The Perfect Sunday Dinner: A 🧵

It’s Sunday, so if they’re lucky,  many Southern tables will still be adorned with plates of fried yard-bird piled high, glistening with oil like a freshly christened baby. And like that baby, it will fetch a lot of oohs and ahhs This is as it should be. Good fried chicken is a cause for rejoicing. A thin crust that crunches between your teeth while the juices run down your chin even as Aaron’s beard. Behold how good and how pleasant it is!

“I want to read Faulkner (or give it another shot). Where should I start?”

I get this question regularly. Many were forced to read Faulkner in HS or college and didn’t have a good experience. This is likely due to starting at the wrong place.

So here’s where you should begin- If you enjoy short stories, or just want to ease into that mysterious Mississippi mind, I recommend “Barn Burning.”

Conservatives seem most gifted at lamentation. Bewailing the loss of goodness and beauty, while quietly ceding any and every institution.

This is because they failed to truly conserve the foundation on which those institutions rest—the hearts and souls of their progeny. 1/8 If “conservatism” is an attempt to freeze history it’s always a fool’s errand. If it is merely the repristination of artifacts from a bygone era they hope will withstand the sands of time, it is equally untenable.

This is because the Past is a place to learn, not to live. 2/8

I can honestly say it’s not a “bit,” I’m not playing to a brand, nor am I in any way being disingenuous when I say that I don’t know single one of these bands.

I have virtually no knowledge of popular music born this century. And I’m ok with that. 1/ 10

https://twitter.com/soilsympathy/status/1753263544710402521

At some point I became a musical Luddite. People started playing computers instead of instruments and I lost interest.

Folks started talking instead of singing so I turned my radio off.

If I’m exposed to anything new it’s because a friend insists. I usually regret it. 2/10

When Powell matriculated at Trinity College, he began as serious young man earnest about his studies. When others were at parties, classmates found him mitten clad and draped with an overcoat surrounded by 18th century folios in his freezing rooms. There was no fire. “It was not an economic matter” he told them, “the fire makes me sleepy and I can get more work done and for longer without it.” He had no real friends at Cambridge. He was a virtual recluse. From 5:30 in the morning until 9:30 at night, he would lock himself in his rooms except for classes. Reflecting on this later in life, he said that this wasn’t because he disliked his peers, but simply because he had never learned to do anything other than work. He lacked the social mechanics for frivolity and play.

I often quietly amuse myself by making lists of church names.

The white Baptists make it difficult because they don’t start naming churches until they are at least 2 or 3 congregations deep. Until then it’s 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Baptist. Then come the splits from those 3 invariably named Unity, Fellowship, and Harmony.

In contradistinction, the Methodists don’t split—they molt. Their new nests are all Chapels (Asbury, Wesley, or the last name of the rooster who initiated the new plant).

Reading the biography of Enoch Powell and struck by how intuitively conservative he was even as a boy.

At the age of 6, his parents took him on a tour of Caernarvon Castle. Entering one room, he removed his hat. When his father asked him why, he said, “This is the room in which the first Prince of Wales was born.”
His belief in the inherent goodness of institutions, hierarchy, and rank may not have been hereditary—his father was a Lloyd George liberal, but Powell himself said that his beliefs were “congenital.”

Do Christians and Jews Worship the Same God?

A while back, a friend of mine did what I, and those who are not ashamed to be called my brethren, often do—he “went and got hisself in a spot of bother,” as they say. 1/ Having consulted no Blue Checks™ and taking no thought for the morrow, he bounded into the Twitterverse and expressed an unpopular opinion concerning God and people. I admit that this was rather careless behavior.

*10 Thoughts on Liturgy”

1.) Make sure that your desire to move in a more liturgical direction doesn’t simply spring from an inordinate desire to play dress up. In that case you’re probably just a dandy. 2.) Just because liturgy sounds like lethargy doesn’t mean that it should look like it too.

I reckon I buy more socks than any man in Arkansas. I have to purchase a pack or two every other month because my dog Peanut is addicted to them. Between the dryer and the pooch, I can’t seem to keep a pair. The last dog I owned had a fondness for wall plaster and table legs, so I can testify that a mutt on a diet of Golden Toes is preferable to one who prefers the taste of hardwood. It isn’t clear to me why he finds my socks alluring.

We buried my cousin Jimmy today. He was 82. He was the stereotypical southern farmer; a big, lumbering man whose wardrobe consisted almost entirely of plaid and denim overalls. I have fond memories of sitting on his lap as a boy as we rode around in his combine. I never heard him cuss, but when he got mad he’d yell “cat hair” and spit. And the places where he spat never yielded vegetation again.

When he was voted “Arkansas Farmer of the Year” in 2014 he simply said, “Ain’t hard. Just gotta break your back a few dozen times a day.”

Now for a bit of Southern Haiku! These ain't exactly good poetry, but they are good fun.

Ham bone stripped naked,
Collards spun in the washer;
Southern Spring cleaning.

https://twitter.com/NoJesuitTricks/status/1670060899674083329

There’ll be hell to pay,
Somebody done ate the biscuits;
Unleavened potluck.

Many know Marty Stuart the musician, but fewer know of Marty Stuart the photographer, preservationist, iconographer of the music of the Southland. This thread is a sample of his labor of love.

The first photo is the last photo taken of Johnny Cash a few days before his death. J.R. Cash, Snorkle the Pig, and Theodore the Turkey on the Farm, 1982

I wrote this simple catechism a couple years ago as a guide for understanding the major denominations. The Lord has blessed it, and I’m sure you’ll find it edifying and instructive.

One reason I rarely venture into the realm of American politics is because I am not in the habit of going places I do not belong, much less where I am not wanted. And I am as out of place among both Republicans and Democrats as a country ham at a synagogue. I see no value in hitching my wagon to an elephant with neither sense of direction nor recollection of where he came from. Neither do I envy the prospect of hooking myself to an ass that can’t plow in a straight line and tries to bite me at every turn.

Here’s a list of insults I found from back when people still thought about words rather than just hurled expletives with no sense of poetry.

1. "He had delusions of adequacy.” ~Walter Kerr

2. "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”~Winston Churchill 3. "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. ~Clarence Darrow

4. "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”~William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

Few things are more fun for readers and writers alike than a good metaphor (or simile). This is one reason I love reading P.G. Wodehouse. He was the master of the comic metaphor, the sultan of the silly simile.

Here are a few plucked from his writings at random: “Some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant—better left unstirred.”

“She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when’. ”

"He looked like a sheep with a secret sorrow."

“His face shone like the seat of a bus driver’s trousers.”

I saw Judge today at the feed store. He said he was there to find out what bears eat.

“Bears eat whatever you eat.” I says.

“Well I can’t afford to by extra frozen pizzas for a bear. Them things done got high as a cat’s back.” He says.

🧵

https://twitter.com/NoJesuitTricks/status/1494870300609191936

“Well, what I mean is that they will just eat people food if you leave scraps out. But why are you trying to feed a bear?”

“They are giving away 25 bears to hunt this year.”

“I’ve heard that.”

Yesterday, feeling a bit nostalgic, I decided to go for a drive out in the country. I want to visit some of the places I had known and loved as a boy. The word “nostalgia” as we know it was first used by Homer to capture the feeling Odysseus felt as he desired to return to Troy, that bittersweet pain of longing for home. And despite what Wolfe said, I believe that through the power of story and memory, we can go home again.

Myth: It’s too expensive to eat healthy.

This is only true if one constantly eats out and refuses to prepare food at home.

Stop eating fast food. Buy cheaper proteins. Quit loading up on processed foods. Get a couple chickens. Cook.

You’ll be surprised how much you save. Chicken thighs are pretty cheap actually. Dark meat is much more flavorful than white meat.

And if you go fishing from time to time, you’ll really be ahead of the game.

Weddings and funerals are two events that seem impervious to meticulous planning. They almost never go off without a hitch, and yet the end result still obtains. Usually.

This morning I woke up thinking about the time I almost got lynched at the Pleasant Acres Funeral Home. 🧵 Caleb was a young man in our congregation who’d had a pretty rough life. His daddy ran off when he was just a tyke and his mother was hooked on painkillers.