Teach me to care and not to care.
A friend sent me a link to this essay by Freddie deBoer, which opens on the late Woodstock 99 documentary, but quickly turns into a brilliant assessment of the infantilization of adult taste over the last ten years.
If the title and the subject matter over the first six or seven paragraphs doesn’t hold you, I would nonetheless encourage you to press on, especially if you teach high school students.
There is nothing the modern man finds quite so pretentious as obedience. Obedience creates a real bond between the ruler and the ruled, the transcendent and the ephemeral, the obeyed and the obedient. This bond is simply not possible for the egalitarian, the radical individual, the self-made man, or the rebel. In the end, whoever submits most deeply to the grandest thing triumphs.
There are Christian parents that are dying for their children to get into schools like this one.
I am so picky about jazz, when I find a new jazz record that I like, I listen to it four or five times a week for months. Chet Baker With 50 Italian Strings is what I’m on now.
This is what that dude is up to today.
The thing is, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is far better if no one tries to explain it to you. You may as well try to explain why pain hurts. The same is true of A Farewell To Arms. If someone doesn’t understand A Farewell To Arms, they are simply too young to read it.
This just isn’t true of the Aeneid, though.
“A humble man trains himself to feel respect when he is shown conventional signs of respect, while an arrogant man is unwilling to train his feelings and instead demands others train their actions around his feelings. The idea that anyone is morally obligated to make others feel respected is just godless relativism dressed up in fake politeness.”
-from my latest for CiRCE
“A brother offended is not easily won,” and a brother easily offended is never won.
“Do what you gotta do/
and don’t misunderstand me”
A prudent man with a backbone will always be a wild card.
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.