best; Rousseau, he’d always known, would blubber and give in.

Yet, like a sentinel, he could not sleep. The night was full of wrong, Earthquakes and executions. Soon he would be dead, And still all over Europe stood the horrible nurses Itching to boil their children. Only his verses Perhaps could stop them: He must go on working. Overhead, The uncomplaining stars composed their lucid song.

Sprave is so into slingshots that in 2009 he created the Slingshot Channel on YouTube. He now spends his weekends building new wrist-rocket contraptions and demoing them online. His most popular, with 1.4 million views, is a 7.5-foot-long slingshot crossbow that blasts a full-size machete. He also features “impact videos” like “Slingshot vs. Coconut,” which demonstrate the incredible force his creations generate. Spoiler alert: The coconut does not win.

Steig’s drawings seem to flow effortlessly from his mind to his pen and onto the paper. I doubt he ever looked at a blank sheet and thought, “I have nothing worthwhile to say today,” or “I can’t draw a car as well as Joe Shmoe, so why don’t I crawl back into bed and wait for the day to be over.” Steig gave himself permission to be playful and experimental. One of the many wonderful things about looking at his drawings is their message, especially to his fellow artists: Draw what you love and what interests you. Draw it how you want to draw it. When we are children we do this instinctively. But somewhere in our passage from childhood to adulthood, the ability to be truly and fearlessly creative is often lost. To quote Pablo Picasso, Steig’s favorite artist, “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” — Roz Chast on the great William Steig

I’m told that the cliché du jour in financial markets involves reference to ‘uncharted territory’. It’s things like the GDP figures which are responsible for that. We’re deep in the land of Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns. (Why, incidentally, was he so widely mocked for talking about the difference between known and unknown unknowns? It seems to me an immensely useful distinction, not least as a way of describing the difference between what economists call risk, which markets can measure and therefore like, and uncertainty, which they can’t and therefore hate.)

Another example that is quite astonishing, one that will be recognized by future historians as an extraordinary phenomenon in the 21st century, is that the aging populations are buying into their own impoverishment. There’s this strange way in which people who are older tend to be conservative, and what conservative means now is no government: “Don’t you dare support my dialysis, don’t you dare support my nursing home expenses! That reduces my liberty! I need my freedom and my options.”

But if you look at how this transformation has come about, where the elderly are, for the most part, advocating their own impoverishment and misery, you find the same thing, this prevalence of social media, new media. You tend to find “conservative,” nutty politics using social media better than mainstream sensible stuff. And that’s true both on the left and the right, but it’s the right that’s taken off with it, and that’s striking to me. Of course, that story is still unfolding, so we don’t know how it will turn out, but it’s absolutely remarkable.

To me, a lot of the culture of youth seems to be using the Internet as a form of denialism about their reduced prospects. They’re like, “Well, sure we can’t get a job and we need to live with our parents, but we can tweet”, or something. “Let us tweet!”

This “rights” kind of stance, as opposed to a “wealth” kind of stance, it’s exactly the mirror image of what you see in Tea Party older America, of “we don’t want our healthcare paid for. What we want is the right to not have our healthcare paid for, and that’s more important to me.”

It’s very strange, this notion of impoverishment and lack of prospects, but this absoluteness of expression and speech. And in a way maybe that’s admirable, maybe there is something about that that’s very American, and very pure. I don’t know. But at any rate, it’s not sustainable, whatever it is. I don’t think it leads to a workable scenario, and I also think it just includes too much suffering and cruelty.

mwfrost:

I know very little about this extremely popular bold truth-teller Louis C. K. But I know enough about him to know that if there’s a nascent backlash, I want to get in on the ground floor.

I’m already there. I set the over/under for backlash at 18 months. Already Louie has said plenty of nasty, nasty things that are going to get him roasted somewhere down the line. Dude can be really funny, though.

mwfrost:

(via Wayne Coyne’s Oklahoma Compound - NYTimes.com)

Yeah, that’s about what I imagined the inside of Wayne Coyne’s house compound to look like. The outside has been visible to the internet public for a while, too.

Yep. Other musicians might have houses, but Wayne Coyne is definitely going to have a compound.

To grow up in the South is to be fed a steady diet of grits and ghost stories. Ask any household in Alabama, and they’ll tell you about a friend or family member with a rogue phantom that blows out candles or stomps around in the attic. Being haunted is a permanent condition below the Mason-Dixon, one that defines the region as much as the voracious kudzu and the iced tea so sugary that it hurts your teeth. William Faulkner, who was known to spin particularly scary fireside stories himself, described the Deep South in Absalom, Absalom! as “dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts.”

No one knew that better than Kathryn Tucker Windham, an Alabama folklorist who spent much of her life collecting and patiently preserving Southern superstitions, recipes, and, most of all, ghost stories. Before passing away this June at the age of ninety-three, Windham published four cookbooks, eight ghostly collections, and more than a dozen works of regional mythology, memoir, and fiction, most of them featuring her own household ghost, a Slimer-esque jester whom the Windhams affectionately named Jeffrey.

Windham’s voice was unforgettable. In high school, I would listen to All Things Considered every couple of weeks to hear her explain, in her rolling, sticky Southwest Alabama accent, the canoe-fighting of the Creek Indian War or the boll weevil statue in Enterprise, Alabama erected in honor of the pest that forced local farmers to diversify their crops. She hunted through cemeteries, traced old wives tales back to their sources, and described the grandeur of crumbling mansions, spared by the Union army only to rot from neglect. “I don’t care whether you believe in ghosts,” Windham was fond of repeating, “The good ghost stories do not require that you believe in ghosts.”

In contemporary life, many people claim to spend extreme lengths of time at the office, such assertions being a form of self-flattery. In her engaging 2010 book “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think,” Laura Vanderkam reports that white-collar Americans dramatically overestimate how much they work: “Research shows that almost no one claiming to work a 70-hour week actually is doing so.” Work, she muses, “has become a competitive sport,” in which people boast of long hours in the way that fishermen boast of larger fish than they actually caught. Vanderkam’s book brings home an important point: Stop making excuses based on time. If there’s something you need to accomplish, there are enough hours in the day – get organized and use your time wisely.