Seth Godin is a teacher and bestselling author who blogs on marketing, tribes and respect. Unlike those you’ll find here on More to Come, Godin’s posts are short. Very short. And to the point.
Our job as professionals is to show up and do the work. Not simply respond to incoming or do the chores, but to create and innovate.
And yet, some days feel more conducive than others. There are moments when it simply flows.
When the surf’s up, cancel everything else. Don’t waste it.
Postpone the dentist, outsource the grocery shopping and leave your email for now.
Make hay.
Indeed!
More to come…
DJB
NOTE: Because the sun is shining this month (you’ll see more in the coming days) I’m going to make some hay while I set aside the Saturday Soundtrack posts during July. That feature will return in August.
Photo of hay bales in Romania in July 2006 from a National Trust Tour of the Black Sea (credit: DJB)
The Chief Justice is clearly worried about the Supreme Court’s legacy.
In last week’s majority 6-3 opinion that declared the administration’s student loan forgiveness program unconstitutional, Chief Justice John Roberts urged those who disagreed with the decision not to disparage the Court because “such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country.”
I’m afraid that horse is already out of the barn.
As multiple observers noted, Roberts and his five conservative colleagues decided in two recent cases that fake plaintiffs are good plaintiffs, substituting their beliefs for the law. That blame lies with the Court. Respected political scientist Norman Ornstein made it clear that the conservatives “have unilaterally blown up the legitimacy of the Court.”
America can accept this Supreme Court as legitimate and its rulings as the final word — or it can have true democracy and a functioning state. But not both.
Today’s extremist Supreme Court is no surprise. It is a decades-long project of corrupt sponsors that is right on schedule.
Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America (2020) by Adam Cohen is a devastating and damning argument against today’s Supreme Court and the Republican party’s fifty-year plan to circumvent the Constitution, overturn the gains of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras, and cement inequality into American law and life. Cohen surveys Supreme Court rulings on a variety of topics from poverty, education, and campaign finance to labor, corporations, criminal justice, and democracy itself to expose how little the Court does to protect the rights of the poor and disadvantaged. In fact, since the Nixon era “the Court has, with striking regularity, sided with the rich and powerful against the poor and weak, in virtually every area of the law.”
Cohen shows how President Johnson and the liberal lions of the Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren — a group that was an outlier in the nation’s long history — made a number of tactical mistakes concerning retirement and appointments. That allowed a go-for-the jugular Richard Nixon — with support of complicit Republicans * — to ruthlessly push a justice with lifetime tenure out the door and make four strongly conservative appointments to the high court. He was stopped only when forced to resign in disgrace. Similarly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republicans built the current 6-3 constellation as the result “of several questionable – to use a wonderfully euphemistic term — actions” to quote Zimmer again, so that the corrupt, twice impeached, twice indicted Donald Trump could make three appointments that have sealed the Court’s supermajority before he was voted out of office and his coup attempt failed.
Cohen carefully reviews the decisions that case-by-case have undermined America’s rule of law, handing control over to an extremist minority. Even conservatives like Reagan administration Solicitor General Charles Fried are appalled.
[I]t has undermined or overturned precedents that embodied long-standing and difficult compromise settlements of sharply opposed interests and principals. These decisions are not the work of a conservative Court.
The Court’s tilt towards extremism only got worse since the book’s publication. A group of decisions this June made a mockery of settled law, precedent, standing, and the balance-of-power to hand extreme ideologues wins in striking down affirmative action, limiting the rights of LGBTQ+ citizens, allowing minority lawmakers to choose their voters, and curtailing the powers of Congress and the president while introducing power for the Court that is not in the Constitution.
In the Colorado case where the decision discriminates against LGBTQ+ individuals, reporting came out just before the ruling which indicates that the facts of the case were not — how shall we say this — facts. The gay man named Stewart who the plaintiff said contacted her business about a website for a gay marriage turned out to be happily married to a woman for 15 years, had never contacted the website designer, and had no idea he was named by the plaintiff in the suit. Esteemed constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe suggested what should have happened next.
Coupled with last year’s decisions to take away rights from women in the Dobbs decision, put a stranglehold on states’ and cities’ efforts to keep guns off the streets, and further tighten religion’s grip on civil society — not to mention Pro Publica’srecently reported corruption of sitting justices by rich benefactors with business before the Court — we see a stunning set of moves that may finally wake Americans to the devastating harm perpetrated by Roberts and his two most recent predecessors, Warren Burger and William Rehnquist, along with their conservative colleagues.
What happened at the court [long-time Court watcher Linda Greenhouse reiterated] was a power grab of a different sort, driving the law far to the right in service of an agenda that most Americans don’t share.
Cohen reported that a mean-spiritedness towards the poor began to appear with the rulings of the Nixon judges. Legal commentators have noted that same callow spirit now permeates the Roberts Court. It goes hand-in-hand with the arrogant and blatant corruption by justices that refuse to allow any ethics rules to grace their hallowed halls, making them a target-rich environment for the nation’s editorial cartoonists.
The three liberal justices on the current Court — all women — are following the path of Justice Thurgood Marshall in writing stinging dissents that point out this head-in-the-sand perspective.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent to the Colorado LGBTQ+ case that the First Amendment right to free speech has never before been used to issue a license to discriminate.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson turned back a personal attack from Clarence Thomas by writing that “Justice Thomas’s prolonged attack…responds to a dissent I did not write in order to assail an admissions program that is not the one UNC has crafted.” Then she put the whole mess in clear terms that everyone can understand.
With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.
Justice Elena Kagan may have put it most succinctly in her dissent to Biden.
“…the Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.”
The entire enterprise under the leadership of John Roberts is violating major parts of the Constitution.
America just celebrated its independence as a nation where “all men are created equal.” Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that “just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle, as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.”
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Keeping a democracy is a constant fight. We have to fight and vote again and again like our lives depend upon it. Because they do.
More to come…
DJB
UPDATE: Not to pile on (well, yes, I am piling on) two more respected observers have written about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, and I wanted to capture their thoughts for future readers. First, respected fighter for democracy Marc Elias wrote for Democracy Docket that John Robert’s Last Word is Not the Final Say in which he points out that Robert’s has been known to disparage his colleagues in dissents when it suits his purpose. And Rebecca Solnit, writing for The Guardian has a call to arms entitled The US supreme court has dismantled our rights but we still believe in them. Now we must fight which — like most Solnit work — is a must-read.
*FBI Director Hoover wiretapped Justice William O. Douglas‘s telephone while House Minority Leader Gerald Ford tried to start impeachment proceedings against Douglas. Ford’s home-state paper said it would take his claims more seriously if it “had greater faith in his objectivity.”
The Weekly Reader links to written works I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.
Earlier today we celebrated the diversity, inclusion, and just plain weirdness of the 2023 Takoma Park July 4th parade. We were there because, as historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us, it was on July 4th, 1776, that . . .
[T]he Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous slavery by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.
America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.
Residents of small-town Takoma Park in the DC Metro area await the start of one of the best July 4th parades in the region.
One of the great present-day defenders of that founding principle, the courageous and highly effective Jamie Raskin, served as the Grand Marshal for his hometown parade. Sporting one of his stylish Stevie Van Zandt bandanas as he continues his recovery from treatment for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, Raskin could not be bound by the car provided for his use, once again walking the route and working the crowd like the pro he is.
Grand Marshal, Congressman Jamie Raskin (right front) sporting his great-looking bandana from musician Stevie Van Zandt
Along with seeing Congressman Raskin, we got to hear musicians of all stripes salute America with Caribbean pan drumming, old 60s rockers, patriotic hymns, and tunes from Scottish bagpipes.
The panquility steel drum band is always one of my parade favorites
The band on the aptly named Party Barge
Bringing our Scottish heritage to Takoma Park
It was the Mark H. Taiko School — bringing a Japanese musical tradition to Maryland — that won first prize in the parade’s performing arts category.
This year’s parade featured dancers, strange automobiles, beauty queens, other types of queens, the always-popular Revelers, and . . . the local chapter of midwives!
A Reveler joins the fun
Call the midwives!
But it was the Happy Campers who took away one of the top two Wacky Tacky Takoma Awards.
The City of Takoma Park is always eager to salute and thank their public works department and workers. Once again, the guy driving the mower had waaaay too much fun making circles along the parade route.
When you put it all together — even the inclusion of the supporters of the anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist, and all-round nut RFK, Jr. because in this parade they give just about everyone a platform — this is the messiness that is democracy. And it is wonderful and worth fighting for.
The Democracy Summer Fellows
A member of the Takoma Horticulture Club — winners of the “Parade Theme” award — show why they won with this timely message
The day before we celebrate America’s independence is a useful time to remember that as a country we have many birthdays. Imani Perry notes that even though we broke away from Great Britain, teachers and historians in the U.S. have inherited a British inclination to tell history in a linear, forward sequence. But that won’t work, she notes, for the story of the nation.
There are so many birth dates: 1492, 1520, 1619, 1776, 1804, 1865, 1954, 1964, 1965. After centuries, we are children of the colonized, colonizers, enslaved, marginal, poor, wealthy, exploitative, White, Black, shades of brown, citizens, and fugitives running from the law. People with jobs but no papers, people with papers but no door or mattress.
It is impossible to tell our story in a linear fashion.
As I prepare to leave for a trip to Alaska — a part of our country that could add a birth date to that list that is more than 11,000 years old — I wanted to make sure I was hearing Indigenous perspectives among those voices telling our history.
The Alaska Native Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2009) edited by Maria Sháa Tláa Williams is a good place to seek understanding of the Indigenous perspective in our 49th state. Home to more than 200 federally recognized tribes, the voices and history of these Native Alaskans are nonetheless often overlooked or silenced. Too often Alaska’s history is told through the stories of “Russian fur hunters and American gold miners, of salmon canneries and oil pipelines.” However, Native Alaskans have been here much longer and have stories, histories, landscapes, ways-of-living, and cultural perspectives worth knowing and preserving.
As seen at the National Historic Landmark Dry Creek, the claim of the Indigenous peoples in Alaska is much older than Russians or European Americans. When archaeologists first discovered the Dry Creek site in the early 1970s, its 11,000-year-old archaeological artifacts were the first pieces of evidence to confirm that people migrated across the Bering Land Bridge and hunted Pleistocene megafauna in Alaska.
Bering Land Bridge (Credit: National Park Service)
The site validates a long-standing cultural connection between Asia and Alaska, and informs us on the earliest trade, communication, and migrations between Alaska and the rest of the Americas. The Dry Creek site is significant to our understanding of the earliest Americans and our ties to Asia.
Williams notes that she uses the term “perspective” purposefully in speaking of the voice she provides Indigenous peoples. “Perspective is how something is portrayed from a particular point of view; in this case, it is an indigenous point of view.” The perspectives she has included are often “counter” stories or histories that “relay new ideas and concepts that have not been included in most history books on Alaska.”
Early in the work, she deftly displays this use of perspective with two stories about the Russian “discovery” of Alaska in the middle of the eighteenth century: one from the Russian perspective and the other from the point of view of the Native Alaskans who were being “discovered.” She also gives voice to the Dena’ina peoples, on whose land about 80 percent of the Alaskan population now reside. This alternative history of Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, points to how the long and continuing Dena’ina presence is often obscured. The Dena’ina historian Alberta Stephan wrote, “It is important to the Athabascan Indian people that their history of a well organized life style be known by everyone.”
Ted Mayac, Sr. has a short but telling piece on How It Feels to Have Your History Stolen as he writes about the oratorio King Island Christmas. Yup’ik writer Harold Napoleon shares a heartrending description of the long shadow of The Great Death — the 1900 flu outbreak. It was a time-marker for the Yup’ik people and it was caused by a disease from non-Natives.
Cultural worldviews in Indigenous communities evolve over thousands and thousands of years and time is important in that development. Williams includes a work by Professor Greg Cajete of the Santa Clara Pueblo about the relationship of the Alaskan Native societies and the stars, how they are linked to origin stories, and their placement in the larger cosmos.
And Cajete explains that the reading of the land, sky, and waters over thousands of years has helped Yup’ik hunters and their families survive in some of the harshest environments on earth. They do so through a deep observational understanding of the relationship between the movements of the sun in a directional circuit of time and the space of the Arctic tundra landscape and the night time movement of the Big Dipper through the year. They use this knowledge to know — even during a winter night — what “time” it is and the direction of the home base on an almost featureless landscape.
Alaska Natives use a relational understanding which combines sky knowledge with knowledge of weather, land, and ocean. This relational understanding is embedded in mythical as well as real stories handed down through the oral tradition. In this way, stories of celestial cycles formed the basis for real integration of traditional environmental knowledge with mythical and historical traditions of Alaska Natives.
As Williams notes, too often what we read about Indigenous peoples in Alaska comes from non-Native voices, “and although there are some impressive contributions in this arena, by definition they lack the ideas, voice, or perspective of the indigenous experience.”
The selections in this fascinating work “shed light on who Alaska Native people are, what their history has been, and the impacts of colonialism, in part by including a new cadre of indigenous leadership that has emerged in the twenty-first century.” Worldviews from the Indigenous perspective “provide new models for viewing knowledge and the indigenous perspective on math, science, astronomy, and the cosmos.”
We are all the richer for hearing these voices and seeking to understand their perspective.
When I walked to the front gate of Nationals Park earlier this month only to find that the game had been postponed due to the hazardous air conditions from Canadian wildfires, the impact of all the terrible things we’re doing to our planet once again became very real. Silver Spring’s own Rachel Carson, perhaps the finest nature writer of the twentieth century, told us that humans could not obtain complete mastery over nature but should approach great and elemental things with mindfulness and awe.
She made that point in The Sense of Wonder which grew out of summertime visits to the Maine coast with her young nephew. My review of this little gem of a book — Becoming receptive to what lies all around us— was the top reader choice on MORE TO COME… for this month.
June is also the anniversary of one of the most important dates in history. D-Day and the ongoing fight against government by the few and for the few— the other top reader choice — was a timely reminder that we once fought and defeated fascism on the beaches of Normandy. In a pamphlet distributed to troops during WWII, those men and women fighting against bigotry, racism, and hatred learned that “the fundamental principle of democracy — faith in the common sense of the common people — was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few.” That’s why the fascists fought so hard against democracy. It is why we have to fight so hard today against those who would overturn our rule of law and government by the people.
Let’s see what else made it to MTC this month.
BOOKS ARE EDUCATIONAL
Groucho Marx once said, “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” Sometimes when asked how I read at least five books each month, I’ll reply that I don’t watch much television. In addition to the Carson book noted above, I reviewed these works in June:
When fear and resentment take poweris my look at Timothy Egan’s newest work Fever in the Heartland about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Understanding the full scope of our past helps us combat those who are spewing hatred and banning books today.
Amy-Jill Levine is a self-described “unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue and a Yankee Jewish feminist who until 2021 taught New Testament in a Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt.” In Acknowledging the difficulties, I discuss her book The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings.
Family, myth, and identityis my look at Thinning Blood, the recent memoir of Leah Myers, a young Native American who makes a powerful push against the feeling of extinction in this fierce piece of personal history.
The latest crime novel in my year of reading dangerously is The Fourth Man by the Norwegian writer K.O. Dahl, which I review in The dark underworld of the soul.
I also returned to Rethink by Steven Poole this month, as it helped me consider The tyranny of binary choicethat we’ve succumbed to in recent years.
During June, I wrote about a rock ‘n roll legend, a Harvard-educated banjo innovator, a folk pianist, and a songstress and writer with pure country sensibilities. Go figure.
Stranger in a strange land led a couple of Leon Russell fans among my readers to self-identify. In his long career, Leon played with everyone ― a “preposterously impressive roll call.”
On Banjo with Alison Brownlooks at the latest by the best banjo player (and independent record label co-founder) to ever grace the halls of that Ivy League institution in Cambridge.
My appreciation for the late folk pianist who passed away on June 4th can be found at George Winston, R.I.P.
Hail to the Redswas my quick homage to the Cincinnati Reds, the team currently having the most fun in baseball. They promptly dropped two games to the Braves but did take a series from the Orioles.
The Browns celebrated Father’s Day late this year, but I recognized the holiday with Father’s Day, baseball, and dad jokes. Yes, I got a few groans from the family.
Continue to celebrate the good news!is this month’s reminder that things we want to go up (jobs) are rising while things we want to go down (inflation and murder rates) are falling. But since you won’t read about it in the New York Times someone has to fill the void.
Thanks, as always, for reading. As you travel life’s highways be open to love, undertake some mindful walking every day, recognize the incredible privilege that most of us have and think about how to put that privilege to use for good. Women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, immigrants, and others can feel especially vulnerable…because they are. Work hard for justice and democracy because the fight never ends.
Bash into some joy along the way.
And finally, try to be nice. Always be kind.
More to come…
DJB
You can follow More to Come by going to the small “Follow” box that is on the right hand column of the site (on the desktop version) or at the bottom right on your mobile device. It is great to hear from readers, and if you like them feel free to share these posts on your own social media platforms.
It seems we are creating a “thumbs up or thumbs down” world. Tribes, which often drive this type of thinking, give the illusion of helping us know our standing in the chaos of modern life. But when everything is presented as an either/or decision, we often look at our choices and feel hopeless.
In his Garden of Forking Paths newsletter, Brian Klaas wrote on this tyranny of binary choice in an essay entitled The Lost Art of the Ideal and the Cycle of Futility. Klaas suggests that our daily despair and feelings of hopelessness result, in part, from the loss of expansive, creative, pie-in-the-sky thinking. To make his point, Klaas asks a simple question.
When did you last consider what utopia looks like?
I have been thinking about utopia in recent months but through much of my life I was pragmatic. Too pragmatic, I suspect. What’s possible in a narrow sense is often the first — and perhaps only — question I’d ask in any given situation. While often appropriate it can also become a crutch.
Millions, I fear, have decided that simply navigating what is given to us is easier than considering the type of lives and society we want. We become afflicted by the curse of knowingness as we see the challenges involved with moving toward our ideals.
By giving in to simply knowing that things are difficult and perhaps impossible, we succumb, in Klaas’s words, to the self-fulfilling delusion of powerlessness.
It strikes me that one way out of the curse of knowingness is to embrace life’s mystery and become more comfortable with uncertainty. At the very least we can banish the thought that everything is either/or and up-or-down. What if, by assuming that we are not all-wise in the ways the world works, we first consider the kind of ideal outcome we want and then ask ourselves what is needed to move toward that goal, given the constraints we face?
On Sunday, June 11, an 8,500-gallon tanker truck on an off-ramp in Philadelphia flipped onto its side and crashed into a wall at a curve. The crash ignited the gasoline in the tank; the driver died and a stretch of I-95 over which an average of 160,000 vehicles a day travel collapsed.
Most immediately began to think about the hardships resulting from the months or years needed for the highway to be repaired.
Yet setting aside the world’s assessment of how difficult it would be, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro immediately announced what in this situation was an ideal outcome: that six lanes of road, three in each direction, would reopen less than two weeks after the crash.
Imagine being in the meeting where the talk is focused on theideal of reopening the road in two weeks. That pie-in-the-sky scenario then leads the engineers to come up with an unpredictable and perhaps unprecedented solution. All of a sudden, everyone comes together and says, “let’s do this!”
Crews working around the clock “constructed a temporary road resting on a bed of aggregate made of recycled glass bottles. The fix will stay in place until a full reconstruction is complete. The governor had a camera set up to livestream the construction and has turned it into a source of pride.”
And they continued with innovative solutions to ensure that they would beat the deadline.
To rebuild I-95 on time, we need 12 hours of dry weather to complete the paving and striping process,” Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro tweeted. “With rain in the forecast, we reached out [to Pocono Raceway] for help — and they’re bringing their jet dryer to Philly to help dry this section of I-95 and keep us on schedule.”
President Joe Biden’s administration played a key role in funding and coordinating the federal response. The President announced after the highway reopened, “We are proving that when we work together, there is nothing we cannot do.”
Klaas suggests that binary choice it is like “following Google Maps without thinking about where you want to go . . . We drive forward, but always toward a flawed destination that nobody really wants.” In thinking this through, I returned to a book I read when it was first published.
Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas (2016) by Steven Poole is an insightful work that tells the story of how many of our new and seemingly innovative ideas are actually based on old ideas that were mocked or ignored for decades if not centuries. Pie-in-the-sky stuff, in other words. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that “many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.” For instance, all those electric vehicles you see on the road these days are based on technology that came from the first electric car . . . which was built in 1837.
Poole writes there are many ways of thinking about ideas, but all depend on “maintaining the suspension of belief” — doing away with the “curse of knowingness.” This gives us time to look at an idea from other, potentially more fruitful angles.
Many innovative ideas come from rediscovering old ideas or reviving them in a different context. Want that road open in two weeks? Call on recycled glass that’s been around for decades along with jet dryers designed to keep racetracks safe and then use them in different ways.
Suspension of belief is living into a life of awe and wonder where we can move beyond the sense of powerlessness that comes from seeing everything as black-and-white. Nature and life are full of complexity and possibilities. Our world is not either/or. We live with many things at once.
We know in our bones that things are harder than they have to be. But let’s push back against the delusion of powerlessness and think expansively about the type of world we want instead of just bickering over the directions.
More to come…
DJB
The Weekly Reader links to written works I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.
My love for the short and to-the-point adage comes from my grandmother. Known to favor sayings such as “Don’t believe what you hear and only half of what you read,” Grandmother Brown had a big influence on my life as well as my love for words.
Late in 2019, a series of pithy proverbs — those bursts of truth in 20 words or so — debuted on the blog. After six months they came together in a post entitled More to Consider.* Four years later I’m still at it. Let’s look at I love the pithy proverb — Volume 8 to see what made it to the More to Consider segment over the past six months.
Living with the unpredictability of life
I’ve been focused a great deal this year on living with the limitations and unpredictability that come our way every day. Several of the pithy proverbs speak to this idea/ideal, beginning with one from poet John O’Donohue, followed by a second from poet Mary Oliver.
I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.
John O’Donohue
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Mary Oliver
Books are a gateway to wonder and awe
It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I latch onto pithy proverbs about books at every chance I get. I was delighted to read a quote from President Dwight Eisenhower delivered to the graduates at Dartmouth University in a commencement address in June 1953. In fact, over the past six months I’ve featured book-related quotes and proverbs from two U.S. presidents, one founding father … and Groucho. That would make quite a Mount Rushmore tableau!
Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.
Abraham Lincoln
The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read.
Benjamin Franklin
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
Groucho Marx
Kindness is so very important in life
My long-time partner in morning ritual
I’ve loved this saying by the writer Robyn Ryle the very first moment I saw it.
What more do you need to know about a person than how they treat their dog when they believe no one else is watching?
Robyn Ryle
And this quote has become something of a mantra for me in my third stage of life.
Try to be nice, always be kind.
Dr. Who (written by Steven Moffat)
Thinking about what matters
Section from a wall of inspirational quotes at the Black History Museum & Cultural Center in Richmond (photo by DJB)
Our goal in life is not to become more spiritual, but to become human.
Richard Rohr
I wrote a full essay on More to Come around this simple quote:
Sin is simply the failure to bother to love.
James F. Keenan, S.J.
Sometimes our spiritual goals are skewed, as Father Richard Rohr suggests.
We prefer heavenly transactions to our own transformation.
Richard Rohr
By our love, the divine may be reached and held; by our thinking, never.
Your rights end at the end of your nose; that’s where somebody else’s nose begins.
Anonymous
Those who say one thing and do another are at least acknowledging that right and wrong exist, as noted in the following:
Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Viktor Frankl
This one goes well with Grandmother’s saying at the top of this post:
Don’t believe everything you think.
Scott McGill, Ecotone Ine.
I’ll leave you with my personal pithy proverb, which is life rule #1:
Be grateful. Be thankful. Be compassionate. Every day.
When Joe Posnanski’s “bonus” Substack essay hit my in-box this morning, I could have guessed the subject without even reading the headline. Joe (“writer of sports and other nonsense”) has been telegraphing this one for a few days.
The first two sentences capture my feelings perfectly.
I am so in on the Cincinnati Reds right now that I can barely function as a human being. It’s truly unhinged.
Candice will attest to this fact. I’ve made her watch Elly De La Cruz highlight videos. I’m considering getting one of those cool Elly t-shirts from the Reds. (Tell me which one you like best!) I’m so excited that Candice and I are going to see Elly, Joey Votto, and the Reds on July 5th when they come to Nats Park (that was a fortunate pre-season choice in games). And if I can’t wait, I may make the drive to Camden Yards for the Reds’ three-game set with a real major league team that begins on Monday. And there’s a very good chance I’m going to Cincinnati in September to see the Reds and check off another MLB ballpark from my bucket list.
I’ve only known two Cincinnati Reds fans in my life. My best friend growing up, Ben Jamison, had lived in Louisville prior to moving to Tennessee in the mid 1960s. All these years later, Ben still follows the Reds. And Robyn Ryle, a wonderful writer I follow on Substack, lives in nearby Madison, Indiana, and occasionally writes about the Reds. Robyn and I have had a couple of baseball-related chats in the comment section of various blogs.
But last evening I was watching baseball (two very forgettable nights for the Nats and the O’s) and I kept seeing that insane Braves-Reds score. Atlanta jumped out 5-0 in the top of the first. Then the Reds come back. The two teams go back-and-forth. By the time the late innings rolled around in Cincinnati I was tuned in to the MLB network and yelling at the screen. MLB had the Reds-Braves game side-by-side with a meaningless (to me) Yankees-Rangers game (of course), and the announcers wouldn’t shut up talking about the Yankees and Aaron Judge (who wasn’t even playing). All while the most exciting team in baseball was clubbing the ball all over the yard, racing around the bases, and having FUN!
You should go read all of Joe’s post (it is free), but here are a couple of money quotes. First this:
I am, for the most part, a sensible man. I don’t believe in UFOs, conspiracy theories or that there are magical clutch hitters, but I firmly believe that when Elly De La Cruz arrived in Cincinnati, everything changed … not unlike when that doofus Knights’ manager Pop Fisher finally decided to play Roy Hobbs*.
*Even if it took an actual outfielder death to make it happen.
Then this one:
With De La Cruz, there’s something even bigger happening, though. He’s such an energizing presence. When you’re around him, I believe, you can’t help but feel like anything, and everything is possible. It’s like this:
Yesterday the job of being a Cincinnati Red was good but kind of uninteresting, the crowds were slight and somewhat indifferent, the results were monotonous, win three in a row, lose four in a row, win, lose, win, lose a couple, etc.
And today, the whole thing bursts into color like the post-tornado scene in “The Wizard of Oz” because Elly’s here, and you have NO IDEA what miracle that guy’s going to pull off. And suddenly, being a Red is like the best thing going.
What miracle did Elly and the Reds do last evening?
Then, on Friday night, big matchup against the titanic Atlanta Braves, sellout crowd at Great American Ball Park, and what do we get? Elly De La Cruz became the youngest player in more than a half-century to hit for the cycle, which included a double hit so hard (117-mph exit velocity) that it sounded like Lexington and Concord as it crashed into the wall.
And Joey Votto hit two majestic bombs, each high and deep and worthy of having its own theme song.
And the Reds won 11-10 for their 12th victory in a row.
Here is the wrap to Joe’s essay:
Why do we love baseball? Two weeks ago, the Reds meant nothing to me. Now they’re my everything. What a game this is.
Play ball, indeed! . . . with an emphasis on the play!
More to come…
DJB
*Washington-area readers may have thought I was going in another direction with that headline, but long-time readers know that 1) I despise the former name of the Washington Football Club and stopped using it well before the team finally changed names, 2) I really despise Dan Snyder (just approve the sale already NFL and get him out of our lives), and 3) I don’t really watch pro football anymore. I was going to make the title Hail to the Red Stockings but I thought that would also be confusing.
Singer and songwriter Brennen Leightells the story of growing up on the Minnesota—North Dakota border with two parents who raised her “on Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris, traditional tunes like Wreck of the Old 97, and weekend airings of Austin City Limits.”
It wasn’t even called “country music” in her house, she says. “It was just music. I didn’t understand probably till I was 10 that there was other music besides country.”
“My dad would entertain my brother and me by playing guitar and singing,” she recalls. “I didn’t have a chance. I was totally indoctrinated from a very young age.”
The Bluegrass Situation also notes the influence of home in Leigh’s music, as demonstrated in the tune Don’t You Know I’m From Here.
On Prairie Love Letter, her full-length paean to her homeland on the Minnesota-North Dakota border, Brennen Leigh demonstrates a visceral, evocative grounding — just as (Dolly) Parton constantly speaks of her Tennessee mountain home: with a glint in her eye, and a sorrow in her heart for knowing she had no choice but to leave it. Leigh stakes her claim on both the wide, expansive plains and Nashville all at once, asking her audience “Don’t you know I’m from here?” As if to remind she’s as at home in bluegrass and country — and Music City — as Dolly herself.
Leigh has also had a long love affair with Western Swing, “a multilayered genre rich with history, dating back to the 1920s. Elements of jazz, blues, polka, and rural country music make up a sound that has had many lives” and is best known for its founder — Bob Wills — and his chief acolyte, Asleep at the Wheel’s Ray Benson.
Leigh lived in Austin for 15 years before moving to Nashville. During that time in Texas she got to know Benson and they discussed the possibility of recording together. However, it wasn’t until 2021, after she was living in Nashville, that Leigh wrote the tunes and all the stars aligned for the album Obsessed With the West, a collaboration with Asleep at the Wheel. I love In Texas With a Band, which came off that album, as well as the odd little ditty If Tommy Duncan‘s Voice Was Booze (I’d stay drunk all the time), performed solo in the live version below.
Brennen Leigh has been singing and writing songs for a long time, often in recent years in collaboration with Noel McKay. Puttin’ Up A Front is classic country, while Only Other Person in the Room is a beautiful duet from their Before the World Was Made album.
Leigh’s classic country voice comes through in much of her music, but nowhere is it better than in her haunting Outside the Jurisdiction of Man from Prairie Love Letter.
Lying in the wagon bottom looking out over the side At that great wide open Western land Not another soul in sight for miles and miles around We’re outside the jurisdiction of man
So let my remaining time all pass On a blanket of swaying prairie grass And then won’t you bury me ‘neath the work of God’s own hand Outside the jurisdiction of man
Lovely, just lovely. As Marty Stuart likes to say, country has broad shoulders.
More to come…
DJB
UPDATE: Apologies for misspelling Brennen Leigh’s first name in a couple of instances in the original post. I’d blame it on the spellcheck, but that would be too easy and inaccurate as well.
Photo of Brennen Leigh courtesy of BrennenLeigh.net.
The femme fatale is a classic of literature and art, the “mysterious, beautiful, and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers, often leading them into compromising, deadly traps.” The character goes back to ancient times and is so familiar that a writer who calls upon the archetype employs her at their peril.
But when a modern, sexy, complex version shows up in a novel, it can result in an excellent path to exploring the dark underworld of the soul.
The Fourth Man (2005 with translation in 2007) by the Norwegian writer K.O. Dahl is a smart, dark, complex, and ultimately very satisfying crime novel which served as Dahl’s U.S. debut. We meet Detective Inspector Frank Frølich of the Oslo Police in the third sentence, as he is participating in a stakeout. An unexpected woman inadvertently enters the scene, endangering both the police raid and her own life. As bullets begin to fly, Frølich throws her to the ground and lays on top of her. The inspector and Elisabeth Faremo, the dark-haired beauty with mysterious eyes and a unique tattoo, meet by chance a few weeks later and their affair begins. It is only after Frølich is hopelessly in love that he learns that Faremo is the sister of a hardened and wanted member of a local crime gang. And his wary colleagues suspect that their original meeting was no accident.
Through a fast-paced, compelling, and very believable story, Dahl has Frølich explore the seamier sides of Norwegian life and his very conflicting emotions about Elisabeth. The inspector’s fortunes takes an unforgettable turn in the middle of the night when he’s awakened by a call to come and investigate the murder of a shipyard guard. He rolls over to find that Elisabeth is no longer beside him in bed. We are then introduced to stolen art, wealthy investors who are not all that their public personas suggest, another of Elisabeth’s lovers, icy Norwegian waterfalls that make excellent places to push unsuspecting victims to their deaths, and isolated ski chalets that can be torched to cover up other murders. Frølich has to seek the truth — and his true feelings for Elisabeth — while suspended from the police force. His gruff, firm, yet sympathetic colleague with his own challenges in love helps do the tough police work that gets us to the unexpected ending that is as complex, emotional, and smart as the rest of the book.
The Fourth Man — my sixth murder mystery this year — was another recommendation from the good booksellers at Brookline Booksmith. It was a satisfying discovery in this year of reading dangerously.
More to come…
DJB
To see reviews of the other books in my year of reading mystery novels, click here for January, February, March, April, and May.
The Weekly Reader links to written works I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.
MORE TO COME... 