The Marginalian
Starlings and the Magic of Murmurations: A Stunning Watercolor Celebration of One of Earth’s Living...
Biking back to my rented cottage from CERN one autumn evening, having descended into the underworld...
a year ago
Biking back to my rented cottage from CERN one autumn evening, having descended into the underworld of matter for a visit to the world’s largest high-energy particle collider, a sight stopped me up short on the shore of Lake Geneva: In the orange sky over the orange water, a...
Robert Caro
An Interview With Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt greeted us in his beautiful 19th century house and in his bare feet (of which more later). As...
a year ago
Kurt greeted us in his beautiful 19th century house and in his bare feet (of which more later). As the interview progressed it grew sort of
The Marginalian
Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way: A Tender Lunar Fable about the Stubborn Courage of Prevailing Over the Odds...
"But we will have to find a way to live, as people do."
4 months ago
"But we will have to find a way to live, as people do."
The American Scholar
Facing the Facts
An antiquated take on antiquity
The post Facing the Facts appeared first on The American Scholar.
7 months ago
An antiquated take on antiquity
The post Facing the Facts appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
May Sarton on Writing, Gardening, and the Importance of Patience Over Will in Creative Work
"Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone."
a year ago
"Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone."
Wuthering...
What books am I reading this summer in the Greek philosophy readalong? Some details.
Now that we are almost done with Plato, the bulkiest figure
in my little Greek philosophy readalong,...
a year ago
Now that we are almost done with Plato, the bulkiest figure
in my little Greek philosophy readalong, I thought it would be a good idea to
revisit, clarify, and puzzle over the texts that will take us to the end of the
project, now that I have given the matter a little more...
The American Scholar
Agent 37
The post Agent 37 appeared first on The American Scholar.
6 months ago
The post Agent 37 appeared first on The American Scholar.
This Space
Twentieth anniversary post
On this day in 2004, I posted the first entry on this blog.
In recent years many posts have...
3 months ago
On this day in 2004, I posted the first entry on this blog.
In recent years many posts have reflected on the past and present of literary blogging (there is no future) so I will not go over that waste land again except to wish more had followed the example of This Space. One of...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Discussian of General Ideas'
A friend who
is not a dedicated reader but has more common sense and worldly knowhow than I’ve
ever...
5 months ago
A friend who
is not a dedicated reader but has more common sense and worldly knowhow than I’ve
ever possessed tells me he plans to reread Animal
House and 1984. Neither have I
read since junior-high school, probably the ideal time for such books, which
are among the most...
The Marginalian
The Great Blind Spot of Science and the Art of Asking the Complex Question the Only Answer to Which...
“Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you,” says the Skin Horse — a stuffed toy...
2 months ago
“Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you,” says the Skin Horse — a stuffed toy brought to life by a child’s love — in The Velveteen Rabbit. Great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise; this is a fundamental question: In a reality of matter,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Was Only Coming True'
In the final
year of his life, Clive James published a book-length poem, The River in the Sky...
a year ago
In the final
year of his life, Clive James published a book-length poem, The River in the Sky (2018), a dying man’s
last fling. The title refers to the Japanese phrase for the Milky Way. It’s
mostly autobiography, a book of well-rehearsed memories, largely unstructured, much
of...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Poem Calls For a Formal Reading'
I swore off
poetry readings a long time ago for reasons of health. The atmosphere of
pressurized...
6 months ago
I swore off
poetry readings a long time ago for reasons of health. The atmosphere of
pressurized solipsism makes it difficult for me to breathe. Sugary adulation induces
diabetic comas. Free verse is emetic and I’m allergic to hipsters but Thursday
evening I broke my vow and went...
Ben Borgers
I Used All of My Meal Swipes!
over a year ago
Wuthering...
The Best Books of 2024
For the last year and a half I read short books,
mostly, which was psychologically satisfying and...
11 months ago
For the last year and a half I read short books,
mostly, which was psychologically satisfying and anyway necessary to fit the
available energy and concentration. Now,
though, back on my feet, I hope, I am ready to read long books again.
Long, and I mean it, like Rebecca West’s...
Ben Borgers
The Redemption Arc Is Coming
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Go to the Bookcase'
I heard an
echo in something I wrote the other day, a dependent clause, inconsequential in
itself....
a month ago
I heard an
echo in something I wrote the other day, a dependent clause, inconsequential in
itself. It nagged me, like a commercial jingle from fifty years ago playing in my
head. The harder I dredged to recover the source, the deeper it sank. I let go
and an hour later it bubbled...
The American Scholar
Un Tinto
The post Un Tinto appeared first on The American Scholar.
5 months ago
The post Un Tinto appeared first on The American Scholar.
This Space
The disaster of writing: My Weil by Lars Iyer
"When a
plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins,
Lucy Easthope's phone...
a year ago
"When a
plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins,
Lucy Easthope's phone starts to ring" says the blurb to her recent book subtitled Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster, and goes on to report rapturous praise from critics and...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Deaf Unto the Suggestions of Tale-bearers'
“Though the
Quickness of thine Ear were able to reach the noise of the Moon, which some
think it...
10 months ago
“Though the
Quickness of thine Ear were able to reach the noise of the Moon, which some
think it maketh in it rapid revolution; though the number of thy Ears should
equal Argus his Eyes . . .”
The first surgery
on my left ear was fifty years ago, prompted by a perpetually...
The American Scholar
Nights at the Opera
Long before he wrote his masterly novels, Stendhal was transformed by the power of music
The post...
4 months ago
Long before he wrote his masterly novels, Stendhal was transformed by the power of music
The post Nights at the Opera appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
Some Thoughts about the Ocean and the Universe
How to bear the gravity of being.
a year ago
How to bear the gravity of being.
Josh Thompson
Krav Maga, or "Crush Balls, Gouge Eyes, and Break Bones"
In the last few weeks, I have been physically attacked dozens of times. Usually the attacker was...
over a year ago
In the last few weeks, I have been physically attacked dozens of times. Usually the attacker was just trying to choke me, but sometimes he was trying to throw me to the ground. After a few minutes of fighting, I would attack him. Then we’d both shake hands, say “thank you”, and...
Blog -...
Book Review - Owning Your Own Shadow
The shadow of the human psyche cannot be overlooked in a thorough
exploration of personal...
over a year ago
The shadow of the human psyche cannot be overlooked in a thorough
exploration of personal development. According to the classic resource
Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche, “The
shadow is that which has not entered adequately into...
Wuthering...
Middle period Plato - He’s garbage, he cares about nothing but the truth.
Assembling yesterday’s post I saw that I was only missing one dialogue from Plato’s early period, so...
a year ago
Assembling yesterday’s post I saw that I was only missing one dialogue from Plato’s early period, so I knocked off Greater Hippiaslast night. The early dialogues are generally short; the three in the “death of Socrates” group are only fifty pages total, for example.
Hippias is...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Not At All Abashed Before the Fact'
“We do not
go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man
who has...
a year ago
“We do not
go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man
who has least fear for his own carcass, has most time to consider others.”
What a
remarkable sentence, one I would never have the guts to write. It’s not the
sentiment but the form that’s so...
Josh Thompson
Content but Restless
There is tension between being content with what you have, and striving for more.
We have all heard...
over a year ago
There is tension between being content with what you have, and striving for more.
We have all heard the “serenity prayer”:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
This prayer is...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Brave Respect the Brave'
In
observance of Memorial Day, R.L. Barth sent me a poem by Ambrose Bierce, one I
had never read...
7 months ago
In
observance of Memorial Day, R.L. Barth sent me a poem by Ambrose Bierce, one I
had never read before, “To E.S. Salomon” (Black Beetles in Amber, 1892). Here is the memorably pertinent third stanza:
“The brave
respect the brave. The brave
Respect
the dead; but you -- you...
The Marginalian
The Broadest Portal to Joy
"Despite every single lie to the contrary, despite every single action born of that lie — we are in...
a year ago
"Despite every single lie to the contrary, despite every single action born of that lie — we are in the midst of rhizomatic care that extends in every direction, spatially, temporally, spiritually."
Wuthering...
How Ivan Bunin and Vasily Grossman spent the war - He was in the countryside then for the last time...
Without planning it I recently read three books by Russian
writers from three different strands of...
3 months ago
Without planning it I recently read three books by Russian
writers from three different strands of Russian literature: Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur
(1929 /1972, tr. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) in the Gogolian and
Dostoyevskian strand, Ivan Bunin’s Dark Avenues (1943/1946)...
Josh Thompson
2017 In Review & Thoughts on 2018
Note: this “annual review” covers three topics. Click on one to skip to it:
Looking back on...
over a year ago
Note: this “annual review” covers three topics. Click on one to skip to it:
Looking back on 2017
thoughts on going into 2018
book recommendations from the 79 books I read last year
I’ve got mixed feelings on annual reviews. I steadfastly refuse to set New Years’ resolutions, and...
Wuthering...
You drool from it. You are happy. - Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit
Finally, I have finished Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout
de la nuit (1932), known in English...
4 months ago
Finally, I have finished Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout
de la nuit (1932), known in English as Journey to the End of Night. That “end of night” is death. The existence of death makes everything
hateful and nullifies the value of anything else. I gotta say that the...
Ben Borgers
Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
12 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'There Are Many Real Things of Beauty Here'
A reader sent
me a screed against beauty he had found online. The writer wasn’t advocating...
3 months ago
A reader sent
me a screed against beauty he had found online. The writer wasn’t advocating its
opposite, ugliness, exactly, though his prose definitely leans in that
direction. Only a graduate-school alumnus could come up with such silly ideas.
Rather, he seemed to be saying that...
The Marginalian
What We Look for When We Are Looking: John Steinbeck on Wonder and the Relational Nature of the...
Searching for "that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life."
a year ago
Searching for "that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life."
Anecdotal Evidence
'Where They Grind the Grain of Thought'
Let me sing
the praises of Miss Milly, Miss McClain, Miss Esson, Miss Shaker, Miss Martin,
Miss...
a year ago
Let me sing
the praises of Miss Milly, Miss McClain, Miss Esson, Miss Shaker, Miss Martin,
Miss Rose, Miss Whistler – my teachers, K-6, at Pearl Road Elementary School.
Most were young and pretty, more like big sisters than mothers. On the
television in Miss Shaker’s class we...
Josh Thompson
Be Gentle to You
There are many types of people in the world, all with different approaches to “getting stuff done”....
over a year ago
There are many types of people in the world, all with different approaches to “getting stuff done”. My approach to doing stuff is different from my wife’s approach. (Who’da thunk?)
These two years of marriage have revealed much. One of these “revelations” was this: my sense of...
Josh Thompson
Resources for People with Jobs
RESOURCES FOR PEOPLE WITH JOBS
You spend most of your waking hours at work. So, spend a few of those...
over a year ago
RESOURCES FOR PEOPLE WITH JOBS
You spend most of your waking hours at work. So, spend a few of those waking hours when you’re
not at work thinking about how to improve the hours that you
are working. Often, improving your work means you can improve your work conditions and...
The American Scholar
Insisting on the Positive
A popular historian’s philosophical musings
The post Insisting on the Positive appeared first on The...
4 months ago
A popular historian’s philosophical musings
The post Insisting on the Positive appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
Spell Against Indifference
I was a latecomer to poetry — an art form I did not understand and, as we tend to do with what we do...
a year ago
I was a latecomer to poetry — an art form I did not understand and, as we tend to do with what we do not understand, discounted. But under its slow seduction, I came to see how it shines a sidewise gleam on the invisible and unnameable regions of being where the truest truths...
The American Scholar
Jason Middlebrook
Tree rings in time
The post Jason Middlebrook appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
Tree rings in time
The post Jason Middlebrook appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Stood There and Stared at Silence, Silent Too'
St. Augustine
observes of St. Ambrose in Book VI, Chapter 3 of his Confessions:
“When he...
11 months ago
St. Augustine
observes of St. Ambrose in Book VI, Chapter 3 of his Confessions:
“When he was
reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his
voice and tongue were silent. . . . Very often when we were there, we saw him
silently reading and never...
Anecdotal Evidence
'One Thing Always to Be Guarded Against'
“Poetry,
geography, moral essays, the divers [sic] subjects of philosophy, travels, natural
history,...
6 months ago
“Poetry,
geography, moral essays, the divers [sic] subjects of philosophy, travels, natural
history, books on sciences; and, in short, the whole range of book-knowledge is
before you; but there is one thing always to be guarded against; and that is,
not to admire and applaud...
ribbonfarm
The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet
My essay The Extended Internet Universe, where I coined the term “cozyweb” (probably in my top 5...
8 months ago
My essay The Extended Internet Universe, where I coined the term “cozyweb” (probably in my top 5 most successful memes) is featured in this cute little collectible book, The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet put together by Yancey Strickler (whom you may have heard of as the...
The American Scholar
“Death Fugue” by Paul Celan
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “Death Fugue” by Paul Celan appeared first on The American...
7 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “Death Fugue” by Paul Celan appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
From Stardust to Sapiens: A Stunning Serenade to Our Cosmic Origins and Our Ongoing Self-Creation
We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the...
a year ago
We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into...
Josh Thompson
Why I use a Kindle
Amazon’s e-reader is extremely functional. Most reasons to
not use one focus either on practical...
over a year ago
Amazon’s e-reader is extremely functional. Most reasons to
not use one focus either on practical issues (depending on something with a battery) or on aesthetic reasons. These are valid issues, of course, but these pale in comparison to the many, many reasons
to use a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Still to Suruiue in My Immortall Song'
Many of the best
things in life, so long as they persist, are accompanied by a shadow of...
a week ago
Many of the best
things in life, so long as they persist, are accompanied by a shadow of their
disappearance. If fortunate, we learn this lesson early. Their transitoriness
becomes part of their charm, whether a cat, a garden or a brother. We are
grateful and enjoy them...
The Marginalian
The Moon and the Yew Tree: Patti Smith Reads Sylvia Plath’s Haunting Portrait of Depression
"This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary."
a year ago
"This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary."
Josh Thompson
Be a little better at personal email
The next bunch of posts will be me “clearing out the drawers” of notes I have scattered across my...
over a year ago
The next bunch of posts will be me “clearing out the drawers” of notes I have scattered across my phone, computer, and brain. There is no unifying theme to what will be written here.
Three recommendations to email better
TL;DR Email should usually be as short as possible. More of...
Ben Borgers
War Room — using the native date picker
a year ago
The Marginalian
What It Takes to Grow: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the Key to Self-Realization
"Self-knowledge... is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous...
a year ago
"Self-knowledge... is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth. In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, but... the prime moral privilege."
Josh Thompson
20 Things 20-Year-Olds Don't Get
Jason Nazar recently wrote an article titled
20 Things 20-Year-Olds Don’t Get.
Please read it, but...
over a year ago
Jason Nazar recently wrote an article titled
20 Things 20-Year-Olds Don’t Get.
Please read it, but with a big grain of salt.
Nazar opens with the statement “I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and I see this generation making their own.”
This seems to be an aspirational...
The Marginalian
17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian
The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels...
a year ago
The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels to me now almost like a different species of consciousness. (It can only be so — if we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Who Needs Your Stories?'
Have you
ever read something – it might be a poem or a history
book, almost anything – and...
2 months ago
Have you
ever read something – it might be a poem or a history
book, almost anything – and encountered a phrase or sentence so self-contained
and dense with meaning, in words so perfectly arranged, that you stop reading,
ponder and write it down? You may not even continue with...
The Marginalian
Kinship in the Light of Conscience: Peter Kropotkin on the Crucial Difference Between Love,...
“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Whitman wrote in what may be the most elemental...
3 months ago
“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Whitman wrote in what may be the most elemental definition of solidarity — this tender recognition of our interdependence and fundamental kinship, deeper than sympathy, wider than love. Half a century after Whitman’s atomic...
The American Scholar
A Rebel to Remember
Gregory P. Downs on the late Anthony E. Kaye’s groundbreaking history of Nat Turner
The post A Rebel...
4 months ago
Gregory P. Downs on the late Anthony E. Kaye’s groundbreaking history of Nat Turner
The post A Rebel to Remember appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
How to be an awesome belayer
For the next few posts I am going to geek out on sport climbing. If you’re not a climber (or a sport...
over a year ago
For the next few posts I am going to geek out on sport climbing. If you’re not a climber (or a sport climber), these are not for you. All of this information is in the context of sport climbing on trustworthy protection - not trad climbing!
How to belay when your climber is in...
This Space
Dead Souls by Sam Riviere
Even before one begins reading Sam Riviere’s first novel there is despondency as one registers that...
over a year ago
Even before one begins reading Sam Riviere’s first novel there is despondency as one registers that the title is a duplication of the English translation of Nikolai Gogol’s Мёртвые души, the novel in which a character seeks to buy dead serfs from their owners but who have yet to...
Anecdotal Evidence
'. . . Or That He Did Not'
Some of us
enjoy footnotes and other annotations. Thoughtful, non-Kinbotean notes accompanying
older...
6 months ago
Some of us
enjoy footnotes and other annotations. Thoughtful, non-Kinbotean notes accompanying
older texts can identify historical figures and help us decipher obsolete words. As
Joyce advised in the Wake: “Wipe your
glosses with what you know.” My preference with Shakespeare...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Although Too Many Readers Have Forgotten'
My education
continues. Here is “Artillery” (Hazards,
1930) by the English poet Wilfrid Wilson...
a month ago
My education
continues. Here is “Artillery” (Hazards,
1930) by the English poet Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, previously unknown to me:
“All night I
sat beside the bed
And watched
that senseless moaning head
Backwards
and forwards toss and toss,
When
suddenly he sat upright
And...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Poem Saves Time and Space'
Discovering
a good writer long after his death is a gift and a betrayal. Gratitude mingles
with...
7 months ago
Discovering
a good writer long after his death is a gift and a betrayal. Gratitude mingles
with regret and even guilt. Selfishly, we wish he had truly been our
contemporary and we had been smarter and watched him develop as a writer.
Instead, we compensate by scrambling after his...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Smart Dinner Jacket and Patent Leather Pumps'
I was never
strictly a crime reporter but several times I covered the cops-and-courts beat,
which...
a year ago
I was never
strictly a crime reporter but several times I covered the cops-and-courts beat,
which was more genteel and less interesting than it sounds. Reading the police
blotter each morning or scanning new filings in the county clerk’s office left this
reporter feeling less...
Anecdotal Evidence
'No Secret Element of Gusto Warms Up the Sermon'
Gusto is one
of my favorite virtues, especially among writers. Italo Svevo has it. John
Steinbeck...
a month ago
Gusto is one
of my favorite virtues, especially among writers. Italo Svevo has it. John
Steinbeck does not. A.J. Liebling has it. Woodward and Bernstein have never
heard of it. Gusto is taking pleasure in the job at hand. About writers it
suggests energy and enjoyment in playing...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Living Through Radical Change'
Ten years
ago, Joseph Epstein wrote to his friend Frederic Raphael:
“I have
myself long ago put...
8 months ago
Ten years
ago, Joseph Epstein wrote to his friend Frederic Raphael:
“I have
myself long ago put aside any thought about writing an autobiography. . . .
When I became, almost without conscious decision, a bookish and a scribbling
man, the larger sense of adventure went out of my...
Josh Thompson
`Medusa` mythical creature: part 2
Preparing for Turing Series Index
What follows is an eight-part series that will help you pick up...
over a year ago
Preparing for Turing Series Index
What follows is an eight-part series that will help you pick up useful information about a number of topics related to Ruby, specifically geared for students learning the Ruby programming language, as part of the Turing School’s Backend Software...
Ben Borgers
Customer Rewards Programs
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'On the Cello of Shared Grief'
With the deaths
of certain writers our reaction is shamefully selfish: Why did he do that to me? No...
2 weeks ago
With the deaths
of certain writers our reaction is shamefully selfish: Why did he do that to me? No thought for family or friends, or
even other readers, merely one’s sense of personal betrayal. That’s how I felt
seven years ago when Richard Wilbur died at age ninety-six, as...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Mandelstam Dances Barefoot in the Snow Alone'
“In the end
like all great poets he became a jester”
Not the usual
encomium one expects for Osip...
2 months ago
“In the end
like all great poets he became a jester”
Not the usual
encomium one expects for Osip Mandelstam, dead at age forty-seven in a Soviet camp,
but the eulogist is Zbigniew Herbert, a congenitally ironic poet, ever aware of
the comic in the appalling. For my birthday I...
Anecdotal Evidence
'An Impetuous Eagerness to Subvert'
Dr. Johnson describes
the poet and physician Mark Akenside: “He
certainly retained an unnecessary...
6 months ago
Dr. Johnson describes
the poet and physician Mark Akenside: “He
certainly retained an unnecessary and outrageous zeal for what he called and
thought liberty; a zeal which sometimes disguises from the world, and not
rarely from the mind which it possesses, an envious desire of...
The American Scholar
A Toothsome Tale
Bill Schutt chomps through millennia to share the story of our pearly whites
The post A Toothsome...
4 months ago
Bill Schutt chomps through millennia to share the story of our pearly whites
The post A Toothsome Tale appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Every Departure Destroys a Class of Sympathies'
As a boy I
was spared most deaths. I've read of people who lose parents, siblings and close
friends...
5 months ago
As a boy I
was spared most deaths. I've read of people who lose parents, siblings and close
friends when young, and wonder how they adapt to unprecedented loss. They have
nothing to compare it to. The death that hit me hardest was President Kennedy’s,
a month after my eleventh...
Josh Thompson
First five meals from The 4-Hour Chef
I don’t know how to cook. Period. My most impressive culinary creations were, until recently,...
over a year ago
I don’t know how to cook. Period. My most impressive culinary creations were, until recently, spaghetti and beans-n-rice.
I got married about a year ago, and had hoped that I would become inspired to become a world-class chef. After a long time eating Rice-A-Roni, spaghetti,...
Robert Caro
Robert Caro on the Art of Biography
I was never interested in writing biographies merely to tell the lives of famous men. From the first...
a year ago
I was never interested in writing biographies merely to tell the lives of famous men. From the first time I thought of becoming a biographer
Josh Thompson
How to Move
Kristi and I are moving to Colorado in July. We’ve taken three broad steps to make this move...
over a year ago
Kristi and I are moving to Colorado in July. We’ve taken three broad steps to make this move happen:
We both are in process with new jobs
I just started working remotely for Litmus, which means I can seamlessly transition to Colorado this summer. Kristi spent a few days last week...
The Marginalian
The Wondrous Birds of the Himalayas and the Forgotten Victorian Woman Whose Illustrations Rewilded...
Bridging Blake and Darwin with a single-hair brush.
a year ago
Bridging Blake and Darwin with a single-hair brush.
Josh Thompson
Feedback pt. 2
Traditional Feedback is Explicit
Feedback is the means by which any system makes changes. From the...
over a year ago
Traditional Feedback is Explicit
Feedback is the means by which any system makes changes. From the gene pool to the swimming pool, feedback works to eliminate the insufficient and improve the sufficient. (See what I did with the “pool” thing?)
Your car gives you feedback if the...
Wuthering...
Books I Read in June 2023
If only I had the will to write something. But I can read.
PHILOSOPHY
Fragments or Sayings or...
a year ago
If only I had the will to write something. But I can read.
PHILOSOPHY
Fragments or Sayings or Tall Tales (4th
C. BCE), Diogenes the Cynic, tr. Guy Davenport
Cynics (2008), William Desmond - for an entry in a series aimed at students, surprisingly well written. It helps that...
The Marginalian
Wherever You Are, Stop What You’re Doing
Nothing magnifies life — in the proper sense of the word, rooted in the Latin for “to make greater,...
9 hours ago
Nothing magnifies life — in the proper sense of the word, rooted in the Latin for “to make greater, to glorify” — more than the act of noticing its details, and nothing sanctifies it more: Kneeling to look at a lichen is a devotional act. We bless our own lives by recognizing and...
This Space
“Can there be a pure narrative?”
The question opening Maurice Blanchot’s essay The Experience of Proust* has always drawn me back,...
over a year ago
The question opening Maurice Blanchot’s essay The Experience of Proust* has always drawn me back, not to secure a yes or a no, but to keep the question of pure narrative open in its initial uncertainty, perhaps, rather, in its impossibility, as it appears to make reading and...
sbensu
Payments vs Transfers
Transfer means to move money but payment means "exchanging goods or services". A payment system has...
a year ago
Transfer means to move money but payment means "exchanging goods or services". A payment system has a lot more requirements than a transfer system and I rarely see the crypto ecosystem acknowledge these when building "payment" products.
Wuthering...
Ovid's Metamorphoses, Cantos II and III - or just III, it turns out - And Cole and Swift, and little...
A month ago I wrote about the first Canto of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Now I will move through the...
11 months ago
A month ago I wrote about the first Canto of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Now I will move through the Cantos two or
three at a time, just leafing through the books, really, with luck getting at
what Ovid is doing. Cantos II and III
today.
Ovid established his cosmology and created...
The Marginalian
Coleridge on the Paradox of Friendship and Romantic Love
On sympathy, reciprocity, and satisfying the fulness of our nature.
a year ago
On sympathy, reciprocity, and satisfying the fulness of our nature.
The American Scholar
Jane Skafte
The language of trees
The post Jane Skafte appeared first on The American Scholar.
6 months ago
The language of trees
The post Jane Skafte appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
My Cousin Manya
One survivor’s story
The post My Cousin Manya appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
One survivor’s story
The post My Cousin Manya appeared first on The American Scholar.
This Space
Drowning is Fine by Darren Allen
For reasons unclear to me at the time I re-read several novels by Aharon Appelfeld, the author born...
over a year ago
For reasons unclear to me at the time I re-read several novels by Aharon Appelfeld, the author born in 1932 to a German-speaking Jewish family in what was also Paul Celan’s hometown, Czernowitz, then in Romania, now in Ukraine, and who wrote exclusively in Hebrew after he had...
Wuthering...
Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and their Stoic self-help books - I shall not be afraid when my last hour...
The curious thing about Stoicism is its long-lasting
survival in the self-help genre, curious at...
a year ago
The curious thing about Stoicism is its long-lasting
survival in the self-help genre, curious at least until I read Seneca’s Letters
from a Stoic (1st C.) several years ago and discovered that it was a self-help
book, one of the founding self-help books.
The Meditations of...
The Marginalian
How to Say Goodbye: An Illustrated Field Guide to Accompanying a Loved One at the End of Life
"If you don't know what to say, start by saying that... That opens things up."
a year ago
"If you don't know what to say, start by saying that... That opens things up."
The American Scholar
The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend
How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths
The...
a month ago
How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths
The post The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend appeared first on The American Scholar.
Astral Codex Ten
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
...
a month ago
The American Scholar
Moondance
Experience the marvel that is
The post Moondance appeared first on The American Scholar.
4 months ago
Experience the marvel that is
The post Moondance appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
Verde
Learning a foreign language isn’t just about improving cognitive function—it can teach us to sense...
a month ago
Learning a foreign language isn’t just about improving cognitive function—it can teach us to sense the world anew
The post Verde appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
How to Have Enough: Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily...
3 weeks ago
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Little Towns Should Have Had Their Chroniclers'
Every St.
Patrick’s Day my mother pinned on my shirt before I walked to school a green
and white...
9 months ago
Every St.
Patrick’s Day my mother pinned on my shirt before I walked to school a green
and white knitted shamrock and reminded me of the origin of my first name. Her
father was born in County Cork, as were her mother’s parents. I waited until
the third grade to rebel against...
Josh Thompson
Migrating my Jekyll site to Netlify
Troubleshooting Netilify deploy
Ugggh I moved intermediateruby.com to Netlify a few months ago in...
over a year ago
Troubleshooting Netilify deploy
Ugggh I moved intermediateruby.com to Netlify a few months ago in like 10 minutes, so my primary site, josh.works, should take maybe 20, right?
I’m a few hours deep. Here’s what I get when Netlify tries to build:
I should have done the following...
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Learned to Love Books'
“Though most
of the teachers followed Erasmus in seeking to make learning palatable,
Montaigne...
4 months ago
“Though most
of the teachers followed Erasmus in seeking to make learning palatable,
Montaigne considers himself fortunate to have avoided getting 'nothing out of
school but a hatred of books, as do nearly all our noblemen,’” writes Donald
Frame in his 1965 biography of the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Those Move Easiest Who Have Learn’d to Dance'
Alexander
Pope’s 1716 imitation of Martial’s epigram X.23:
“At length,
my Friend (while Time, with...
7 months ago
Alexander
Pope’s 1716 imitation of Martial’s epigram X.23:
“At length,
my Friend (while Time, with still career,
Wafts on his
gentle wing his eightieth year),
Sees his
past days safe out of Fortune’s power,
Nor dreads
approaching Fate’s uncertain hour;
Reviews his
life, and in...
Anecdotal Evidence
'If You Want Less Trouble, Plow the Sky'
I had a
suburban kid’s notion of life on a farm -- hearty yeomen and Jeffersonian
gentleman-farmers...
a year ago
I had a
suburban kid’s notion of life on a farm -- hearty yeomen and Jeffersonian
gentleman-farmers tilling the soil and bringing in the sheaves. Working for
rural newspapers in the Midwest and upstate New York educated me to the
realities of mortgages, tractor accidents,...
The Marginalian
John Gardner on the Key to Self-Renewal Across Life and the Art of Making Rather Than Finding...
"The potentialities you develop to the full come as the result of an interplay between you and...
7 months ago
"The potentialities you develop to the full come as the result of an interplay between you and life's challenges."
Ben Borgers
Donating forks to the dining hall
7 months ago
Wuthering...
Readalongs I wish someone else would organize - Cuban literature, August Wilson plays, and many more
The glory days of book blogs were full of “challenges.” I hosted several: Scottish literature,...
over a year ago
The glory days of book blogs were full of “challenges.” I hosted several: Scottish literature, Italian, Austrian, Scandinavian, Portuguese, always limited to the 19th century and earlier to keep the scope manageable. The idea was that I read a lot, while others were invited to...
The Marginalian
What It’s Like to Be a Falcon: The Peregrine as a Portal to a Way of Seeing and a State of Being
"You cannot know what freedom means till you have seen a peregrine loosed into the warm spring sky...
8 months ago
"You cannot know what freedom means till you have seen a peregrine loosed into the warm spring sky to roam at will through all the far provinces of light."
Wuthering...
The appeal of Septology as religious fiction - the urge, inexplicably, to pray - because it helps!...
Septology is a stream-of-consciousness novel
throughout, a mix of sentence fragments, unconventional...
a month ago
Septology is a stream-of-consciousness novel
throughout, a mix of sentence fragments, unconventional punctuation, and temporal
shifts, meaning the painter Asle is sometimes thinking about the present and
sometimes about the past.
These are all old moves, old techniques. I was a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Diana Steads Him Nothing, He Must Stay'
For earned emotional
intensity, especially coming from a man seldom associated with emotion, you...
a year ago
For earned emotional
intensity, especially coming from a man seldom associated with emotion, you can
hardly outdo A.E. Housman, as recounted by one of his students in Richard
Perceval Graves’ A. E. Housman: The
Scholar-Poet (1979):
“One morning
in May, 1914, when the trees in...
This Space
No safe landing
A review of A Winter in Zürau and Partita by Gabriel Josipovici
Gabriel Josipovici has said that...
3 months ago
A review of A Winter in Zürau and Partita by Gabriel Josipovici
Gabriel Josipovici has said that as a critic he is conservative but as a novelist he is radical. The second claim may not be controversial but the first will come as a surprise to those who remember what he said...
The American Scholar
Cats and Dogs
The post Cats and Dogs appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 weeks ago
The post Cats and Dogs appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Profoundly Bitter Lesson'
My friend
Moshe Vardi is a computer scientist at Rice University, the Karen Ostrum...
a year ago
My friend
Moshe Vardi is a computer scientist at Rice University, the Karen Ostrum George
Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering. He has published
an essay, “A Moral Rot at Rice University”:
“I was well
aware that antisemitism is alive and well in the US,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Old Collections Persist Somewhere'
Speaking of
anthologies, I again picked up Books and
Libraries (2021), published as part of the...
a year ago
Speaking of
anthologies, I again picked up Books and
Libraries (2021), published as part of the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets
Series. I’ve browsed in several of these attractively compact volumes and they are
a very mixed bag, as any thematic anthology must be. You can sense...
Ben Borgers
The Beginning of College Sucks
over a year ago
Ben Borgers
Things Go Downhill After We Leave
over a year ago
This Space
The disappearance of criticism, part two
A friend mentioned to me that he felt alienated by the articulacy of a literary critical book he was...
over a year ago
A friend mentioned to me that he felt alienated by the articulacy of a literary critical book he was reading; by its neutrality of tone, by its calm. Unruffled was another word he used. We all might recognise this feeling while assuming it is admiration, respect, perhaps even...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Butterflies Have Nothing to Do With Butter'
Call me an
aesthete but I’ve always favored the definition of butterfly given by Dr. Johnson in his...
5 months ago
Call me an
aesthete but I’ve always favored the definition of butterfly given by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary: “A beautiful insect, so named because it first appears
at the beginning of the season for butter.” Their seemingly gratuitous beauty, coupled
with not stinging like...
Josh Thompson
Rules for Fighting Fair
When a friend tells me they want to date someone, I ask them why. They always say “she’s pretty,...
over a year ago
When a friend tells me they want to date someone, I ask them why. They always say “she’s pretty, funny, and kind”, or “he is handsome, funny, and cares for me”. Obviously. Have you ever wanted to date someone because they are ugly, boring, and mean?
So, rather than asking more...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Some Spirit That Didn’t Wobble'
“As a
youngster I came to the classics simply by following the clues of other
writers. Cooper,...
a year ago
“As a
youngster I came to the classics simply by following the clues of other
writers. Cooper, Stevenson, Whitman, even Edgar Rice Burroughs seemed to lead,
allusion by allusion, back to a body of writing that was solider and wiser,
some spirit that didn’t wobble, wasn’t under...
The Marginalian
Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary
Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how...
10 months ago
Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its craters a monument of the odds we prevailed against to exist, a reliquary of the violent collisions that forged our rocky planet lush with life...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Right Things in the Right Order'
“But surely
the stories of Chekhov or the paintings of de Chirico move us not only because
they are...
a year ago
“But surely
the stories of Chekhov or the paintings of de Chirico move us not only because
they are so well done, but because in each case the artist has arranged exactly
the right things in the right order. The choice of subject matter has been at
least half of the achievement....
Anecdotal Evidence
'His Empty Heart is Full at Length'
Two-hundred-fifty
years ago, in the late summer and fall of 1773, Dr. Johnson and Boswell made
their...
a year ago
Two-hundred-fifty
years ago, in the late summer and fall of 1773, Dr. Johnson and Boswell made
their grand tour of Scotland, including the Hebrides, and both would
publish accounts of their adventures. Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland appeared in...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Soil Must Have Been Prepared'
Tom Disch
took the title of his first collection of essays and reviews from “The Castle of...
a year ago
Tom Disch
took the title of his first collection of essays and reviews from “The Castle of Indolence” (1748), eighty-one Spenserian stanzas by the Scottish poet James
Thomson. The poem is a sort of mock-epical hymn to the Protestant work ethic, a virtue ably
represented by...
Wuthering...
Books I read in September 2024 - Boring books had their origin in boring readers
My reading took an interesting Russian turn that I will
write about, soon, tomorrow, there, I said...
3 months ago
My reading took an interesting Russian turn that I will
write about, soon, tomorrow, there, I said it out loud so maybe I will really
do it.
November is Norwegian month at Dolce Bellezza. I will be joining her by reading at least the
first novel, The Other Name (2019), of Jon...
Blog -...
Book Review - Open
Open by Andre Agassi is a narrative tour de force. I literally could not
put it down. I usually...
over a year ago
Open by Andre Agassi is a narrative tour de force. I literally could not
put it down. I usually have four to six books on the go at any time, but
all of them were put on pause for the day and a half it took me to devour
this book.
Josh Thompson
Cancel Your Cable. Seriously.
No one likes to waste money, right?
There are two things that are even worse to...
over a year ago
No one likes to waste money, right?
There are two things that are even worse to waste.
Time
Energy
Money can be earned, and if more is needed, you can spend less or earn more. Energy is what you need to bring ideas to fruition. Unlimited time with no energy gets you nowhere, as...
Ben Borgers
It Does Have to Be Every Day
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
Travel somewhere fun. But first get on Scott's email list
Most of us have a bucket list item of “travel abroad”, right?
It gets harder to realize once you...
over a year ago
Most of us have a bucket list item of “travel abroad”, right?
It gets harder to realize once you start looking through flight prices, though. If you and your significant other want to head to Europe or Asia, you might be dropping $2500, minimum, for the both of you.
That’s...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Lack of Self-deception'
“There is a
difference between a villain and one who simply commits a crime. The villain is
an...
a year ago
“There is a
difference between a villain and one who simply commits a crime. The villain is
an extremely conscious person and commits a crime consciously, for its own
sake.”
A fine
distinction, one often lost on us. Auden is describing Shakespeare’s Richard
III and refers us to...
The Marginalian
What Rises from the Ruins: Katherine Anne Porter on the Power of the Artist and the Function of Art...
"We understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment."
a year ago
"We understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment."
The Marginalian
The Bird in the Heart: Terry Tempest Williams on the Paradox of Transformation and How to Live with...
"We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather...
11 months ago
"We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay."
Josh Thompson
Some Lessons Learned While Preparing for Two Technical Talks
A few weeks ago, I gave two talks about Ruby and Rails:
An 8-minute lightning talk about using...
over a year ago
A few weeks ago, I gave two talks about Ruby and Rails:
An 8-minute lightning talk about using .count vs .size in ActiveRecord query methods
A 30-minute talk at the Boulder Ruby Group arguing that developers should embrace working with non-development business functions, and the...
The Marginalian
How to Eat the Sun: A Blind Hero of the Resistance on Accessing the Light Within and Touching the...
“There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry...
a year ago
“There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in.”
Josh Thompson
June trip to the New River Gorge
The New River Gorge had beautiful weather this weekend. The forecast for the weekend was, until...
over a year ago
The New River Gorge had beautiful weather this weekend. The forecast for the weekend was, until Friday, near-certain thunderstorms.
Typical of the New, the weather proved unpredictable, and we had glorious sun the entire trip.
I was eager to get out to the New, since my last...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Known to All But Themselves'
Suddenly,
there’s nothing shameful about ignorance. I mean personally, not as an indictment
of the...
5 months ago
Suddenly,
there’s nothing shameful about ignorance. I mean personally, not as an indictment
of the bigger culture. There’s so much I don’t know or understand, and that
knowledge of my ignorance no longer bothers me very much. I still like learning
things but there was a time when...
The American Scholar
Indiana Absurd
Tiffany Tsao on translating a beguiling Indonesian short-story collection
The post Indiana Absurd...
7 months ago
Tiffany Tsao on translating a beguiling Indonesian short-story collection
The post Indiana Absurd appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Poet's Hope'
Erica Light
is the daughter of my late friend Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017), the poet and
Melville...
8 months ago
Erica Light
is the daughter of my late friend Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017), the poet and
Melville scholar. We exchange emails several times each year, usually devoted
to what we are reading. This week she reported reading some of the writers and books I’ve
mentioned recently at...
Josh Thompson
Friends Don't Let Friends Shortrope
The first in a series about how to be a better belayer.
Short rope
[shawrt-rohp]
verb
The act of...
over a year ago
The first in a series about how to be a better belayer.
Short rope
[shawrt-rohp]
verb
The act of not giving sufficient rope to your climber.
Getting short roped is bad.
It’s not necessarily dangerous, nor does it cause you to take a whip (it can, of course) but the real reason...
Josh Thompson
$150 Custom-Made Standing Desk
My desk/our kitchen table
Standing desks are
all the
rage. (I’m still waiting for
walking desks...
over a year ago
My desk/our kitchen table
Standing desks are
all the
rage. (I’m still waiting for
walking desks to catch up.)
Kristi and I outfitted our space with reclaimed furniture from Craigslist (also known as “cheap”), so we wanted to keep it going with a desk. My setup at our kitchen...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Top Thing of the World'
John Keats’
meditation on a reader’s paradise:
“I had an
idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant...
2 months ago
John Keats’
meditation on a reader’s paradise:
“I had an
idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner. Let him on a
certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him
wander with it, and muse upon it and reflect from it, and dream...
Josh Thompson
Talent is Overrated
Talent is Overrated
In Talent is Overrated, the author argues that world-class performers are not...
over a year ago
Talent is Overrated
In Talent is Overrated, the author argues that world-class performers are not genetically gifted. The difference between world-class performers and the rest of us? Lots of deliberate practice. (Read the article.)
I have no interest in becoming Mozart, or Tiger...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Used to Stand in Front of the Windows'
In my dream I
was staring through the window of a bookstore, worried that sunlight would
bleach the...
11 months ago
In my dream I
was staring through the window of a bookstore, worried that sunlight would
bleach the color from the cover of a book. At the center of a display that
seemed to be made of cotton gauze was not just any book but a first edition of Ulysses. In the rare books collection...
Anecdotal Evidence
'One of the Finest of Human Creatures'
Turnstile One (1948) is a slender anthology of poems,
stories, essays and reviews edited by V.S...
10 months ago
Turnstile One (1948) is a slender anthology of poems,
stories, essays and reviews edited by V.S Pritchett and drawn from The New Statesman and Nation. Founded in
1913 by the Webbs and others associated with the Fabian Society, the magazine’s
politics were left-wing and many of...
The American Scholar
Paolo Arao
Acts of devotion
The post Paolo Arao appeared first on The American Scholar.
4 months ago
Acts of devotion
The post Paolo Arao appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Corollas and U-Hauls
These last few posts have a theme. We moved. I’m writing about it a lot because I thought about it a...
over a year ago
These last few posts have a theme. We moved. I’m writing about it a lot because I thought about it a lot, and a lot of work went into it.
When moving across the country, you have a few options. You could higher a moving company, who comes and boxes up your house, packs a truck,...
Josh Thompson
Turing Prep Chapter 2: Run your first tests (and make them pass)
Preparing for Turing Series Index
What follows is an eight-part series that will help you pick up...
over a year ago
Preparing for Turing Series Index
What follows is an eight-part series that will help you pick up useful information about a number of topics related to Ruby, specifically geared for students learning the Ruby programming language, as part of the Turing School’s Backend Software...
Anecdotal Evidence
'To Be Made Out of Emotions, Colors, Life Itself'
“[Robert
Conquest] and his two closest friends, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, proved
their...
5 months ago
“[Robert
Conquest] and his two closest friends, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, proved
their vocation by playing the games with language and perception that poets
play, three Musketeers at a time when not much else was disturbing the quiet
little cemetery of English...
Josh Thompson
"Cooking" is so much more
I’ve long wanted to get better at cooking. I eat a lot of food, and would like to enjoy it. I’ve...
over a year ago
I’ve long wanted to get better at cooking. I eat a lot of food, and would like to enjoy it. I’ve gotten to a point where I am comfortable following a recipe, and I bet you normally are fine following a recipe too.
To follow a recipe, you must have two things. These two things...
The American Scholar
The Next New Thing
In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before
The...
6 months ago
In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before
The post The Next New Thing appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
Kate Sessions and the Devotion to Delight: The Forgotten Woman Who Covered California with Trees and...
In May 1941, next to news of the Nazi savagely bombing London, The Los Angeles Times published a...
a year ago
In May 1941, next to news of the Nazi savagely bombing London, The Los Angeles Times published a memorial profile of “California’s Mother of Gardens” — a hopeful antidote to the undoing of the human world, celebrating the woman who covered Southern California with the loveliest...
This Space
39 Books: 2014
One could say that Mallarmé, through an extraordinary effort of asceticism, opened an abyss in...
7 months ago
One could say that Mallarmé, through an extraordinary effort of asceticism, opened an abyss in himself where his awareness, instead of losing itself, survives and grasps its solitude in a desperate clarity.
This is from The Silence of Mallarmé, an essay in Blanchot's first...
The Marginalian
Poetry as Prayer: The Great Russian Poet Marina Tsvetaeva on Reclaiming the Divine
"In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what...
5 months ago
"In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget."
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Particular Adroitness and Off-hand Readiness'
For years, with plenty of interruptions, I’ve
tried working my way through John Dryden’s prolific...
a year ago
For years, with plenty of interruptions, I’ve
tried working my way through John Dryden’s prolific output – poems, plays,
translations, essays, letters. Much of it is lost on me, especially among the plays. His
verse and essays are what I most enjoy, but a play, Amphitryon,or the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Fond of Books and Fond of Reading'
A friend has
loaned me his copy of Maurice Baring’s Have You Anything to Declare? (1936),
subtitled...
9 months ago
A friend has
loaned me his copy of Maurice Baring’s Have You Anything to Declare? (1936),
subtitled A Note Book with Commentaries. This
is the 1950 edition published by William Heinemann and comes with an indecipherable
pencil inscription on the front end paper that may be...
The Marginalian
The Majesty and Mystery of Night Migration, in a Stunning Poem Turned to Music
“Night, when words fade and things come alive,” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote...
a year ago
“Night, when words fade and things come alive,” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his love letter to the hours of darkness, composed while flying alone over the Sahara Desert. No aliveness animates the nocturne with more grandeur than the migration of birds....
Ben Borgers
It's Fun to Do Things with Care
over a year ago
Ben Borgers
The Land of Endless Socialization
over a year ago
The Elysian
Elysian gatherings around the world
Picnic with me in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and San Francisco.
2 weeks ago
Picnic with me in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and San Francisco.
Wuthering...
Some lesser works of Sōseki and Tanizaki - deep in the earth directly beneath Lady Kikyō’s toilet
Dolce Bellezza is running her 17th Japanese Literature Challenge. Amazing, well done, etc.
I read...
11 months ago
Dolce Bellezza is running her 17th Japanese Literature Challenge. Amazing, well done, etc.
I read some short works for it, which I will pile up here: three
short works by Natsume Sōseki, collected in a Tuttle volume that looks like it
is titled Ten Nights of Dream Hearing...
The Marginalian
Favorite Children’s Books of 2023
Tender and poetic reckonings with friendship, fear, love, solitude, black holes, deep time, and the...
a year ago
Tender and poetic reckonings with friendship, fear, love, solitude, black holes, deep time, and the interconnectedness of life.
The American Scholar
A Ray of Sunshine
The post A Ray of Sunshine appeared first on The American Scholar.
4 months ago
The post A Ray of Sunshine appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
Hometown Heroes
What if the goal is not to make it out of the neighborhood?
The post Hometown Heroes appeared first...
8 months ago
What if the goal is not to make it out of the neighborhood?
The post Hometown Heroes appeared first on The American Scholar.
Escaping Flatland
Don’t sacrifice the wrong thing
I began emailing essays into the void on 30 May 2021, 53 days before Rebecka, our youngest daughter...
7 months ago
I began emailing essays into the void on 30 May 2021, 53 days before Rebecka, our youngest daughter was born. This writing experiment has followed roughly the same trajectory as the baby. In 2021, Escaping Flatland's prime achievement was putting a few toys in its mouth (a...
Wuthering...
Three weeks in Portugal
I was in Portugal for three weeks in June. Five hours a day for four days I was in this inlingua...
6 months ago
I was in Portugal for three weeks in June. Five hours a day for four days I was in this inlingua classroom in Porto, or one much like it:
The results:
B1 in Portuguese after about two years of fairly relaxed study
– relaxed until those four days – which seems pretty good. ...
Steven Scrawls
Word Rot
Word Rot
Unless you are extraordinarily unfortunate, every problem you ever
face will have been...
a year ago
Word Rot
Unless you are extraordinarily unfortunate, every problem you ever
face will have been faced in some form by someone who came before you.
That person may have already shared the story of that challenge, and
that story might have melded with other tales to form collective...
The American Scholar
Braña Curuchu
The post Braña Curuchu appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
The post Braña Curuchu appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
Make Yourself a Seer: The Teenage Arthur Rimbaud on How to Be a Poet and a Prophet of Possibility
"The day of a single universal language will dawn!... This language will be of the soul, for the...
a year ago
"The day of a single universal language will dawn!... This language will be of the soul, for the soul, encompassing everything, scents, sounds, colors, one thought mounting another."
Escaping Flatland
Seeing people clearly
Head of people operations for the entire friend group
a year ago
Head of people operations for the entire friend group
Escaping Flatland
On shortcuts and longcuts
There’s this design heuristic that if people cut across the grass, you should pave the shortcut they...
8 months ago
There’s this design heuristic that if people cut across the grass, you should pave the shortcut they make. This gives the path a lovely human fit. But sometimes you want to do the opposite. You want to design ways to get people to take a longer path, a longcut, so they can see or...
The Marginalian
How to Triumph Over the Challenges of the Creative Life: Audubon’s Antidote to Despair
We move through the world as surfaces shimmering with the visibilia of our accomplishments, the...
3 months ago
We move through the world as surfaces shimmering with the visibilia of our accomplishments, the undertow of our suffering invisible to passers-by. The selective collective memory we call history contributes to this willful blindness, obscuring the tremendous personal cost behind...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Greatness Is Difficult'
“It is
dangerous to admire a great man for his sins: we may too easily adopt his sins
for our own...
a year ago
“It is
dangerous to admire a great man for his sins: we may too easily adopt his sins
for our own out of admiration for his genius; and when the inevitable reaction
occurs, the great man’s reputation is likely to suffer unduly.”
Among writers, Dr. Johnson
is the first fallible...
The American Scholar
Martha Foley’s Granddaughters
What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett
The...
5 months ago
What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett
The post Martha Foley’s Granddaughters appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
I Once Worked Hard
When I began working at my first job out of college, I knew I didn’t want to spend my whole career...
over a year ago
When I began working at my first job out of college, I knew I didn’t want to spend my whole career there. I was a college graduate (that means something, right?) working at a climbing gym, part time, teaching seven-year-olds how to climb at about $10 an hour.
I had no idea what I...
Anecdotal Evidence
'An Old Man in the Dark'
Philip
Larkin shares with us the mundane complaints of the middle class, the lusts and
anxieties of...
a year ago
Philip
Larkin shares with us the mundane complaints of the middle class, the lusts and
anxieties of people unburdened with wealth and pull. He grows deaf, loses hair,
juggles girlfriends, gains weight and drinks too much. As a librarian he works hard.
He will never be hip except...
The American Scholar
“The Answering Machine” by Linda Pastan
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “The Answering Machine” by Linda Pastan appeared first on The...
6 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “The Answering Machine” by Linda Pastan appeared first on The American Scholar.
sbensu
The Market for Takes
Solving for the Twitter equilibrium
5 months ago
Solving for the Twitter equilibrium
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Result of Education Carried on By Curiosity'
“His
curiosity was so pure it seemed almost childlike.”
Vladimir
Nabokov is describing his friend...
9 months ago
“His
curiosity was so pure it seemed almost childlike.”
Vladimir
Nabokov is describing his friend in exile, Iosif Hessen (1866-1943), and makes
him sound like an extraordinary fellow. He continues in the obituary he wrote
for his friend:
“He was
living proof of the fact that a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'That Excellent Judge, Posterity'
A reader can
sometimes judge the true worth of a writer by the quality of his detractors....
9 months ago
A reader can
sometimes judge the true worth of a writer by the quality of his detractors. Take
Dwight Macdonald on James Gould Cozzens. And then consider Arnold Bennett
(1867-1931). Today he’s judged a respectable but minor English novelist, something
of a documentarian, if he’s...
Josh Thompson
VCR's debug_logger and `git diff`
I recently added the vcr gem to one of our repositories, and was adding tests for an external...
over a year ago
I recently added the vcr gem to one of our repositories, and was adding tests for an external API.
One of my tests was passing, and I wanted to commit the VCR cassette, along with the test/code that went with it.
I had thought I’d rebuilt the VCR cassette a few minutes before,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Demographer of the Common Woe'
Only in the
last twenty years or so have I started accumulating deaths, logging them on a...
a year ago
Only in the
last twenty years or so have I started accumulating deaths, logging them on a internal
list and weighing them against my own precious self. I’ve led a improbably
healthy life which only encouraged the universal young man’s conviction that I
was immune to mortality and...
Josh Thompson
Benefits of helplessness
The last few days were rough, strangely enough. I live in beautiful Golden, Colorado with my best...
over a year ago
The last few days were rough, strangely enough. I live in beautiful Golden, Colorado with my best friend (who I happen to be married to), and I’ve got a pretty cool job to boot. That’s the “big three”, right? (Relationships, work, location.)
Yep. Except from Thursday through...
The American Scholar
“Spring” by J. R. Solonche
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “Spring” by J. R. Solonche appeared first on The American...
8 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “Spring” by J. R. Solonche appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'She Exhibits the Unrepentant Bad Taste Which Belongs to Good Taste in Its Good Sense'
“Most poetry
is as poor as most fiction or most biography, or most books. But it is often...
7 months ago
“Most poetry
is as poor as most fiction or most biography, or most books. But it is often so
aggressively, so conceitedly poor and undistinguished that readers cannot be
altogether blamed for not bothering with the new books as they come out, and I
am always hesitant to make them...
The Marginalian
Sundogs and the Sacred Geometry of Wonder: The Science of the Atmospheric Phenomenon That Inspired...
Notes on the eternal dialogue between art and science in our yearning to know reality.
a year ago
Notes on the eternal dialogue between art and science in our yearning to know reality.
Josh Thompson
Persistence
Persistence. It’s worth far more than any finite sum of money. Actually, it’s worth more than an...
over a year ago
Persistence. It’s worth far more than any finite sum of money. Actually, it’s worth more than an unlimited amount of money, because an unlimited amount of money would complicate my life (and probably yours) far more than we can possibly imagine.
Persistence. I keep trying to...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Aesthetically They Are Still Delightful'
“Early
Ellington records are like vintage cars. They are not as he or anyone else
would make them...
8 months ago
“Early
Ellington records are like vintage cars. They are not as he or anyone else
would make them nowadays, but historically they are still important and
aesthetically they are still delightful.”
Let's not confine Philip
Larkin’s conclusion exclusively to Duke Ellington’s
early...
Anecdotal Evidence
'That Lofty Vehicle, High Dudgeon'
A friend is studying
Greek while reading Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad alongside...
a year ago
A friend is studying
Greek while reading Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad alongside George Chapman’s version of Homer from the seventeenth
century. Like me, she’s a reader not a scholar, and like generations of
students and common readers I first encountered Chapman...
This Space
39 Books: 2003
This year I read Robert Antelme's The Human Race for the first time. I was nonplussed. The strange...
7 months ago
This year I read Robert Antelme's The Human Race for the first time. I was nonplussed. The strange title, closer to popular sociology than memoir, should have been a warning. This was not quite the horror story one imagines of memoirs from those who survived Nazi concentration...
Anecdotal Evidence
'To Feel With Melancholy Wonder'
I was
introduced to the poet, critic and editor Stanley Burnshaw (1906-2005) in the mid-Seventies
by...
6 months ago
I was
introduced to the poet, critic and editor Stanley Burnshaw (1906-2005) in the mid-Seventies
by Edward Dahlberg, a difficult man who furthered my education. Collected in Epitaphs for Our Time: The Letters of Edward
Dahlberg (George Braziller, 1967) are five letters to...
Anecdotal Evidence
'They’ve No Clue of My Reality'
“We are all
well and in good spirits, have enough to eat. I have not yet eaten the cake you
sent me....
11 months ago
“We are all
well and in good spirits, have enough to eat. I have not yet eaten the cake you
sent me. I do not have to do guard duty as I am an officer, think of sergeant
Peck, sounds pretty big don’t it, eh?”
That’s
Marcus Peck, a soldier from Sand Lake, N.Y., who answered...
Josh Thompson
Everything I Do and Think I've Read in a Book (or, exploring the relationship between books and...
Here’s yet another big post on money and income and saving and reading. I tried to write everything...
over a year ago
Here’s yet another big post on money and income and saving and reading. I tried to write everything on my mind in one massive letter, so I could write a really detailed answer once, rather than a less-useful but less-thoughtful email that I can never reuse.
Hey there,
I’m...
Josh Thompson
Becoming an Early Riser
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
-The man no child likes to...
over a year ago
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
-The man no child likes to hear about when being awoken by their parents
Getting out of bed is a struggle. I’ve spent the better part of twenty four years setting my alarm as late as possible so I could have...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Amid Tremendous History, New Pity'
Oscar Williams (1900-4) was a middling poet with a gift for compiling excellent anthologies,
thirty...
9 months ago
Oscar Williams (1900-4) was a middling poet with a gift for compiling excellent anthologies,
thirty of which he published during his lifetime. Early on, several of them
were my primers, an inviting way to learning the poetic tradition in English on
the cheap. One of them, the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Leave Him, Full of Envy'
Without resorting to clues, who do you think Eugenio Montale is talking about:
“He is a
strong,...
a year ago
Without resorting to clues, who do you think Eugenio Montale is talking about:
“He is a
strong, cordial, human man, whom one seems to have always known.”
One hint: it’s
a poet. Among major poets, the pickings are slim. Strong? Scratch Cavafy.
Cordial? There goes Frost. “Human...
Anecdotal Evidence
'They Never Settle Down'
A reader has
happened on an unfamiliar word while reading Dimitri Obolensky’s The Byzantine...
3 weeks ago
A reader has
happened on an unfamiliar word while reading Dimitri Obolensky’s The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe,
500-1453 (1971), one he finds “especially amusing”:
“Cosmas [Indicopleustes]
tells us of monks who, ignoring their vows, live unchastely, engage in trade
and...
Wuthering...
Xenophon's Socrates
I’m still catching up with myself.
I wanted to spend March thinking about Socrates as a...
a year ago
I’m still catching up with myself.
I wanted to spend March thinking about Socrates as a philosopher,
independent from Plato’s use of him, to the extent that it is possible. The Socrates of Aristophanes in The Clouds
is not much help. But luckily we have
Xenophon, a close...
The Marginalian
Excellent Advice for Living: Kevin Kelly’s Life-Tested Wisdom He Wished He Knew Earlier
"The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished."
a year ago
"The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished."
Anecdotal Evidence
'To Be in Some Respect Unique'
“[L]et us
not forget that ‘public’ denotes a collection not of identical units, but of
units...
11 months ago
“[L]et us
not forget that ‘public’ denotes a collection not of identical units, but of
units separable and (under close scrutiny) distinguishable one from another.”
I work with professors of statistics, among others, for whom data are the primal substance of the human world. You...
The Marginalian
Look Up: The Illustrated Story of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, Who Laid the Groundwork for...
How a brilliant woman rose against the tide of her time to fathom the mysteries of space.
a year ago
How a brilliant woman rose against the tide of her time to fathom the mysteries of space.
Josh Thompson
How to Wake Up Early
An understanding of sleep, and attempts to wake up early
(Read Part Two, and Part Three)
My...
over a year ago
An understanding of sleep, and attempts to wake up early
(Read Part Two, and Part Three)
My understanding of sleep has evolved. When I was born, I spent most of my time asleep (if I recall correctly…) and gradually spent less and less time sleeping, until I was down to about...
The Marginalian
Leaning Toward Light: A Posy of Poems Celebrating the Joys and Consolations of the Garden
“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone,”...
a year ago
“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone,” the poet and passionate gardener May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the parallels between these two creative practices — parallels that have led centuries of beloved writers to...
Anecdotal Evidence
'And Then Became a Name Like Others Slain'
In a six-word
paragraph in “Preliminary,” his brief introduction to Undertones of War, Edmund...
a month ago
In a six-word
paragraph in “Preliminary,” his brief introduction to Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden articulates the impulse that
would drive his poetry for the next half-century: “I must go over it again.” Psychically,
there was no Armistice. Whether to purge its memory or...
Anecdotal Evidence
'All Is Not Dead'
Sadness
nicely coexists with happiness this time of year. Christmas is over. Memories
abound. We...
a week ago
Sadness
nicely coexists with happiness this time of year. Christmas is over. Memories
abound. We underestimate ourselves when it comes to emotional capacity. Only
the insane know one emotion at a time, which is why bliss and clinical
depression are rare states and why Joseph...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Amber of His Style'
Isaac
Waisberg at IWP Books has digitalized three volumes of Desmond MacCarthy’s essays
and reviews...
8 months ago
Isaac
Waisberg at IWP Books has digitalized three volumes of Desmond MacCarthy’s essays
and reviews -- Portraits (1931), Criticism (1932), Memories (1953) – with a promise of more to come. MacCarthy’s reputation
in the U.S. is almost sub-atomic. Devotees of Bloomsbury think of hm...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Master of Light But Stinging Irony'
I bought
Vikram Seth’s novel-in-verse The Golden
Gate when it was published in 1986. Around that...
6 months ago
I bought
Vikram Seth’s novel-in-verse The Golden
Gate when it was published in 1986. Around that time I was giving up the
practice of writing in books, which had always left me a little uncomfortable. Instead,
I switched to keeping notebooks. In The
Golden Gate I see that I...
Josh Thompson
On Feedback
Most of what makes us who we are is based on some sort of feedback obtained earlier in our life.
By...
over a year ago
Most of what makes us who we are is based on some sort of feedback obtained earlier in our life.
By my best estimation, there are two types of feedback:
Explicit feedback
, which comes in a little box labeled “this is feedback”, and is hard to miss.
Implicit feedback
, which is...
Wuthering...
Thales, the first philosopher - what is philosophy, anyways?
He [Thales of Miletus] held that the original substance of all things is water, and that the world...
a year ago
He [Thales of Miletus] held that the original substance of all things is water, and that the world is animate and full of deities. They say he discovered the seasons of the year, and divided the day into 365 days. (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, p. 12,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Are All Potential Recruits for Anarchy'
It’s an
honor to be published in The New
Criterion, a journal I started reading in 1986, four years...
7 months ago
It’s an
honor to be published in The New
Criterion, a journal I started reading in 1986, four years after it was
founded by the late Hilton Kramer and Samuel Lipman. To share pages in the June issue with Gary Saul Morson, Victor Davis Hanson and other gifted writers is...
Escaping Flatland
Garlic and gravel
fragments
5 months ago
The American Scholar
“How Do I Love Thee” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “How Do I Love Thee” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning appeared...
4 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “How Do I Love Thee” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Arid Interrogation'
As boys, in
our imaginations we tested ourselves. Would we prove courageous in combat? Our
fathers...
4 months ago
As boys, in
our imaginations we tested ourselves. Would we prove courageous in combat? Our
fathers had, so we believed, during World War II. Could we withstand torture?
These virtues, touched with Hollywood melodrama, seemed like essential aspects of
maturity. We wanted to be...
The Marginalian
Love and the Sacred
"I did not know what love was until I encountered one that kept opening and opening and opening."
a year ago
"I did not know what love was until I encountered one that kept opening and opening and opening."
Blog -...
Book Review - Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant
In the book Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant, author Roland Lazenby
meticulously shares the...
over a year ago
In the book Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant, author Roland Lazenby
meticulously shares the journey of Kobe Bryant, from ancestral influences
up through his final game in the NBA. He is a clear fan of Kobe’s
inarguable work ethic, but he allows readers to reinforce their...
Anecdotal Evidence
'To Carry on With the Business of the Day'
Beware of “nature
poetry.” It tends to be not about nature but the poet and his self-regarding...
4 months ago
Beware of “nature
poetry.” It tends to be not about nature but the poet and his self-regarding epiphanies.
Perhaps our finest nature poet is Yvor Winters. A basic understanding of
biology is useful in discouraging pantheism and other forms of fashionable nature
mysticism.
We...
Robert Caro
Alone on the Desert Her Dream Fades
A lack of basic infrastructure forced a 74‒year-old widow to carry a water bucket a mile-and-a-half...
a year ago
A lack of basic infrastructure forced a 74‒year-old widow to carry a water bucket a mile-and-a-half back to her tiny shack.
The American Scholar
Set in Seclusion
The post Set in Seclusion appeared first on The American Scholar.
7 months ago
The post Set in Seclusion appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Amateurism (in the Original Sense of the Term)'
Autodidact as a noun and adjective arrived in English in
1534 via French, from a Latinized form of...
11 months ago
Autodidact as a noun and adjective arrived in English in
1534 via French, from a Latinized form of the Greek for “self-taught.” The
range of the word’s uses in our university-smitten age is vast. Some academics apply
it to anyone without an advanced degree who presumes to have...
The Marginalian
We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt, the Power of Defiant Goodwill, and the Art of...
"It is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most...
9 months ago
"It is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most."
Anecdotal Evidence
'For a Dream's Sake'
Interviewer:
“Do you feel you could have had a much happier life?”
Philip
Larkin: “Not without...
a year ago
Interviewer:
“Do you feel you could have had a much happier life?”
Philip
Larkin: “Not without being someone else. I think it is very much easier to
imagine happiness than to experience it. Which is a pity because what you imagine
makes you dissatisfied with what you experience,...
Josh Thompson
No New Books
I’ve promised myself that I won’t add any more books to my Kindle, either by purchasing them from...
over a year ago
I’ve promised myself that I won’t add any more books to my Kindle, either by purchasing them from Amazon, or downloading them online, or renting them from a Library.
Why?
I’ve let reading about doing things stand in the way of doing the things. No amount of educational literature...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Cool Malignity of Othello'
“As Shakespeare
went on, however, he became interested in why people like evil, not for their
own...
a year ago
“As Shakespeare
went on, however, he became interested in why people like evil, not for their
own advantage but for its own sake.”
In his
lecture on Othello, W.H. Auden understands,
as a growing number of our contemporaries do not, that evil is autonomous and
self-justifying....
Anecdotal Evidence
'Taking Your Time, Angel of Death'
I like plain
speaking when it comes to death. Not needlessly harsh but direct and above all...
a month ago
I like plain
speaking when it comes to death. Not needlessly harsh but direct and above all unvarnished,
no flowers, closer to a coroner’s report than a greeting card. A well-meaning
reader has sent belated condolences for my brother’s death in August without
once using any of...
The Marginalian
Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30...
"We are not incoherent, a bundle of sensations, but a self, rising from experience, continually...
a year ago
"We are not incoherent, a bundle of sensations, but a self, rising from experience, continually growing and revised... Through experience, education, art, and life, we teach our brains to become unique. We learn to be individuals. This is a neurological learning as well as a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Their Thoughts, Their Longings, Hopes, Their Fate'
A new
record: stopped three times at train crossings in a single day without leaving
the city,...
10 months ago
A new
record: stopped three times at train crossings in a single day without leaving
the city, driving only to the university library and back, twenty-two miles. Because
of its sprawling, unplanned nature, Houston is a dense web of train tracks, as
John Bainbridge, a staff writer...
The Marginalian
The Paradise Notebooks: A Poet and a Geologist’s Love Letter to Life Lensed Through a Mountain
"Each world bears all the worlds we might find within it. If you understand one outcropping of...
8 months ago
"Each world bears all the worlds we might find within it. If you understand one outcropping of stone, or one wildflower, or one hummingbird — if we see our way along the tracery of cause and effect, the mystery of change and recreation — then we are led to everything we see, and...
The Marginalian
Sheltering the Heroes Among Us: John Berger on Art as Resistance and Redemption of Justice
"The powerful fear art, whatever its form... because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities...
a month ago
"The powerful fear art, whatever its form... because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us... becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring."
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Perpetual Fountain of Fun'
“It was not
only in the best company he uttered his best things. He was a perpetual
fountain of fun;...
6 months ago
“It was not
only in the best company he uttered his best things. He was a perpetual
fountain of fun; an improvisatore, who
raised upon some shrewd comment wild edifices of exaggeration. His talk
ascended from rational wit to buffoonery; yet his towerings never daunted
others. He...
Wuthering...
Books finished in April 2023
I continue the practice of posting a list as a substitute for real writing.
Coming soon: a long...
a year ago
I continue the practice of posting a list as a substitute for real writing.
Coming soon: a long overdue loot at Seneca's plays, a glance at Gide's Counterfeiters, and some messing around with Plato's Republic.
If I did not write in April, I at least read:
GREEK PHILOSOPHY
The...
The American Scholar
Marlana Stoddard Hayes
Hope blooms
The post Marlana Stoddard Hayes appeared first on The American Scholar.
5 months ago
Hope blooms
The post Marlana Stoddard Hayes appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
Dead Stars: Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s Stunning Love Poem to Life
"We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love...
a year ago
"We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?"
ribbonfarm
Storytelling — Just Add Dinosaurs
In a previous part, I covered the storytelling model of Matthew Dicks, who specializes in live,...
9 months ago
In a previous part, I covered the storytelling model of Matthew Dicks, who specializes in live, spoken-word competitive storytelling from real life. He has a theory of stories I found deeply unsatisfying: That the essence of a story is a moment of character change where the...
Josh Thompson
Your "Community" Should Not Be Local
When Kristi and I were planning our move from Maryland to Colorado, the biggest challenge we...
over a year ago
When Kristi and I were planning our move from Maryland to Colorado, the biggest challenge we anticipated was no longer being a short drive away from my sister,
Jen, and Kristi’s brother,
Richard. There are a few reasons, however, that we decided the benefits of moving...
Wuthering...
Books finished in March 2023
For some reason I have been putting a monthly account of completed books on Twitter, where it is a...
a year ago
For some reason I have been putting a monthly account of completed books on Twitter, where it is a common practice, although mostly with photographs of book stacks. I am not sure why I have not put the lists here as well. I guess I am not sure any of this is interesting.
Soon,...
The American Scholar
Hot and Cold
The post Hot and Cold appeared first on The American Scholar.
6 months ago
The post Hot and Cold appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Depression
I’m starting to write more regularly these days. For a long time, I’ve hardly written anything, or...
over a year ago
I’m starting to write more regularly these days. For a long time, I’ve hardly written anything, or only written when external circumstances required me to write something. For example, when I give a talk, I always create a page to “support” the talk, that I can link to in slides,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'An Ill-Assorted Collection'
A friend has
broken up with her boyfriend and he is launching protracted salvos of nasty
emails in...
2 months ago
A friend has
broken up with her boyfriend and he is launching protracted salvos of nasty
emails in her direction. As prose they are better than average. There have been
no threats of violence and little profanity. The ex’s weapon of choice is a
detailed critique of every aspect...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Until He Un-Alived'
“But at
bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and
if a poet...
4 months ago
“But at
bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and
if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience
worth having, for which the dutiful mob that signs on every September is no
substitute.”
Philip
Larkin’s...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Some Godforsaken Province'
After the
Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the poet Aleksander Wat fled to Lwów, already
occupied by...
7 months ago
After the
Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the poet Aleksander Wat fled to Lwów, already
occupied by the Soviets. He was arrested by the NKVD the following year and
held in a military prison in that city, then moved to Kiev, the Lubyanka in Moscow, and Saratov, more than...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Make Memory Speak so Volubly'
A reader
shares with me her first reading of two books she knows I value highly. First,...
a year ago
A reader
shares with me her first reading of two books she knows I value highly. First, Kipling’s
Kim: “I was
twelve. I was very interested in ‘spiritual’ things. It was the Beatles and the
Maharishi, you know. I got it from the library and it was love at first sight.
I...
ribbonfarm
Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes
I started reading Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes while I was in Istanbul last...
8 months ago
I started reading Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes while I was in Istanbul last November and finally finished it last week. It’s a really solid and absorbing book, and far too dense and rich with detail to zip through, which is why I read it a dozen or so pages...
The Marginalian
The Science and Poetry of Anthotypes: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, Recreated in Hauntingly Beautiful...
On September 20, 1845, the polymathic Scottish mathematician Mary Somerville — the woman for whom...
12 months ago
On September 20, 1845, the polymathic Scottish mathematician Mary Somerville — the woman for whom the word scientist was coined — sent a letter to the polymathic English astronomer John Herschel, who six years earlier had coined the word photography for the radical invention of...
The American Scholar
Island Royalty
A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary
The post Island Royalty appeared first on The American...
a month ago
A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary
The post Island Royalty appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Injury Impedes Improvement
Kristi and I have been in Colorado for three months, I’ve been climbing regularly for two, I am back...
over a year ago
Kristi and I have been in Colorado for three months, I’ve been climbing regularly for two, I am back in shape and it feels good.
I am tempted to throw myself into climbing again. To climb every day, or maybe every other day, and finish every session with training. But here’s the...
Escaping Flatland
In praise of insular groups
Last spring, as we were exploring the coastline of our island, Johanna, the kids, and I crossed a...
8 months ago
Last spring, as we were exploring the coastline of our island, Johanna, the kids, and I crossed a meadow where two men were artificially inseminating a longhaired cow. We stopped to observe the work. When it was done, one of the men came over to where we stood by the electric...
The American Scholar
All Talk
Ease of communication will not save us
The post All Talk appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
Ease of communication will not save us
The post All Talk appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'So Important That It Ought to Absorb Him'
In his brief
portrait of Joseph Conrad, Desmond MacCarthy tells us the novelist “felt
himself...
a month ago
In his brief
portrait of Joseph Conrad, Desmond MacCarthy tells us the novelist “felt
himself impelled to attempt an intenser vividness in description. Try, just
try, so to describe something that the inattentive reader must see it, and the
attentive one can never forget that he...
Josh Thompson
Habits Take Preparation
Kristi and I moved to Golden, Colorado. We’ve been in our new apartment for five days. I’m trying to...
over a year ago
Kristi and I moved to Golden, Colorado. We’ve been in our new apartment for five days. I’m trying to quickly settle into a routine that makes sense for both of us.
For example - I work for a company in Boston. While I could keep local working hours (Mountain Time) I prefer to...
The American Scholar
The March Down Main
The post The March Down Main appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
The post The March Down Main appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
What Makes a Compassionate World: Sophie de Grouchy’s Visionary 18th-Century Appeal to Parents and...
The morning after the 2016 presidential election, I awoke to terrifying flashbacks of my childhood...
11 months ago
The morning after the 2016 presidential election, I awoke to terrifying flashbacks of my childhood under a totalitarian dictatorship. Desperate for assurance that the future need not hold the total moral collapse of democracy, I reached out to my eldest friend for perspective....
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Love of Reading Is Caught, Not Taught'
I’ve used “home
library” to describe the accumulation of books in our house but it’s starting
to...
2 months ago
I’ve used “home
library” to describe the accumulation of books in our house but it’s starting
to sound a little pretentious. For now I’ll keep it at “books.” Nadya Williams
titles her essay “Home Libraries Will Save Civilization,” which, I understand, is
more reader-enticing than...
The Marginalian
Poetic Ecology and the Biology of Wonder
"The real disconnect is not between our human nature and all the other beings; it is between our...
a year ago
"The real disconnect is not between our human nature and all the other beings; it is between our image of our nature and our real nature."
Josh Thompson
Type. Publish. Done.
Yesterday I read How the Hell do I Prioritize Work, Blog & Find Balance.
The author of the letter is...
over a year ago
Yesterday I read How the Hell do I Prioritize Work, Blog & Find Balance.
The author of the letter is a busy, accomplished guy and still manages to write regularly.
He said, in short:
I sit down, and I write. I’ve done it a lot, so I’m not bad at it. I don’t often proof read my...
The American Scholar
Anchoring Shards of Memory
We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both
The post Anchoring Shards of...
4 months ago
We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both
The post Anchoring Shards of Memory appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Troubleshooting Chinese Character Sets in MySQL
A while back, I picked up a bug where when a customer tried to save certain kinds of data using...
over a year ago
A while back, I picked up a bug where when a customer tried to save certain kinds of data using Chinese characters, we were replacing the Chinese characters like 平仮名 with a series of ?.
This will be a quick dive through how I figured out what the problem was, and then validated...
Anecdotal Evidence
'On Satan’s Chamberlains Highseated in Berlin'
In 2011, in
an antiques-cum-junk shop here in Houston, I found a copy of an anthology, The Spirit of...
a year ago
In 2011, in
an antiques-cum-junk shop here in Houston, I found a copy of an anthology, The Spirit of Man, published as a
wartime morale booster in 1916, edited by the Poet Laureate, Robert
Bridges. It’s the fourth edition, from 1923. I knew the title because of the
contribution...
Wuthering...
Stein's style - Mostly no one will be wanting to listen, I am certain
Not many find it interesting this way I am realizing every
one, not any I am just now hearing, and...
7 months ago
Not many find it interesting this way I am realizing every
one, not any I am just now hearing, and it is so completely an important thing,
it is a complete thing in understanding, I am going on writing, I am going on
now with a description of all whom Alfred Hersland came to know...
The Elysian
“Friends” as the ideal community
The one where communes aren't the answer.
7 months ago
The one where communes aren't the answer.
Anecdotal Evidence
'He's Not Pulling It Out of Thin Air'
A friend
tells me he is boycotting a favorite bookstore because, as he writes, “someone
posted a...
9 months ago
A friend
tells me he is boycotting a favorite bookstore because, as he writes, “someone
posted a fair-sized sign on the store’s ‘Community Board’ reading, ‘From The
River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free.’” There’s a naïvely childish part of
me that finds the obscenity...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Dead Wall or a Thick Mist'
Reading occasionally reveals a pleasing convergence of thought between one writer, separated by...
a year ago
Reading occasionally reveals a pleasing convergence of thought between one writer, separated by centuries
and continents, and another. The happy reader is their ambassador and beneficiary.
I was again reading Nabokov’s brief, death-haunted novel from 1972, Transparent Things. Its...
This Space
39 Books: 2002
The quiet joy of short, constrained memoirs. I borrowed a copy of this book in 2002 and then found a...
7 months ago
The quiet joy of short, constrained memoirs. I borrowed a copy of this book in 2002 and then found a copy in a remaindered shop for £5.
Anne Atik got to know Beckett in the late 1950s through the artist Avigdor Arikha, later her husband. Beckett's circle of friends included as...
ribbonfarm
Truth-Seeking Modes
Been on a Venn diagram kick lately, since being primed to think in Venns by Harris campaign. This...
4 months ago
Been on a Venn diagram kick lately, since being primed to think in Venns by Harris campaign. This one summarizes an idea I’ve long been noodling on: The healthiest way to relate to a truth-seeking impulse is as an infinite game, where the goal is to continue playing, not arrive...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Till Love and Fame to Nothingness Do Sink'
Dr. Johnson
thought the first aim of biography was utilitarian: “I esteem biography, as
giving us...
2 months ago
Dr. Johnson
thought the first aim of biography was utilitarian: “I esteem biography, as
giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use.” The reader reads
the life of another, reflects on it and applies the lessons he deduces to
himself. In the early pages of his...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Each Sweaty Midnight I’m a Lifer'
Think of
this as an unexpected coda to Monday’s post, “A Recon Patrol Is a Small Unit,”
in which I...
4 months ago
Think of
this as an unexpected coda to Monday’s post, “A Recon Patrol Is a Small Unit,”
in which I asked readers to report anything they knew about the war
correspondent Albert W. Vinson. He was author of a dispatch recounting a 1968 reconnaissance
patrol in Vietnam led by the...
The American Scholar
For Want of Touch
The astonishing breadth of our passions
The post For Want of Touch appeared first on The American...
4 months ago
The astonishing breadth of our passions
The post For Want of Touch appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Notes from 'Why We Sleep'
I first read Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams about two years ago. It...
over a year ago
I first read Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams about two years ago. It immediately led me to prioritize sleep over almost everything else.
Most of us don’t get enough sleep, and are worse for it. Usually when the topic of sleep comes up, I say
Hey, there’s...
The American Scholar
Betsy, Mary, and Trish
The post Betsy, Mary, and Trish appeared first on The American Scholar.
7 months ago
The post Betsy, Mary, and Trish appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Look for Truth, for Knowledge, for Wisdom'
“The library
is, and always has been, the heart of a college. . . . For professors--professors
of...
a year ago
“The library
is, and always has been, the heart of a college. . . . For professors--professors
of the humanities, at any rate--as much as students, are the creatures of the
library. Just as the laboratory is the domain of the sciences, so the library
is the domain of the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Stimulated to Vigour and Activity'
When John
Ruskin (b. 1819) traveled as a boy, his father packed in his luggage four small
volumes of...
8 months ago
When John
Ruskin (b. 1819) traveled as a boy, his father packed in his luggage four small
volumes of Dr. Johnson’s Rambler and Idler essays. In his peculiar memoir Praeterita (1885), Ruskin tells us “had
it not been for constant reading of the Bible, I might probably have...
The Marginalian
Archives of Joy: Reflections on Animals and the Nature of Being
An invitation to "a certain, forgotten way of seeing the world" and an exultation at "earthly life,...
a year ago
An invitation to "a certain, forgotten way of seeing the world" and an exultation at "earthly life, with its duration so short it obliges us to surpass ourselves."
Josh Thompson
Winter on Two Pairs of Socks
We’re
minimalists, mostly. We try to not have a bunch of stuff. This naturally extends to the...
over a year ago
We’re
minimalists, mostly. We try to not have a bunch of stuff. This naturally extends to the wardrobe.
I’ll cover more about what we wear another time, but for now, I want to give you an idea. With the right socks, you can go an entire winter with just two pairs of socks. You...
sbensu
The birth of a (pseudo) currency
A dozen pseudo-currencies were issued in Argentina in 2002. How did that work? And why are they...
10 months ago
A dozen pseudo-currencies were issued in Argentina in 2002. How did that work? And why are they coming back in 2024?
Ben Borgers
My Guilt for Useless Things
over a year ago
Ben Borgers
Thursday, January 20, 2022
over a year ago
The Marginalian
Delight Between Science and Magic: Euler’s Disk and the Sound of the Singularity
One afternoon in the late 1980s, sitting in the company cafeteria, aerospace engineer Joseph Bendik...
a month ago
One afternoon in the late 1980s, sitting in the company cafeteria, aerospace engineer Joseph Bendik found himself so bored that he took a coin out of his pocket and began spinning it atop the table. In a testament to the eternal paradox of boredom and wonder as two sides of the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A General Effect of Pleasing Impression'
Back in the Golden Age of Blogging, the decline of
which roughly coincided with the arrival of...
a year ago
Back in the Golden Age of Blogging, the decline of
which roughly coincided with the arrival of Anecdotal Evidence in 2006, literary
memes were far more popular. Some were trivial parlor games, a way for certain readers
to safely show off without having ever opened a book....
This Space
Proust regained
I recommend very highly for anyone who has read or not read In Search of Lost Time Brian Nelson's...
a year ago
I recommend very highly for anyone who has read or not read In Search of Lost Time Brian Nelson's The Swann Way, the first volume in a new translation of the entire novel by diverse hands, in this fine paperback from Oxford World's Classics. His translation of the chapter Swann...
Ben Borgers
Brief: AI-summarized news
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
Don't Focus on the Present
If you accept the premise that training
cycles are the method by which you will improve your...
over a year ago
If you accept the premise that training
cycles are the method by which you will improve your climbing, you
should be able to focus less on the day-by-day fluctuation in your performance.
At least, I should be able to, since I accept that premise. Yet I still struggle to not be...
Wuthering...
Ovid's Metamorphoses, Canto I, "Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge"
Some notes on Canto I of Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 CE). Just some of the things I am looking for...
a year ago
Some notes on Canto I of Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 CE). Just some of the things I am looking for or
enjoying while reading Ovid’s epic of “forms changed / into new bodies.” (tr. Charles Martin, 2004, p. 15). Or, per Arthur Golding (1567, p. 3 of the
Paul Dry paperback) “Of...
Anecdotal Evidence
'These Pieces of Moral Prose'
“Where did
you get your humility? I thought that was an extinct virtue.”
Creating
anything...
7 months ago
“Where did
you get your humility? I thought that was an extinct virtue.”
Creating
anything worthwhile, whether joke, villanelle or pot of lentil soup, calls
for pride and humility. Pride because one presumes to add to the world’s bounty
and impose it on others; humility because...
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