July Check-In

July 1, 2021

Hello friends, and welcome to July’s Snakes & Ladders check-in! There will probably be another of these in August before resumption of regular service in...

Hiatus Hiatus

May 31, 2021

Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921) Hello friends! This is, as the title suggests, only a hiatus from my newsletter hiatus. A lot of work is being done under...

A Memory and a Miscellany

April 26, 2021

As I come to the end of a truly ... challenging academic year, I realize that I am a very tired man. So I’m going to put this newsletter on hiatus for May. I...

A Possibly Incoherent Edition

April 19, 2021

I got my second vaccination shot the other day, for which I am immensely grateful -- but wow have I been hammered by my body’s reaction to it. I wanted to...

A Fitness Trainer and an Improbable Goat

April 12, 2021

Louise Janin, A La Poursuite Des Illusions (1962) A couple of belated Holy Week treats, perhaps to be remembered for next year, but both are especially well-...

A Stone Rolled from the Mind

April 5, 2021

Last year I gave you Easter with Arcabas. So let’s do that again, shall we? Laurance Wieder, from After Adam, “Eighth”: And so, a toast: O God, the cup You...

Grief and Repair

March 29, 2021

That’s Bob Davey, who has just died at the age of 91. In 1992 his wife Gloria, who died in 2006, discovered an abandoned church in a deserted village,...

Qui, Quo, Qua

March 22, 2021

Haven’t you always wondered what Donald Duck’s nephews are called in the various European languages? Follow this link to get the equivalent data about Donald...

Country Walks, Home Again

March 15, 2021

Thanks to so many of you for your kind words in response to my last newsletter, about my dog Malcolm. With a couple of exceptions, I’ve not been able to...

Dogs

March 8, 2021

Today I just want to talk about dogs. Let me begin with two orienting statements. 1) Some people roll their eyes at the praise we dog-lovers tend to sing....

Cavaliere Wild Scull and Other Adventurers

March 1, 2021

Romare Bearden, Odysseus Leaves Circe, 1977, collage of various papers with foil, paint, and graphite on fiberboard. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which...

Pruning, Arranging, and How My Ash Looks

February 22, 2021

As many of you know, things have been tough here in Texas for the past week. At our house, we were without electricity (which in our case meant without heat...

Murmurations, Months, Masters

February 8, 2021

Søren Solkær’s photos of murmurations A couple of weeks ago I mentioned some of the newsletters I especially enjoy, so let me take the opportunity today to...

In Which Kafka and Wombats Make An Appearance

February 1, 2021

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Equilibrium, 1932 There is a fairly lengthy article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the vexed question of what exactly...

A Newsletter of Newsletters

January 25, 2021

This week, an incomplete but heartfelt list of newsletters that I enjoy. Not the subscription-based journalistic Substack ones, but the quirky and disheveled...

The Year of Hypomone

January 18, 2021

I’m going to do something a little different: I’m going to quote something that I wrote on my blog: I received a gift today, in the form of a post by Ian...

Snow, Cycling, Scale, and ... MENDACITY

January 11, 2021

Snow day in central Texas! — possibly the heaviest snow in Waco since 1949. A few more photos here. I know, I know — not a big deal to most of you. But here...

The Three Salernitan Doctors

January 4, 2021

Eric Ravilious, “Halstead Road in Snow” Sir Robert Burton, from his great Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): Mirth and merry company may not be separated from...

The Worlds Ae Reconciled

December 28, 2020

David Jones A Christmas Hymn by Richard Wilbur “And some of the Pharisees from among the multitude said unto him, Master, rebuke thy disciples. And he...

A Rather British Edition

December 21, 2020

Eric Ravilious The Friends of Friendless Churches rescue and care for neglected or abandoned old churches and chapels in England and Wales. I love the idea...

Messages (Some in Bottles)

December 14, 2020

Walther Klemm The Gothic Revival in the Victorian age created significant demand for new stained glass, and one of the leading firms to supply that glass was...

A Magic Number

December 7, 2020

A number of editions of the English Bible are known today solely for their errors. As F. F. Bruce explains in his wonderful history of the Bible in English,...

Advent and Other Thoughts

November 30, 2020

Now that Advent is here, it’s an excellent time to begin reading Auden’s Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being. In my Introduction to that edition — an...

Gospel of the Trees

November 24, 2020

Friends, please pardon me for sending you an additional email only 24 hours after my previous one, but I couldn’t wait a week to announce this. Ten years ago...

Pasts and Futures

November 23, 2020

Archaeologists have discovered 200 metal and ceramic artifacts from the Middle Ages in the village of Poniaty Wielkie, east-central Poland. Some of them show...

Nautical Mysteries and Divine Insanity

November 16, 2020

Naomi Alderman at the Spectator names Breaking Bread with the Dead as her book of the year! — alongside, as her fiction choice, Susanna Clarke’s wondrous...

Sound and Vision

November 9, 2020

I’ve been posting a few autumnal images to my micro.blog recently. I haven’t been writing much. This seems to be a season for catching my breath — in part,...

The Sounds of Tranquility

November 2, 2020

Paul Klee, Vergesslicher Engel (1939) There’s a great deal of racket in our lives right about now, so as the world works itself into a noisy frenzy, let’s...

Tribe of Tiger, Cherub Cat

October 26, 2020

A Siberian photographer’s award-winning photograph of a Siberian tiger. Eero Saarinen’s Bell Labs complex in Holmdel, New Jersey is empty. I wrote a post...

Check Your Pravilege

October 19, 2020

This is the 100th edition of Snakes & Ladders! Thanks so much to everyone who has come along for the ride, whether starting recently or from the beginning. I...

Affirmations and Renunciations

October 12, 2020

The New Atlantis, the fabulous journal of technology and society of which I am a Contributing Editor, has a newly and beautifully redesigned website. Please...

Trousers, Tweezers, and Wise Advice

October 5, 2020

This Friday afternoon I’ll be talking with my friend Yuval Levin of AEI about my new book. You can check out the livestream here. Comment is joining forces...

Pigeons, Donkeys, Commandments

September 28, 2020

This Friday, October 2, I’ll be talking about Breaking Bread with the Dead on Zoom with Cherie Harder of the Trinity Forum. If you’re interested in watching...

Happy Are Those

September 21, 2020

That’s an architectural model created by Edward Tuckerman Potter in 1888 as part of “a proposal for an apartment building with improved daylighting and...

Paper and Memory

September 14, 2020

Over the past couple of weeks my wife Teri and I watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — the 1979 miniseries, not the 2011 movie — and its 1982 sequel,...

It’s Pub Day!

September 8, 2020

Um, no, not that kind of pub, this kind: Click on that image to order. Or, if you’re not yet convinced, here’s an excerpt at the Atlantic. And here are some...

It’s Scotland This Time

August 31, 2020

Many thanks to the hundreds of you who asked for a copy of my forthcoming book — I wish we could have given one to each of you. In the end ten, rather than...

Silences (plus a giveaway)

August 24, 2020

Soon, soon you will be able to acquire the new book of mine that I call your attention to at the bottom of this newsletter. Here’s a commendation from the...

Texas Bookends

August 17, 2020

Modern life is a peculiar thing. Last week Teri and I, in a risk-taking mood, made the 80-minute drive to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, where we saw...

The Vicar of Large Things

August 10, 2020

Pawel Kuczynski, Audiobook Friends, if you’re like me, and I expect you are, you have often thought about the great variety of control consoles in LEGO...

Restorations and Discoveries

August 3, 2020

The restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece My buddy Austin Kleon is at home with his kids, confined by the chronovirus. I took the last month away from my...

The Proverbial Memory Lane

July 27, 2020

Beautiful or out of scale? I wrote for the Hedgehog Review about Alexander Herzen, the central figure of Tom Stoppard’s sprawling and marvelous trilogy The...

Vantablack Fish and Lissajous Figures

July 20, 2020

I’m very pleased to announce that I’m about to start work on a critical edition of Auden’s book The Shield of Achilles. (About my immediately forthcoming...

Concerning Forests and Tools

July 13, 2020

Photo by Jim Champion If I’m ever allowed to return to England, I want to visit the New Forest, which has been a royal forest since just a few years after...

This & That & the Other Thing

July 6, 2020

Why not read some books about the ampersand? & On July 10 at 1:30pm Eastern Time I’ll be conversing with the good folks at the Trinity Forum about Christian...

Living Room, Working Space

June 29, 2020

Musicians in Barcelona rehearsing before an audience of ... plants. Strange phenomena in Wiltshire! “What we’re seeing is two massive monuments with their...

The Far Invisible

June 22, 2020

REM Island, a pirate radio station off the Dutch Coast (1964). Here’s the story of how BBC Radio 1 emerged from pirate radio. Among the greatest poems...

Humble Cottages and a Royal Game

June 15, 2020

The art of Eric Ravilious (1902-1942) is deceptively simple and straightforward. Here is a wonderful tribute by Niall Gooch. I have a few Ravilious images on...

A Miscellany of Pleasant Distractions

June 8, 2020

The Baroque is one of my least favorite architectural eras, but, strangely enough, I think the most beautiful church I have ever seen with my own eyes is...

On Noble Things He Stands

June 1, 2020

Behold, a king will reign in righteousness, and princes will rule in justice. Each will be like a hiding place from the wind, a shelter from the storm, like...