It’s Tuesday, and perhaps your Monday was terrible. Maybe it was your fault … again. You were rude, ate too much, drank with abandon. What should you do? I don’t know, though reading the Bible and Anna Karenina might help. So does apologizing to others if that’s what you need to do. How about reading a self-help book or an advice column? Determining in your heart to do better today? That depends. As Caitrin Keiper shows in an entertaining review of Jessica Weisberg’s Asking for a Friend—a history of the advice column in America—we can’t avoid asking for advice. It’s part of who we are, and in a society where the old sources of authority—the Church, family—have been in decline for years, new sources appear. At the same time, if you think you can perfect yourself by following gurus, God have mercy on your soul. From Sarah Ditum’s review of Marianne Power’s The Year of Living Mindfully: “At a conference/rally/high-pressure sales event starring motivational speaker Tony Robbins, Power (who is most delightful when she zeroes in on bathos) finds herself doing the ‘mashed potato’ with a Norwegian accountant as collective hysteria takes hold. But she also, she records, finds herself convinced by some of the manuals. She wants to believe that following them will lead her to ‘Perfect Me’. Instead, they lead to breakdown.”
Speaking of failure, you probably knew that William Faulkner was a terrible postmaster. If not: “In 1921, 24-year-old William Faulkner had dropped out of the University of Mississippi (for the second time) and was living in Greenwich Village, working in a bookstore—but he was getting restless. Eventually, his mentor, Phil Stone, an Oxford attorney, arranged for him to be appointed postmaster at the school he had only recently left. He was paid a salary of $1,700 in 1922 and $1,800 in the following years, but it’s unclear how he came by that raise, because by all accounts he was uniquely terrible at his job. ‘I forced Bill to take the job over his own declination and refusal,’ Stone said later, according to David Minter’s biography. “He made the damndest postmaster the world has ever seen.’”
