Archive • Commonplace thoughts • Buttondown

Pools of enchantment

September 11, 2024

A public pool in Annecy, France It's been quite a while since the last edition of my newsletter. I was recently thinking about a couple of articles and was...

Beauty and content

December 9, 2023

The Electrician from the "photography competition" link below (keep reading for the context) Welcome back and a happy belated Thanksgiving. I took the last...

Look, it's just really cool

November 11, 2023

Paint, oil, and soap in motion from Thomas Blanchard's video Chopin - Nocturne op.9 No.2 Colorful Liquids in motion. Really a mesmerizing video to watch....

October 28, 2023

"Plaza," by Cinta Vidal Vidal’s paintings flirt with perception, filling private rooms and public areas with figures who barely adhere to the laws of...

October 14, 2023

On our recent trip back from Europe, Delilah and I got a chance to see Wes Anderson's latest full-length film, Asteroid City. Wes Anderson movies are a...

What we leave behind

September 30, 2023

An almost empty beach in Brighton. If you look closely you can see the red "Danger" sign on the left-hand sign saying that the winds are too strong to enter...

September 16, 2023

Daunt Books, which we visited today. I picked up a sketching book, a copy of some George Orwell essays, and an essay on the misuse of words by Locke. We're...

September 2, 2023

One of a set of "architectural theory" illustrations by Arthur Skizhali-Weiss Coming up very soon, my family and I will be taking a long time off to travel...

The life of leisure

August 19, 2023

Catching some leisure time on the job (a photo of mine) Zena Hitz, author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, recently wrote an...

Waves of sound and reading well

The functional whimsy of a sinusoidal brick wall. Serpentine walls are apparently found in places in England, and even outside of the country. The wave...

Dialogue and translation

"Two Waves" by Makoto Fujimura If you've been to our house you know we don't have a lot of "modern" art. Our walls have either pictures of our family,...

A plant of slow growth

This, dear reader, in my opinion, is NOT how books should be organized If you own a number of books, how do you organize them? I thought it was interesting...

Biophilia and reading poetry

One of Salvador Dali's watercolor paintings of a botanical engraving As we've now officially entered summer I can finally spend more time outside. That is,...

The seven lamps project

Thanks for the email responses I received responding to the previous newsletter. There were interesting thoughts and links, and it's given me more to think...

Anthropology and friendship

Ayesha, The Return of She by H. R. Haggard from of the Visual Haggard Archive Someone recently remarked to me how learning to draw, even just a little, is a...

Old books and new technology

I'm a little late this time. I eventually want to move this to going out on a weekday instead of the weekend, to give me a better chance to polish things....

Welcome to the second installment of my newsletter. This fortnight I've been digging into book collecting, design, and the plays of Shakespeare and T.S....

The transparent eye

Welcome to my first email newsletter (tentatively titled 'commonplace thoughts'.) I have a vague sense of a format as well as some tidbits pulled together...