Check Your Pravilege
This is the 100th edition of Snakes & Ladders! Thanks so much to everyone who has come along for the ride, whether starting recently or from the beginning. I look forward to many more years of providing for you my unique brand of edification and entertainment. 😉
The photo above was taken at a place that many of you know is especially dear to me: Laity Lodge. Which means that I am absolutely delighted to announce that, along with our old friends at Comment, Laity Lodge and its parent institution the H. E. Butt Foundation will be sponsoring this newsletter for at least the next year. To have this little bagatelle of my associated with two organizations I admire so much, Comment and Laity Lodge, means a lot to me. And of course this convergence consolidates, in however small a way, the bonds between those two great North American nations, Canada and Texas. More on this collaboration in due course.
My friend Dan Cohen — scholar, librarian, and digital humanist extraordinaire — has a wonderful newsletter called Humane Ingenuity, and the most recent issue is a cracker.
“An evil, injurious, or worthless privilege or law” is called a pravilege.
A watercolor by Burton Silverman of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson. Silverman painted the iconic cover of Tull’s Aqualung — and still had made next to nothing from his work.
For the first time in several years, Bob Dylan has released a new episode of Theme Time Radio Hour — and it’s fantastic. Strange to say, it’s a bit of an infomercial for a new brand of whiskey Dylan has been involved in creating, and even stranger to say, that doesn’t matter. It’s a magnificent collection of songs about “various amber intoxicants.” Also, I love Dylan’s intro to the episode:
Hello, friends, and welcome back to Theme Time Radio Hour. I’m your host, Bob Dylan. To paraphrase Alexandre Dumas, in The Count of Monte Cristo*, “I’m so delighted to see you here. It makes me forget, for the moment, that all happiness is fleeting.”
My friend Richard Gibson did two nice things for me last week. First, he wrote this excellent post on the possibilities and perils of an “electronic agora.” Second, he reminded me of this lovely poem by Carol Ann Duffy, “Prayer”:
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
That radio is praying the timeless liturgy of the Shipping Forecast. You may learn about that great British tradition by visiting the website of the wonderful podcast 99% Invisible. You should read the story but also listen to the episode, which condludes with Roman Mars, he of the ultramellifluous voice, doing his own reading of the Forecast. I would suggest not listening to it when you need to stay awake.
You can still buy my new book, you know.
