Notebooks, A Monk, and the Death of a Poet
A notebook of Leonardo da Vinci, at the British Library’s Writing: Making Your Mark exhibition. Would love to see that, but I don’t think I’ll be in London at all this year.
Alas, alas for the death of the great Les Murray. Here’s an essay I wrote about him a few years ago.
I asked for some thoughts about a course I’ll be teaching in the fall; and here’s a sneak peak of one I’ll be teaching in 2020. I also wrote a brief post as a contribution to my ongoing war against the cheap and easy categorizing of people by generation.
Here’s a lovely reflection on Bach’s B-minor Mass by my friend Wesley Hill. If I could rescue only one work of classical music for posterity, the B-minor Mass would be it.
It’s been raining a good deal here in central Texas recently, and whenever the rain comes and the birds disappear from our bird feeders I have the same thought, one which is memorialized in one of my favorite xkcd comics.
In the fall of 1980, during my first semester in graduate school at the University of Virginia, I wandered through Alderman Library until I found the Rare Book Room. I entered and listened to a talk by an elderly monk named Jean LeClerq. I have a peculiarly strong memory of that hour: the dim light, the old old books surrounding us, and Dom Jean sitting with his legs crossed, speaking quietly and smilingly of the love of learning and the desire for God. As soon as we were done I ran over to Heartwood Books, where I found and bought a copy of his book. I read it with great eagerness over the next few days, to the detriment of my assigned work. Good thing I was already married, or I might have signed up for the monastic life then and there.
STATUS BOARD
- Work: Final exams about to come in....
- Music: The Melodians, “Rivers of Babylon” — and everything else the Melodians recorded.
- Reading: Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. A very good book.
- Food: I’m trying to eat healthily. Yuck.
- Drink: The Hefeweizen from Live Oak Brewing. A superb example of the genre.
