My family were strangely unreceptive when I told them what I want for my birthday. It’s a bargain!
The state of Alabama in 1832 (from the David Rumsey Map Collection). My home town of Birmingham did not yet exist, but the village of Elyton was the county seat of Jefferson County, and eventually that became a neighborhood of Birmingham. From fifth through seventh grade I attended Elyton Elementary School, which was closed long ago but still stands, abandoned.
I explained to my Buy Me a Coffee supporters why I ask them to buy me dragons.
One of the best tags on my big blog is drawing — though the formatting gets wonky when you get back to 2016 or so, apologies for that. (Side-effects of an import from Tumblr that can only be fixed one post at a time. Sigh.)
I wrote about Thomas Flanagan’s Irish historical novels — which I love.
Re: David Brooks’s column on the good and bad sides of ambition, I once told David that I thought my work is insufficiently ambitious. “Well,” he said, “you did write a book called How to Think.”
The great director Howard Hawks told a story about a time when he invited two friends, who had never met, to go hunting with him: “Bill, this is Clark Gable; Clark, this is Bill Faulkner.” At one point during the trip Gable asked who the best living writers were. Faulkner named a few of the usual suspects and then added: “and myself.”
Gable: “Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?”
Faulkner: “Yes. And what do you do, Mr. Gable?”