A Shift of Attention
Friends, I love making this newsletter but I can’t manage it right now — I am hitting the pause button, possibly for a long while. However, I still will be...
The Eye Chart and the King Actor
Mal Evans’s diary What’s been going on at Ye Olde Blogge? More Babylon Should academics be rewarded for generativity? Wendell Berry one and two A bunch of...
Silence, Minuets, Gold
A pocket medicine chest, with the Rod of Asclepius on its cover; copied from an original found at Pompeii. I’m still blogging about Babylon, among other...
Physicists, Poets, and Other Stock Characters
I’ve just returned from a wonderfully restorative week at Laity Lodge, the kind sponsor of this newsletter and my home away from home. My tummy is full of...
I Am Inquisitive in the Lord
What a gorgeous edition of Christopher Smart’s weirdly wonderful poem Jubilate Agno. One of my first published essays — an excerpt from my dissertation — was...
The Way the Cards Are Dealt
The breeder from whom we bought Angus would like to have a portrait of him now that he’s a big boy. The above is what happened when I tried to take that...
Presidents, Aunties, and Hexagonal Rooms
WSJ: “After me, there won’t be any others,” says Roland Reisley, absorbing what it means to be the last original occupant in a Frank Lloyd Wright house....
Pray for Rain
This site identifies the photographer here as Ilaria Miani, but evidence is lacking. Great Cartier-Bressonesque shot, though, taken at Inle Lake in Myanmar....
Cities and Ruins
How Stephen Heller lost his heart at the Olivetti store I’ve finished (for now anyway) my blog-through of Augustine’s City of God, focusing on his treatment...
Art Out of Time
Early Computer Art in the 50’S & 60’S (Des)Ordres (1974), Vera Molnar Catfish and spaghetti: Depending on whom you ask, this combination is either as...
Tiger, Cathedral, Atlas
The art of Tony Sarg A brief preview of my forthcoming edition of Auden’s collection The Shield of Achilles. “I just bought the only physical encyclopedia...
En Passant
Clay mastiffs, found in the excavated ruins of a palace in Nineveh, were meant to protect the property from demons. They have cuneiform inscriptions on them,...
The Comfort of Friends
There have been many tributes to Tim Keller since his death last week; I could only add a few words. This from Russell Moore does much to capture the Tim I...
Tree and Leaf
Photographs of the American West by Wim Wenders John Muir, from “A Wind-Storm in the Forests” (1894): Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through...
Archbishop of Banterbury
Melissa Cormican’s animal portraits Kieran Healy, responding to the news that Great Britain will have a Free Speech Tsar: As an alternative to ‘Free Speech...
A Bell That Rings True
Photograph by Tony Cearns When the robot revolution comes, this lady will be in big trouble. I eagerly co-sign my buddy Austin Kleon’s desire to become a...
Begone About Your Business
Preston Singletary, Crest Hat (2021). Blown and sand-carved glass. 5½ x 21¾ x 21¾ inches. Photo by Russell Johnson. See a smart and sensitive essay on...
Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin was born in 1868 or thereabouts. Probably in Texarkana, probably on the Arkansas side. His father was a railway worker and for a while he was...
Sameness and Difference
Abraham, from Dream Big, Laugh Often: And More Great Advice from the Bible, by Hanoch Piven and Shira Hecht-Koller. Lately I’ve found a bit of a rhythm with...
Sedentary and Unsedentary Persons
Lectionarily speaking, it’s a week late to be posting Sebastiano del Piombo’s The Raising of Lazarus. But here it is anyway. On the National Gallery website...