My favorite music of the year: Waxahatchee’s Tigers Blood, by a relatively long shot, but Sault’s Acts of Faith deserves a listen — like a 30-minute gospel jam. Of course, a day after I wrote this post, I learned about Hannah Frances' Keeper of the Shepherd. Haunting, oneiric stuff! Think latter-day Fleet Foxes, John Fahey, Joni Mitchell, etc. Here’s a performance of “Floodplain.“🎵

Some music I missed from ‘22-23 — and a nominee for Thanksgiving’s quintessential album.

AI is the ultimate hold-my-beer event: my entirely superfluous addition to an oversaturated discourse.

“‘There’s less brand loyalty than there used to be,’ Christ said."

I wrote about why you should ditch your gin and tonic, and what to try instead.

Second half of my interview with my artist friend John. I worried these conversations might be difficult to follow and/or dull for people who aren’t very literate in art (myself included). But the response has been basically, more of this, please, by which I hear, less of you, please. I get it! Words suck, pictures rule.

Cory Doctorow on AI’s productivity theater:

• 96% of bosses expect that AI will make their workers more productive;
• 85% of companies are either requiring or strongly encouraging workers to use AI;
• 49% of workers have no idea how AI is supposed to increase their productivity;
• 77% of workers say using AI decreases their productivity.

Original research paper by The Upwork Research Institute (their framing is, predictably, more optimistic).

I liked his appearance; I knew his appearance; he came from the right place; he was one of us. He stood there for all the parentage of his kind, for men and women by no means clever or amusing, but whose very existence is based upon honest faith, and upon the instinct of courage. I don’t mean military courage, or civil courage, or any special kind of courage. I mean just that inborn ability to look temptations straight in the face—a readiness unintellectual enough, goodness knows, but without pose—a power of resistance, don’t you see, ungracious if you like, but priceless—an unthinking and blessed stiffness before the outward and inward terrors, before the might of nature and the seductive corruption of men—backed by a faith invulnerable to the strength of facts, to the contagion of example, to the solicitation of ideas. Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim 📚

Talked with my friend John Springer about landscape painting, his new art collective, and Ingres versus Delacroix. Here’s his Field of Yellow Flowers. 🎨

“In Athens, Georgia, R.E.M.’s hometown, memories are everywhere”

I wrote about what, if anything, constitutes summer reading. Probably nothing!

Mrs Russell among the flowers in the garden of Goulphar, Belle-Île, John Peter Russell. Born in Australia, Russell was a friend of Van Gogh and Monet, and mentored Matisse at his home studio on Belle-Île in the 1890s. (His use of color was a major influence on Matisse, who up that point operated in a darker, more Flemish palette.) After his wife died of cancer in 1908, Russell destroyed hundreds of his paintings and sold his house on Belle-Île.

I wonder, in other words, whether the work of doing the laundry or washing the dishes—these are almost always the examples, but they stand in for a host of similar activities—might not provide a certain indispensable grounding to the artistic endeavor, tethering it to the world in a vital rather than stupefying manner. Or, to take another angle, whether a fidelity to such tasks might not yield certain virtues that might also sustain the artist in their labors: attentiveness, patience, perseverance, or humility, for example.

— L. M. Sacasas

I think a preoccupation with art, in which the work of art actually supersedes the work of life, is part of the reason why so much art has a recursive element now — that is, why so much art is just about…art. Art is very important. And certainly more important than many other things. But art is not ultimately important, and to act as if it is diminishes and perverts what’s good about it. Kelly Reichardt’s movie Showing Up touches on this a bit.

The Skate, Chardin. This painting fascinated the young Matisse, who spent more time copying it than anything else he saw in the Louvre. Proust compared the fish’s innards to a cathedral nave. Diderot apparently thought it was disgusting.

A good haul. 📚

Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it’s Pythagoras.

— Annie Dillard, Holy The Firm 📚

The Blood of a Poet, dir. Jean Cocteau. Ok, had my fill. 🎥

“The Testament of Orpheus is simply a machine for creating meanings. The film offers the viewer hieroglyphics that he can interpret as he pleases so as to quench his inquisitive thirst for Cartesianism." Testament of Orpheus, dir. Jean Cocteau — I think this film is, at least partly, intended as a joke (?). 🎥

“My method is simple: not to aim at poetry. That must come of its own accord. The mere whispered mention of its name frightens it away.” Beauty and the Beast, dir. Jean Cocteau 🎥

Orpheus, Jean Cocteau.🎥

Currently reading: Brother to a Dragonfly by Will D. Campbell 📚

I wrote a note to myself, on turning 35. Additional note to self: Isn’t it odd that your “most popular” writing is the stuff you just sorta toss off? And the stuff you spend an inordinate amount of energy on…barely registers? Whatever the lesson is here, surely I will never learn it.

Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is?—our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Though perhaps we are the last generation—now there’s a comfort. Take the bomb threat away and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist on an improbable yarn.

—Annie Dillard, For The Time Being (1999) 📚

Erika Mann and W. H. Auden. H/t Alan Jacobs

🎵 Please send help, I cannot stop listening to Waxahatchee

Astonishment in the Terrain of the Familiar, by Alastair Gordon, 2022.

Daniel Walden, in Commonweal: “This is the vein in which this campaign pitches itself: deliberately inoffensive, appealing to the dim embers of values the American people still share. Not hating people is good; doing nice things for them is good; being a sign of harmony in the midst of conflict is good. None of these things, however, is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They are, as one of the twentieth century’s great Thomists might have put it, insufficiently revolutionary, because they are in perfect continuity with the way we live now and the values we hold in a world that we know to be fallen.”

Back from paternity leave to discuss Walker Percy, This Old House, The Smile, and tales of HVAC horror

Currently reading: The Guide to Gethsemane by Emmanuel Falque 📚

Guy Davenport (left), Cormac McCarthy (right).

Brad East’s tech-attitude taxonomy. Seems like a pretty good list. I too fall on the 7-8-9 spectrum, while (unconvincingly) aspiring to 10. The funniest combo (which does seem to exist?) is 1 and 9.

Currently reading: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L’Engle 📚

Pretty diaristic. Appreciate her connecting Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief to Aristotle: “that which is probable and impossible is better than that which is possible and improbable.”

Currently reading: Signposts in a Strange Land by Walker Percy 📚