This skeet amused and inspired me:

It reminded me of something I’d read by Ta Nehisi Coates, way back in 2011. It was about learning from people:

We don’t get to choose our teachers. If you’re going to be an artist, or a thinker, or even a full person, you better be able to make yourself into something more than the shadow of someone else’s bankrupt philosophies. You better be more than an obvious and predictable reaction.

(It took me a long time to find that exact quote. I finally remembered that I’d blogged it in my old Tumblr blog.)

Coates was reacting to a comment on an earlier post of his, about V.S. Naipaul’s misogyny. (The comments on that post have been swallowed by history, but I think it was by Professor Hilary Bok.) This part is a worthy ending to my post here:

I read my first Naipaul novel about six months after someone tried to rape me, and if I had known that the rape scene in that novel was part of the pattern mentioned above, I don’t know that I would have been able to get past it. But I’m really glad I was. I would have lost so much had I just thrown the book across the room and never looked at Naipaul again. And in saying this, I’m not being nice to him, or something; I’m being entirely selfish. He’s one of the writers I learned the most from, I think, and I would hate to have been deprived of that.