Maggie's Farm

Junior Wells and Buddy Guy with the great Sonny Boy Williamson song which should be, or is, the theme song of Maggie's Farm (after Dylan's Maggie's Farm, of course). "Don't start me talkin', I'll tell everything I know..."

Megan Cox Gurdon in the WSJ on A Wrinkle in Time. (h/t, The Corner) A quote:

Of course I wasn't the only reader to find Ms. L'Engle's work of science fantasy initially disconcerting. Famously, 26 publishers rebuffed the manuscript before the author found a benefactor in Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1962. Winning the Newbery a year later secured the book's place in the pantheon of children's literature, and since then innumerable schoolchildren have experienced the dazzling weirdness of a story that starts with quantum physics and ends with a child's love overcoming vast powers of evil.

"It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice," Ms. L'Engle said in her Newbery acceptance speech. "And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.

Coming back to the book 30 years later, it's striking how true the same process is for the reader. A child is inclined to take away very different lessons from a novel than is an adult. For one thing, "A Wrinkle in Time" is infused with Christian faith to such a degree that, were it newly published today, it would probably be relegated to the religious section of the bookstore.

A tip of the old camo cap to David Thompson, who found a site about New York's 1939 World's Fair. I know that my Gramps took my Mom and my uncle to see it all. Lots of images at the site. Here's a postcard of the Underwood Typewriter exhibit:

The Herald should run a weekly Friday or Saturday feature entitled something like "Bay State Life" or "Notes from a Cabinetmaker," written by this guy, along with the photos he finds.

It would sell newspapers. I guarantee it. You could get him for cheap, because he is an undiscovered jewel: tasteful, hip, wry, dry, but tender and sentimental at the same time.

Vienna State Opera, 1984

And tomorrow is Super Sunday. Here is Federer playing Roddick in the quarter-finals, from the US Open site. Roger does what I never remember to do: GLUE YOUR EYES TO THE DANG BALL! A miracle of tennis is that when you stare at the ball, the ball seems to slow down, and gives you time to move your lazy-ass feet.

Japanese Watermelons. They pack compactly.

Ted Dalrymple is becoming more interested in good than in evil as he ages, he says. A quote from his short essay in New English Review (h/t, reader):

...I have spent a great deal of my life among the utmost ugliness, both physical and moral. Moreover, I must confess that the problem of evil has preoccupied me.   

One of the reasons for this, perhaps, has been literary ambition. It is far easier to make evil interesting than good. Depictions of good people are inclined very soon to decline into mawkishness, and make their objects as dull as they are unbelievable. Too much good repels us; we long for the feet of clay to be revealed. As Oscar Wilde said, only a man with a heart of stone could read of the death of Little Nell without laughing.

 

A fascination with evil is pretty widespread. When, at social gatherings, I tell people what I once did for a living, namely that I was a doctor in a large prison, it isn’t usually very long before someone asks me, slightly shamefacedly, who the worst, most evil man I ever met was. They also want to know what he did in as much detail as possible, of course. No story is so horrifying that it ever bores people; and even the most demure cannot for long entirely resist the thrill of the barbarous.

It was interesting to see the various major linkers to that (surprisingly) controversial piece on Multiculturalism and Arabs we posted the other day because I had only been vaguely aware of one of the sites, and unaware of the others.

The most productive of blog visitors was reddit. That link- collector gets huge traffic, judging by the number of visit they sent over here: over 15 thousand. No comparison with what FARK can send, but powerful still.

We had thousands of visitors via linkswarm, another link-aggregator which seems to have a vast and loyal readership.

We also had thousands from a site which our pure and chaste selves had never seen - Ernie's House of Whoopass. Ernie provides general links plus hard-core p*rn links which make visiting Theo feel like going to church. This photo is the most modest image I could find at Ernie's place.

Also on the list is This Modern World, which posed an interesting, if sarcastic, contrast between the essay and the famous The America I Have Seen, by Sayyid Qutd (who I believe was the inspiration for Al Quaida and The Moslem Brotherhood).

Clicked, an MSNBC blog, was late to the party but provided a few thousand visitors. Will Femia links stuff he finds interesting. A good gig.

There have even been many hundreds of visitors via dirty.ru, a Russian blog (in Cyrillic). Cool.

We hope we have gleaned a few new Maggie's fans from this spike in visitors. I do know that we made a lot of folks angry.

A Love Letter to Southern Football, by ESPN's Wright Thompson - h/t, reader. It begins:

OXFORD, Miss. -- Two friends, both unhinged football fans, got married earlier this year. During the wedding reception, the bride's father somehow got the Ole Miss band to march into the room, a blaring chorus of starched uniforms and shining brass. The groom conducted. The crowd stomped and cheered. You'd have thought folks were celebrating a 12-play scoring drive, not holy matrimony.

Soon after the wedding, I watched video of this event. Immediately, I recognized the feeling deep down in my gut. It's something I've felt in so many cathedral-like stadiums. I closed my eyes, and the familiar notes sent me rushing months into the future, longing for a tailgate that escalates from simmer to burn, for the chill bumps that always come in the moments before kickoff, for the evening breezes rustling the white oaks when the game is done. My body sat in front of a computer screen. My mind was in a stadium. It was only April, and I longed for September.

I missed football season.