Some people can tell you their favorites easily. They seek them out often. Their favorite shirts are the ones they wear all the time. Their favorite meals they eat several times a year, or if that’s too expensive, at least annually for a birthday. I’m the type who doesn’t wear his favorite shirt so that it will last longer. I wear lesser shirts that can wear out. A favorite I’ll don for special occasions. It’s not the same for meals. I would eat favorite foods often, but I like many different things. Sure, that cake you made for my birthday was delicious. You made it last year too, and it was great. Maybe this year we make a different delicious cake.
So, like the speaker in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 52, I don’t frequent my treasures often “for blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.”
“Blessèd are you whose worthiness gives scope,
Being had, to triumph, being lacked, to hope.”
What links do we have today?
Shelby Steele: Author Shelby Steele and filmmaker Eli Steele discuss their ideas on power, race, and America with City Journal. “We have wealth; now we want innocence—that’s where power lies at the moment. So much of our politics and culture really come out of this struggle with innocence,” the author states. By innocence, he means the moral justification for authority and the exercise of power.
Book towns: Richard George William Pitt Booth MBE (1938-2019) said libraries couldn’t keep up with today’s publishing industry, and thus “the future of the book is in book towns,” such as the one he inspired in Hay-on-Wye, Wales. Bloggers Sophie Pearce and Sophie Nadeau both visited and took photos for their travel sites.
Ugly Buildings: “There is nothing so obvious that it cannot be denied.”
Spam: “The nostalgic valances that stem from that salty, pink block of luncheon meat go way back for some of us, not least because it represents a very specific experience: what it was like growing up in America with immigrant parents.”
Poets: Irish poet Maurice Scully died last year, “a true original in the world of Irish poetry, quietly and patiently doing things his own way for several decades.”
Photo: Newman’s Drug Store in New York, 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.