Letters to Hannah: August 2015

Monday, August 31, 2015

A retraction concerning the Mexican work ethic

Dear Hannah,

St. Augustine used to publish a series of yearly retractions, and I think it would be wise for me to do the same. If anyone's going to be a man of learning, he must also be a man of unlearning. Or to put it another way, if he's going to learn better ways to think of things, that means he has to get rid of the worse. And if he's got any humility at all, he has to admit it when he was wrong.

Want to know more about J?

Read the rest of the essays. This paragraph will not suffice. Too many beautiful things that can't be put into words, or at least so his mom would tell you. He's a college dropout, but a lover of learning. A self-taught, working-class, bare-knuckle boxer of an intellectual. Not a self-appointed sage in real life, but more like a clown -- and thus probably more useful, since self-appointed sages are the worst.

He's a work always in progress. A man of many moods. A hater of mob-think and trendy causes. A world-class mocker of moralistic horn-tooters. He was named after Jeremiah the Prophet and carries on the tradition successfully. Almost nobody listens to either of them. J believes in being a full man, brawn and bookshelf, and his essays, being confined to no small series of subjects, reflect not an issue or a cause, but the fullness of life itself. He has, despite being in his mid-30's, a magnificent head of hair, on top a magnificently thick skull, on top a sometimes magnificent brain. His ego is a giant joke to him, puffed up to be taken down for fun. He admires Thanos and Gaston, and is deeply bored by Pope Francis and Martin Luther King Jr.

Letters to Hannah

Monday, August 31, 2015

A retraction concerning the Mexican work ethic

Friday, August 21, 2015

A home for Black Lives Matter activists