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The Elysian
One year of my work, printed The Elysian Volume II is here.
2 months ago
Josh Thompson
Waking Up Early 2.0 A few months ago, I wrote about waking up early. I tracked my progress for almost a month, and most...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
A few months ago, I wrote about waking up early. I tracked my progress for almost a month, and most of the days I woke up between 4:45 and 6:00. My “must be up by” time is 7:30a, so waking up more than an hour and a half early counts as a huge win. From mid-may until June 7, I...
Wuthering...
everything in a being is always repeating - reading Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans Since I actually read the thing for some reason I will write some notes on Gertrude Stein’s enormous...
6 months ago
63
6 months ago
Since I actually read the thing for some reason I will write some notes on Gertrude Stein’s enormous The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (1925).  It is a monster.  Why did I read it?  No, that is not the right questions.  There are good reasons to read...
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
40
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...
The American Scholar
Aging Out Many of us do not go gentle into that good night The post Aging Out appeared first on The American...
2 weeks ago
5
2 weeks ago
Many of us do not go gentle into that good night The post Aging Out appeared first on The American Scholar.
Wuthering...
Metamorphoses, cantos 7 through 10 - more Heroides, more gore, more of everything - What meen my... Metamorphoses is fluid, quick, and ever-changing.  Let’s look at cantos VII through X, which...
9 months ago
65
9 months ago
Metamorphoses is fluid, quick, and ever-changing.  Let’s look at cantos VII through X, which have their share of famous stories, stories famous, or as famous as they are, because of Metamorphoses.  Venus and Adonis, Baucis and Philemon, Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion.  Icarus –...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Bright, Cheerful, Salubrious Hell' Max Beerbohm’s first radio broadcast, delivered on December 29, 1935, is titled “London Revisited.”...
11 months ago
13
11 months ago
Max Beerbohm’s first radio broadcast, delivered on December 29, 1935, is titled “London Revisited.” He celebrates the city of his birth (in 1872) and youth – the Edwardian era – and implicitly critiques the London of the interbellum years:  “London has been cosmopolitanised,...
The Marginalian
Magnolias and the Meaning of Life: Science, Poetry, Existentialism On cruelty, kindness, and the song of life.
a year ago
This Space
39 Books: 2016 I love it when people announce that "if Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be writing Eastenders", or...
7 months ago
51
7 months ago
I love it when people announce that "if Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be writing Eastenders", or Game of Thrones or crime fiction, according to one and another variation. The innocence of the claim is charming, giving voice to the desperation to give weight to ephemera. But I...
Anecdotal Evidence
'And the Third Is To Be Kind.' A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude (David R. Godine, 2002) is a collection of the...
a year ago
22
a year ago
A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude (David R. Godine, 2002) is a collection of the late publisher/poet’s photographs of artists well-known and obscure. Williams was no snob when it came to talent and genius. He photographs Stevie Smith, Guy Davenport...
The American Scholar
Mystery Solved! The post Mystery Solved! appeared first on The American Scholar.
6 months ago
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
The Marginalian
The Poetic Science of the Ghost Pipe: Emily Dickinson and the Secret of Earth’s Most Supernatural... "That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet."
a year ago
The American Scholar
The March Down Main The post The March Down Main appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
Steven Scrawls
You Are Not Incompressible You Are Not Incompressible can be summarised as: walking, walking, walking, bit of fighting...
6 months ago
2
6 months ago
You Are Not Incompressible can be summarised as: walking, walking, walking, bit of fighting with orcs, walking, walking, walking, anguish, walking, walking, walking, bit more fighting with orcs, walking, walking, walking. —Goodreads review of “The Lord of the Rings” Im returning...
Ben Borgers
Friday, January 14, 2022
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
Habits, Milestones, and Climbing Since April 9th, I have spent exactly 70 minutes training for climbing. Prior to April 27th, I have...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
Since April 9th, I have spent exactly 70 minutes training for climbing. Prior to April 27th, I have climbed exactly seven times in the last five months. I just spent two days at the New River Gorge and exceeded my expectations, considering my almost half-year hiatus from regular...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Am Thinking This May Be My Last Summer' I never encountered the name Keith Douglas in school. We knew some of the English poets of the first...
6 months ago
20
6 months ago
I never encountered the name Keith Douglas in school. We knew some of the English poets of the first war – Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon – but the second seemed a blank. On my own, I learned of the Americans – Karl Shapiro, Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov. Only...
sbensu
On becoming a person (book) It reframes therapy as a relationship instead of a treatment.
2 weeks ago
ribbonfarm
Protocol Entrepreneurship I’m running the Summer of Protocols program for the Ethereum Foundation again this year. Here is the...
9 months ago
2
9 months ago
I’m running the Summer of Protocols program for the Ethereum Foundation again this year. Here is the Call for Applications. I’d appreciate any help getting it in front of the right candidates. The core of it is what we’re calling Protocol Improvement Grants (PIGs): 90k for a team...
This Space
The end of something Thirteen years ago I posted The beginning of something to mark the fifteenth anniversary of Spike...
a year ago
50
a year ago
Thirteen years ago I posted The beginning of something to mark the fifteenth anniversary of Spike Magazine (not to be confused with Spiked), which I helped to found when the world wide web was forming, and to comment on the direction online literary culture had taken. By that...
This Space
39 Books: 1995 Looking over the list of books read over a decade, it becomes clear that each book came too early or...
7 months ago
34
7 months ago
Looking over the list of books read over a decade, it becomes clear that each book came too early or too late, or not at all; unless, of course, not yet. Untimely medications. Of the first, Robert Pinget's Be Brave applies. Again, lightness rather than heaviness, when there was...
Escaping Flatland
How I write essays Notes on process
2 weeks ago
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
2
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 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
30
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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Favourable Enough for a Writer' Jules Renard writing in his journal on November 22, 1906:  “I am in no great hurry to see the...
a year ago
12
a year ago
Jules Renard writing in his journal on November 22, 1906:  “I am in no great hurry to see the society of the future – our own favourable enough for a writer. By its absurdities, its injustices, its vices, its stupidities, it nourishes a writer’s observations. The more men...
Anecdotal Evidence
'An Old Man or Young Man Mad About Literature' Sometimes an eccentric judgment – one that reflects the critic’s discernment, not merely his wish to...
7 months ago
30
7 months ago
Sometimes an eccentric judgment – one that reflects the critic’s discernment, not merely his wish to provoke and attract attention – proves useful to the common reader. Take a sentence from Ford Madox Ford's final book, The March of Literature (1939): “The modern English language...
Ben Borgers
Gamelan Music
over a year ago
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
1
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...
Josh Thompson
Recommended Reading I like to read, and I often recommend books to others. I used to have a very different list of...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
I like to read, and I often recommend books to others. I used to have a very different list of recommended books, but they come and go with time. This list is sorta ‘older’, circa 2021. 1 A newer/different list is available here These are a collection of books that come up in...
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."
3 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Twitter of Inconsequent Vitality' This week I will interview a professor of chemical engineering who is retiring after forty-four...
8 months ago
54
8 months ago
This week I will interview a professor of chemical engineering who is retiring after forty-four years on the faculty. He came to the university straight from earning his Ph.D. He’s neither flashy nor hungry for publicity, and I was surprised he agreed to speak with me. He has a...
Josh Thompson
Why Your Belayer is Keeping You from Climbing Hard(er) Since climbing regularly again (!!!), I’ve observed lots of belaying in the gym. I can’t walk up to...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
Since climbing regularly again (!!!), I’ve observed lots of belaying in the gym. I can’t walk up to a stranger and say “Excuse me, sir, I noticed that your poor belaying is totally crippling your climber’s ability to try hard, and actively eliminating any hope you had of...
sbensu
Enterprise sales meets product development What I’ve learned from selling enterprises while developing a new product. This is less of a guide...
10 months ago
2
10 months ago
What I’ve learned from selling enterprises while developing a new product. This is less of a guide and more of a cautionary tale.
Anecdotal Evidence
'O Deliquescence of Our Quartz-like Loves!' A chemical engineer describing his recent research to me used a lovely word: deliquescent. The word...
5 months ago
44
5 months ago
A chemical engineer describing his recent research to me used a lovely word: deliquescent. The word entered English in the eighteenth century and its original context was strictly scientific: deliquescence occurs when a substance absorbs moisture from the air and becomes a...
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...
2 months ago
39
2 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...
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...
8 months ago
26
8 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
'Gleams Like a Warm Homestead Light' Here is epigram 1.33 by Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. 38-102 A.D.), better known in English as...
2 months ago
27
2 months ago
Here is epigram 1.33 by Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. 38-102 A.D.), better known in English as Martial:  “In private she mourns not the late-lamented; If someone’s by, her tears leap forth on call. Sorrow, my dear, is not so easily rented. They are true tears that without witness...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Larkin Was a Larrikin' At age ten or so I had a pen pal, a girl from New South Wales, Australia. We both wrote in pencil on...
11 months ago
17
11 months ago
At age ten or so I had a pen pal, a girl from New South Wales, Australia. We both wrote in pencil on lined paper, and we met through our respective newspapers in Cleveland and Sydney. The correspondence lasted for a year or so and I don’t remember what either of us ever said to...
Anecdotal Evidence
'What American Beauty Should Be' An old friend called and reminded me of the September almost forty years ago when we hiked along...
3 months ago
32
3 months ago
An old friend called and reminded me of the September almost forty years ago when we hiked along Otter Creek in southern Vermont near Dorset. Often we hiked in Otter Creek, which is filled with granite boulders. It was less hiking than climbing horizontally. Between the stones...
The Marginalian
The Dalai Lama’s Ethical and Ecological Philosophy for the Next Generation, Illustrated "We are all interconnected in the universe, and from this, universal responsibility arises......
a year ago
50
a year ago
"We are all interconnected in the universe, and from this, universal responsibility arises... Everyone has the responsibility to develop a happier world."
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
12
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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'But There Must Have Been More' One of the unexpected gifts of being young and working as a newspaper reporter was the...
a year ago
9
a year ago
One of the unexpected gifts of being young and working as a newspaper reporter was the giddy sensation of being thrown into life and finally mistaken for an adult. Some of the one-time abstractions – murder, suicide, cancer – become real. Once you’ve interviewed the parents of a...
The Marginalian
Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace "Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel...
10 months ago
Josh Thompson
The Power of an Audacious Goal I generally try to hedge the risks I face. I’m no daredevil, nor do I love danger, but I do love...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
I generally try to hedge the risks I face. I’m no daredevil, nor do I love danger, but I do love pursuing opportunities that take me beyond my comfort zone. The funny thing about going beyond your comfort zone is that once you’ve done it once or twice, you redefine your comfort...
The Elysian
Three classic utopian novels—now collectibles More than 100 years ago, three thinkers imagined what a utopian future might look like in the year...
3 months ago
35
3 months ago
More than 100 years ago, three thinkers imagined what a utopian future might look like in the year 2000. Now, their novels are available as a collectible set.
Wuthering...
The Story of the Stone, volume 4 - It was an eerie, desolate night. At the two-thirds mark, after 80 chapters of the 120, three big changes hit The Story of the Stone...
16 hours ago
8
16 hours ago
At the two-thirds mark, after 80 chapters of the 120, three big changes hit The Story of the Stone (c. 1760 / 1791).  First, David Hawkes, the original translator of the Penguin edition, dies; John Minford finishes the job.  Second, the author of the novel, Cao Xueqin, dies,...
The Marginalian
A Whole of Parts: Philosopher R.L. Nettleship on Love, Death, and the Paradox of Personality "Death is self-surrender... Love is the consciousness of survival in the act of self-surrender."
6 hours ago
Ben Borgers
Publishing my Fall 2022 class notes
a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Art Must Be Giving Pleasure' On May 14, 1947, after giving seven months of lectures on the sonnets and all but two of...
a year ago
12
a year ago
On May 14, 1947, after giving seven months of lectures on the sonnets and all but two of Shakespeare’s plays at the New School of Social Research in New York City, W.H. Auden delivered a concluding lecture. He roots Shakespeare’s vision in the notion of original sin and what he...
The Elysian
Could AI make us wise? An alternative to the internet making us stupid.
8 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'It Is the Past That Cast the Stars' I and the first issue of Mad magazine arrived in October 1952. A decade or so later I was a devoted...
a year ago
6
a year ago
I and the first issue of Mad magazine arrived in October 1952. A decade or so later I was a devoted reader. That same month, Poetry, a journal I would start reading a few years after Mad, published its fortieth anniversary issue. Included is the work of more than fifty poets,...
The American Scholar
All in Your Head The post All in Your Head appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
This Space
39 Books: 1988 This is one of my most surprising discoveries in second-hand bookshop trawls in the far off days...
7 months ago
24
7 months ago
This is one of my most surprising discoveries in second-hand bookshop trawls in the far off days when they existed, especially because it was found in Portsmouth, not the most literary of cities despite Dickens and Conan-Doyle (or perhaps because of Dickens and Conan-Doyle)....
The American Scholar
“Death Fugue” by Paul Celan Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Death Fugue” by Paul Celan appeared first on The American...
6 months ago
54
6 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Death Fugue” by Paul Celan appeared first on The American Scholar.
Ben Borgers
Waking up Early
over a year ago
The American Scholar
Esteban Cabeza de Baca History witnessed, from the picket lines The post Esteban Cabeza de Baca appeared first on The...
7 months ago
50
7 months ago
History witnessed, from the picket lines The post Esteban Cabeza de Baca appeared first on The American Scholar.
Ben Borgers
Tufts Meal Plans Are a Scam
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Vacuum with American Light' Edward Hopper is often a favorite painter of literary-minded people because, I suspect, so many of...
7 months ago
58
7 months ago
Edward Hopper is often a favorite painter of literary-minded people because, I suspect, so many of his works suggest in-media-res excerpts from larger narratives. Looking as his paintings is like opening a novel to a memorable scene, without access to backstory or subsequent...
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
40
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
Novel Food
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
How To Write A Letter of Recommendation for Yourself I meet regularly with early-career software developers. A few recurring meetings, 1x/week, plus...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
I meet regularly with early-career software developers. A few recurring meetings, 1x/week, plus ad-hoc calls as needed with others. A question came up recently: My three-month internship is close to wrapping up. The Co-founder/CEO/lead developer of the consulting company I’m at...
Josh Thompson
Find out how much money you've made (in your entire life) This post went by on the Personal Finance subreddit today: https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/ After...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
This post went by on the Personal Finance subreddit today: https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/ After creating an account / logging in, click on Earnings, then add the columns. If you have been working for many years, try copying/pasting the column in excel and using the sum...
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
64
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...
The American Scholar
“He Asked About the Quality” by C. P. Cavafy Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “He Asked About the Quality” by C. P. Cavafy appeared first...
6 months ago
52
6 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “He Asked About the Quality” by C. P. Cavafy appeared first on The American Scholar.
This Space
Atheism of the novel "Here it comes: the information dumping..." From section 237, page 185 of Ellis Sharp's latest...
a year ago
35
a year ago
"Here it comes: the information dumping..." From section 237, page 185 of Ellis Sharp's latest novel, the part that is commentary on his attempt to destroy a commercially successful novel emulating "the style that The Guardian liked and promoted": The narrator is a young...
The Marginalian
The Wound Is the Gift: David Whyte on the Relationship Between Anxiety and Intimacy "Intimacy is presence magnified by our vulnerability, magnified by increasing proximity to the fear...
2 weeks ago
The Marginalian
The Last Wonder: D.H. Lawrence on Death and the Best Lifelong Preparation for It "Know thyself, and that thou art mortal. But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal."
a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Not Movement But Glaciation' There’s an art to reviewing a book one doesn’t love but doesn’t hate, especially if the reviewer...
a year ago
7
a year ago
There’s an art to reviewing a book one doesn’t love but doesn’t hate, especially if the reviewer prizes the author’s earlier work. How to juggle critical rigor, honesty and tact? Turner Cassity, writing about Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Amaranth (1934), does it with confident...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Someone Who Could Never Be a Peasant' I first encountered Robert Alter in 1970 in the issue of TriQuarterly devoted to Vladimir Nabokov,...
3 months ago
31
3 months ago
I first encountered Robert Alter in 1970 in the issue of TriQuarterly devoted to Vladimir Nabokov, already one of my favorite writers. Alter’s contribution was “Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics,” which Nabokov later described as “practically flawless.” A...
The American Scholar
Paradise Reclaimed Olivia Laing on the dark histories and utopian dreams of the flower bed The post Paradise Reclaimed...
4 months ago
37
4 months ago
Olivia Laing on the dark histories and utopian dreams of the flower bed The post Paradise Reclaimed appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
On Fables: Finishing up Antifragile I’m cleaning up some notes I wanted to jot down over the last few weeks Nassim Taleb, in...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
I’m cleaning up some notes I wanted to jot down over the last few weeks Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile, says: The great economist Ariel Rubinstein gets the green lumber fallacy - it requires a great deal of intellect and honesty to see things that way. Rubinstein refuses to...
Anecdotal Evidence
'An Author Who Inspires Such Perennial Affection' “This impossibly erudite, overbearing, tender, and anguished man lived in a perpetual state of...
a week ago
5
a week ago
“This impossibly erudite, overbearing, tender, and anguished man lived in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction with himself which only disciplined labor could allay but never completely still.”  In their moral and emotional complexity, certain lives resemble the finest novels –...
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
50
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,...
Josh Thompson
HTTParty and to_json I was having some trouble debugging an HTTParty POST request. A few tools that were useful to...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
I was having some trouble debugging an HTTParty POST request. A few tools that were useful to me: post DEBUG info to STDOUT netcat to listen to HTTP requests locally I had this code: options = { headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json", authorization: "Bearer...
Anecdotal Evidence
''In Prose, Plain as Pike, Pillory' Austin Clarke (1896-1974) was an Irish poet of the generation after Yeats, the slightly...
2 months ago
30
2 months ago
Austin Clarke (1896-1974) was an Irish poet of the generation after Yeats, the slightly older contemporary of Louis MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh. In 1968 he published A Sermon on Swift and Other Poems, and the 117-line title poem appeared in The Massachusetts Review in 1970....
Wuthering...
The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox - counting the pages, he was quite terrified at the number,... Di at The little white attic is chasing Don Quixote through the 18th century, so she read,...
a week ago
10
a week ago
Di at The little white attic is chasing Don Quixote through the 18th century, so she read, obviously, The Female Quixote (1852) by Charlotte Lennox.  I had not read it, so I trailed along. An archetypal novelistic heroine, young Arabella has had her brain addled by novels: From...
Blog -...
Book Review - King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine This book is a timeless classic that had a significant impact on deepening my understanding of the...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
This book is a timeless classic that had a significant impact on deepening my understanding of the masculine. Published in 1990, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover introduces readers to the concept of mature masculine archetypes and their immature shadows. The authors, Robert...
The American Scholar
Kinship and Contradictions Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz on the complexities of Native American identity The post Kinship and...
a week ago
11
a week ago
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz on the complexities of Native American identity The post Kinship and Contradictions appeared first on The American Scholar.
This Space
The end of literature, part five "Stupid" and "a marketing exercise" were the first two descriptions I saw of the New York Times' 100...
5 months ago
57
5 months ago
"Stupid" and "a marketing exercise" were the first two descriptions I saw of the New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century polled from hundreds of "literary luminaries" offering ten choices each, and while it is both of those things, "parochial" is the first word that...
The American Scholar
Jason Middlebrook Tree rings in time The post Jason Middlebrook appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
The Marginalian
The Parts We Live With: D.H. Lawrence and the Yearning for Living Unison "We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living,...
8 months ago
The Marginalian
Trust, Betrayal, and the Nexus of Mathematics and Morality: The Prisoner’s Dilemma Animated Illuminating the pitfalls of the mind in felt and gingerbread.
a year ago
Josh Thompson
Metaprogramming in Ruby: method_missing I’m working through Metaprogramming in Ruby It’s a great read. There are examples in the books, but...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
I’m working through Metaprogramming in Ruby It’s a great read. There are examples in the books, but I wanted to take them out and apply them to some easy Exercisms. I feel some disclosure may be useful. In no way, at all, should you ever implement any of the “solutions” I’m...
The Elysian
I'm not going to have kids to save the economy Not on my list of reasons to have children.
8 months ago
Escaping Flatland
Can we scale cultures that support learning? new essay in Asterisk
2 months ago
The American Scholar
Rhyme, Not Repetition All that’s past isn’t necessarily present The post Rhyme, Not Repetition appeared first on The...
6 months ago
21
6 months ago
All that’s past isn’t necessarily present The post Rhyme, Not Repetition appeared first on The American Scholar.
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
20
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
How To Take Back Your Attention On The Internet with uBlock note: this page has 17Mb of gifs and images. I don’t really want to take the time to manually trim...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
note: this page has 17Mb of gifs and images. I don’t really want to take the time to manually trim the gifs from >3Mb/each to <1Mb each, so I didn’t. If you’re on mobile, or trying to conserve data, you might want to come back to this one later. I value my attention and focus. I...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Range and Liveliness of Poetry' I heard from a high-school classmate who remembered the time in A.P. English our senior year when...
9 months ago
17
9 months ago
I heard from a high-school classmate who remembered the time in A.P. English our senior year when the teacher had us form small groups, select a poem and prepare a discussion. At my suggestion, our group picked “The Groundhog” (1934) by Richard Eberhart (1904-2005). Note its...
Ben Borgers
Bronze, Silver, Gold
over a year ago
Wuthering...
The Nicomachean Ethics - moderate Aristotle - clarity within the limits of the subject matter I will borrow the quotation from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics I found on p. 186 of Gary Paul...
a year ago
42
a year ago
I will borrow the quotation from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics I found on p. 186 of Gary Paul Morson’s extraordinary new study of the ethics if Russian literature: Our discussion will be adequate if it achieves clarity within the limits of the subject matter.  For precision...
The Marginalian
Everything Is Already There: Javier Marías on the Courage to Heed Your Intuitions "This has nothing to do with premonitions, there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about it,...
a year ago
49
a year ago
"This has nothing to do with premonitions, there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about it, what’s mysterious is that we pay no heed to it."
Blog -...
Book Review - Codependent No More With more than five million copies sold by its twenty-fifth anniversary nearly a decade ago,...
over a year ago
1
over a year ago
With more than five million copies sold by its twenty-fifth anniversary nearly a decade ago, Codependent No More is a startling, powerful book that has touched the lives of so very many.
Wuthering...
Books I Read in May 2023 I had a good time. GREEK PHILOSOPHY The Nicomachean Ethics (4th C. BCE), Aristotle - a post,...
a year ago
93
a year ago
I had a good time. GREEK PHILOSOPHY The Nicomachean Ethics (4th C. BCE), Aristotle - a post, however shallow, should appear soon. FICTION Joseph in Egypt (1936), Thomas Mann The Long Valley (1938) & The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck - I last read this probably...
This Space
39 Books: 2010 This series has sailed into the doldrum years. Reading has become less of a headlong existential...
7 months ago
53
7 months ago
This series has sailed into the doldrum years. Reading has become less of a headlong existential adventure than something one does, a pastime, a hobby, something you tell a quiz show presenter how you relax: "I like to read, Brad." By this time I had given up reviewing...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Perhaps the Most Impressive of All' Spices meant salt and pepper. For my family like others in the American working class, there was no...
3 months ago
32
3 months ago
Spices meant salt and pepper. For my family like others in the American working class, there was no cardamom or turmeric. When I was a kid those would have sounded vaguely like medical conditions. We never heard of such things until decades later. For some baked goods, breakfast...
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
17
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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Dense, Democratic, Vulgar' When high summer arrives  -- in Texas, long before this Thursday’s equinox – I think of Saratoga...
6 months ago
41
6 months ago
When high summer arrives  -- in Texas, long before this Thursday’s equinox – I think of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where we bought our first house and lived for seven years. The Saratoga Race Course was less than a mile away. So were Yaddo and Broadway, the main drag downtown. We...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Neither Angels Nor Devils' A favorite story about Dr. Johnson reminded me of something the late critic John Simon had written...
10 months ago
30
10 months ago
A favorite story about Dr. Johnson reminded me of something the late critic John Simon had written on his blog five years ago. In a post titled “Curse Words,” abbreviated by Simon throughout as “CW,” he reviews profanity as used in various settings and languages, including Croat,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Gave Themselves Without Idle Words to Death' Rudyard Kipling was barely twenty years old when he wrote his “Prelude” to Departmental Ditties...
a year ago
9
a year ago
Rudyard Kipling was barely twenty years old when he wrote his “Prelude” to Departmental Ditties (1886), which includes these lines: “The deaths ye died I have watched beside, / And the lives ye led were mine.” Eugene Sledge was nineteen when he enlisted in the Marine Corps a year...
Anecdotal Evidence
'And Here the Nothingness Shows Through' I watched an old favorite, Laurel and Hardy’s 1933 short Me and My Pal. It’s Oliver’s wedding day...
8 months ago
48
8 months ago
I watched an old favorite, Laurel and Hardy’s 1933 short Me and My Pal. It’s Oliver’s wedding day and his best man, Stanley, gives him a jigsaw puzzle as a wedding gift. Oliver dismisses it at first as “childish balderdash” and promptly gets hooked putting it together along with,...
The Marginalian
The Ecstasy of Eternity: Richard Jefferies on Time and Self-Transcendence This is the great paradox: that human life, lived between the time of starlings and the time of...
9 months ago
19
9 months ago
This is the great paradox: that human life, lived between the time of starlings and the time of stars, is made meaningful entirely inside the self, but the self is a mirage of the mind, a figment of cohesion that makes the chaos and transience bearable. A few times a lifetime, if...
The Marginalian
How to Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Proper Aim of Education "While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the...
a year ago
The Marginalian
The Porcupine Dilemma: Schopenhauer’s Parable about Negotiating the Optimal Distance in Love This is the supreme challenge of intimacy — how to reconcile the aching yearning for closeness with...
a year ago
24
a year ago
This is the supreme challenge of intimacy — how to reconcile the aching yearning for closeness with the painful pressures of actually being close, how to forge a bond tight enough to feel the warmth of connection but spacious enough to feel free. Kahlil Gibran knew this when he...
Josh Thompson
MySQL concatenation and casting I recently set up my environment for working through SQL for Mere Mortals. I’ll record some...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
I recently set up my environment for working through SQL for Mere Mortals. I’ll record some interested tidbits here as I go. Chapter 5: Concatenation without the || operator I use MySQL at work, and MySQL doesn’t support the || operator for string concatenation. So, in the book,...
Josh Thompson
Refactoring practice: Get rid of `attr_accessors` in `ogre.rb` in 2 minutes Preparing for Turing Series Index What follows is an eight-part series that will help you pick up...
over a year ago
2
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
'Implacable, Bewildered, It Moves Among Us' Some sixteen years ago David Ferry thanked me for a post I had written about some of the lines by...
a year ago
8
a year ago
Some sixteen years ago David Ferry thanked me for a post I had written about some of the lines by Dr. Johnson interpolated into his poems. That email is long gone but I remember being touched by his buoyant sense of gratitude. That a man in his eighties, much honored as a poet,...
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...
2 months ago
22
2 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)...
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
19
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...
Josh Thompson
Blocks and Closures in Ruby Continuing on from yesterday’s post about method_missing, I’m moving on to a part of Ruby’s language...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
Continuing on from yesterday’s post about method_missing, I’m moving on to a part of Ruby’s language that has been a bit of a mystery for me for quite some time. I’m still working through Metaprogramming in Ruby. It’s the concept of lambdas, procs, blocks, and more. I also hope...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Winter Came in August Killing Fruit and Seed' A sad and sorely final yet incomplete tagline found after a poem in the Winter 1986 issue of The...
a month ago
22
a month ago
A sad and sorely final yet incomplete tagline found after a poem in the Winter 1986 issue of The American Scholar:  “Edward Case’s work has appeared in various journals, including the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, and Modern Age. This poem was taken from a collection of...
The American Scholar
The Source The post The Source appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
The American Scholar
Guillermo The post Guillermo appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
The Marginalian
The Rigor of Angels: Human Nature and the Nature of Reality "What we are striving for lies inside us; we find ourselves in the world and the world in...
a year ago
The Marginalian
Wonder-Sighting on Planet Earth: The Space Telescope Eye of the Scallop Inside Earth's most alien vision.
a year ago
Escaping Flatland
Self-help for cocoons and what's on my mind
9 months ago
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
10
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,...
The Elysian
Week 7: Boost your essays all over the internet
8 months ago
Astral Codex Ten
Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste ...
2 weeks ago
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
2
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
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
39
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...
The Marginalian
May Sarton on How to Cultivate Your Talent "A talent grows by being used, and withers if it is not used."
a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Noble Unconsciousness Is in Him' A reader asks if I have any heroes. “I’m guessing Samuel Johnson is one,” she writes, and that’s...
5 months ago
44
5 months ago
A reader asks if I have any heroes. “I’m guessing Samuel Johnson is one,” she writes, and that’s correct. “I think people are too cynical to have heroes today,” she continues. “They’re embarrassed to say someone is a hero. Nobody’s good enough. Everybody wants to look for failure...
Ben Borgers
Am I a Gym Bro Now?
over a year ago
Ben Borgers
Bubble Tea Snobbery
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
Climbing in Cuba, 2019 A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to go climbing in Cuba. Mark and Dave, walking back from...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to go climbing in Cuba. Mark and Dave, walking back from climbing outside Viñales Locals crag, called “The roof of the world”. Stunning routes. because it was so hot, we spent a lot of time in this cave. Kristi and I tend to stick...
ben-mini
Root Canals and Bill Gates In Finding Nemo, there was a scene about a root canal surgery that absolutely terrified me: This...
6 months ago
1
6 months ago
In Finding Nemo, there was a scene about a root canal surgery that absolutely terrified me: This could just be me, but I spent a remarkable amount of my childhood worrying about root canals. Horror stories like these created a universal phobia that dentists suck and that’s...
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Are So Lucky Having English' “We are lucky that English is our language because it’s better than, say, French for poetry. All...
a year ago
8
a year ago
“We are lucky that English is our language because it’s better than, say, French for poetry. All those millions of words and all those different ways of saying the same, or similar, things. And new words all the time.”  It’s fashionable in some quarters to distrust language, to...
The Marginalian
The Work of Wonder: Phillip Glass on Art, Science, and the Most Important Quality of a Visionary Epoch after epoch, we humans have tried to raise ourselves above other animals with distinctions...
a year ago
14
a year ago
Epoch after epoch, we humans have tried to raise ourselves above other animals with distinctions that have turned out false — consciousness is not ours alone, nor is grief, nor is play. If there is anything singular about us, it is our capacity to be wonder-smitten by the world...
Anecdotal Evidence
'It Bubbles and Chuckles Along' “Persistently obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings.”  A truth I had...
2 months ago
23
2 months ago
“Persistently obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings.”  A truth I had been waiting to hear for much of my life. Willful obscurity (which is not the same as complexity) is favored by writers contemptuous of readers. Avant-gardistes often fancy...
Wuthering...
The Assemblywomen by Aristophanes - Octopus tunnyfish dogfish and skate The Assemblywomen by Aristophanes – or The Parliament of Women, or several other titles – was...
over a year ago
35
over a year ago
The Assemblywomen by Aristophanes – or The Parliament of Women, or several other titles – was performed in 392 BCE, thirteen years after The Frogs.  In the interval many things had changed.  Athens had been conquered; democracy was overthrown but restored; one endless war ended...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Not More Respected, Though Less Loved' In the late summer and autumn of 1773, Johnson and Boswell visited Scotland, the latter’s...
a year ago
9
a year ago
In the late summer and autumn of 1773, Johnson and Boswell visited Scotland, the latter’s birthplace and the butt of many jokes by the former. The journey lasted eighty-three days and both men published books recounting their adventures. Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Lead the Thoughts Into Domestic Privacies' A friend tells me a newspaper is looking for a fulltime obituary writer and she thinks it would be...
a year ago
11
a year ago
A friend tells me a newspaper is looking for a fulltime obituary writer and she thinks it would be an ideal job for me. I’m not in the market but she’s right. Good obituaries are small-scale biographies and always a privilege to write. The first thing I wrote as a newspaper...
The American Scholar
Ups and Downs The post Ups and Downs appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 weeks ago
Josh Thompson
Blessed to be Sick Yesterday, I wrote about reducing work hours to less than 40 hours a week. Yesterday, I was...
over a year ago
1
over a year ago
Yesterday, I wrote about reducing work hours to less than 40 hours a week. Yesterday, I was struggling to be engaged in my work. I was easily distracted, and didn’t feel very efficient during the day. Once I identified the tasks I needed to complete before I could walk away from...
The Marginalian
The Beach and the Soul: Anne Morrow Lindbergh on the Benedictions of the Sea "The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient... Patience,...
6 months ago
24
6 months ago
"The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient... Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach."
The Elysian
Can we create a wise & enlightened citizenry? We'll need to address cognitive biases if we want to reach Plato's ideal.
8 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Also Read for Ecstasy' A reader one-third of my age asks, “Why are books so important to you? What do they matter?” Her...
8 months ago
55
8 months ago
A reader one-third of my age asks, “Why are books so important to you? What do they matter?” Her questions aren’t cynical. She sounds like a reader driven by the sort of bookish hunger I recognize. Her tastes are eclectic, not confined strictly to the American or...
The American Scholar
Bards Behind Bars Reading Sartre aloud inside a maximum-security prison The post Bards Behind Bars appeared first on...
4 months ago
38
4 months ago
Reading Sartre aloud inside a maximum-security prison The post Bards Behind Bars appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
Sienna Martz Sculpting the detritus of fast fashion The post Sienna Martz appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
27
2 months ago
Sculpting the detritus of fast fashion The post Sienna Martz appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
December 2016 Goals December 19th seems a bit late to write about December’s goals, huh? Nonetheless, I’ve had some, and...
over a year ago
1
over a year ago
December 19th seems a bit late to write about December’s goals, huh? Nonetheless, I’ve had some, and I will still have them through the end of the month. I did post a review of November a few days ago. This should really be rolled into that. A “monthly review/going forward”...
Ben Borgers
How /swipes Works
over a year ago
Wuthering...
Books I read in December 2023 - No one’s worse than you, she says Lots of short fantasy fiction this month, perhaps everything in the first section except the May...
11 months ago
34
11 months ago
Lots of short fantasy fiction this month, perhaps everything in the first section except the May Sarton novel and Eugene O’Neill play, balanced by a complementary pair of Holocaust memoirs. NOVELS, STORIES & A PLAY Ocean of Story, Vol. 1 (11th cent.),  Somadeva, tr. C. H....
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Fragility of Happiness' Christopher Carduff, books editor at the Wall Street Journal, asked me to review a new translation...
a year ago
8
a year ago
Christopher Carduff, books editor at the Wall Street Journal, asked me to review a new translation of a Russian novel due for publication in November. The proofs arrived on Thursday and I sent Chris an email letting him know I was already reading the book. The email bounced back...
Robert Caro
Anatomy of a $9 Burglary “Anatomy of a $9 Burglary” is among Caro’s best early writing. When police arrested a criminal, all...
a year ago
2
a year ago
“Anatomy of a $9 Burglary” is among Caro’s best early writing. When police arrested a criminal, all signs indicated a simple case of burglar
Ben Borgers
Hands Occupied
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
Dizzying but Invisible Depth The following is from https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/dfydM2Cnepe, but Google+ is...
over a year ago
1
over a year ago
The following is from https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/dfydM2Cnepe, but Google+ is shutdown, so it’s not easily sharable. I’m reposting here because this is such a useful post. Dizzying but invisible depth You just went to the Google home page. Simple, isn’t...
The American Scholar
Lift Off The post Lift Off appeared first on The American Scholar.
7 months ago
This Space
Books of the year 2024 In order of being read. Giorgio Agamben – What I saw, heard, learned… One night, along Venice’s...
a week ago
19
a week ago
In order of being read. Giorgio Agamben – What I saw, heard, learned… One night, along Venice’s Zattere, watching the putrid water lap at the city’s foundations, I saw that we exist solely in the intermittence of our being, and that what we call I is just a shadow...
Josh Thompson
Letter to Two Climbers (Part 2) Hello again, it’s me! We met climbing a few days ago. I wrote you a letter, but didn’t want to leave...
over a year ago
1
over a year ago
Hello again, it’s me! We met climbing a few days ago. I wrote you a letter, but didn’t want to leave it on such a pessimistic note. First, I commend you both for getting out there. You both invested a lot in making that weekend happen. You acquired the correct tools, and spent...
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
25
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...
sbensu
We need visual programming. No, not like that. Why do we keep building visual programming environments? Why do we never use them? What should we do...
5 months ago
The Marginalian
The Two Souls Within: Hermann Hesse on the Dual Life of the Creative Spirit "Like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a...
11 months ago
12
11 months ago
"Like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a...
The Marginalian
An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days I have found that the surest way of seeing the wondrous in something ordinary, something previously...
4 months ago
37
4 months ago
I have found that the surest way of seeing the wondrous in something ordinary, something previously underappreciated, is coming to love someone who loves it. As we enter each other’s worlds in love — whatever its shape or species — we double our way of seeing, broaden our way of...
The Elysian
Maybe you need to have more fun "Fun" as essential to human flourishing.
5 months ago
Ben Borgers
The real reason for my multiple majors
a year ago
Josh Thompson
The Slight Edge, and why you should read it I read The Slight Edge a few months ago. Since then, it’s been the book I recommend most often to...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
I read The Slight Edge a few months ago. Since then, it’s been the book I recommend most often to most people. (I don’t make book recommendations willy-nilly, but if something seems relevant to what the person I’m speaking to is experiencing/thinking about, I make a...
The Marginalian
How You Relate to Anything Is How You Relate to Everything: Reclaiming the Spirit of the Christmas... Because life is a cosmos of connection, because to be alive is to be in relationship with the world,...
2 days ago
4
2 days ago
Because life is a cosmos of connection, because to be alive is to be in relationship with the world, because (in the immortal words of John Muir) “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” how we relate to anything is how...
Ben Borgers
iPad Impatience
over a year ago
The Elysian
I built a castle to save the economy You're welcome.
8 months ago
Ben Borgers
Strong Hobbies
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
Tiny Habits take 2 Dr. BJ Fogg runs Tiny Habits, a one-week course on building new habits. Since most of what we do is...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
Dr. BJ Fogg runs Tiny Habits, a one-week course on building new habits. Since most of what we do is governed by habits, it is reasonable to study how to build new ones, or replace bad ones. I have done his course before, and had success. I have been reading Freewith Kristi and...
sbensu
The Market for Takes Solving for the Twitter equilibrium
5 months ago
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
12
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....
The Elysian
No one buys books Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.
8 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Past Is Alive and Stirring With Objects' Published in the January 1821 issue of London Magazine are thematically linked essays by two...
11 months ago
10
11 months ago
Published in the January 1821 issue of London Magazine are thematically linked essays by two friends, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt: “New Year’s Eve” and “On the Past and Future,” respectively. Lamb’s is better known, and I'm aware of several readers who, like me, read it...
Josh Thompson
Issues related to the city of Golden While I was biking around recently, I saw notes about an upcoming neighborhood meeting about some...
over a year ago
1
over a year ago
While I was biking around recently, I saw notes about an upcoming neighborhood meeting about some rezoning, a big lot in downtown Golden. I went to the meeting (Thursday, July 22) and learned a lot. Here’s the lot in question: I have ridden my bike past this property hundreds of...
This Space
39 Books: 1999 I've always preferred the Serpent's Tail edition of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet over the others...
7 months ago
58
7 months ago
I've always preferred the Serpent's Tail edition of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet over the others published around the same time, such as from Quartet Encounters and Carcanet, the latter with a fussy variant on the title: The Book of Disquietude. But this one is the most pleasurable...
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
12
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...
Wuthering...
The sophists and their rehabilitation - they clearly cause the ruin and corruption of their... I have been pursuing the sophists, the great antagonists of Socrates and Plato.  Minimized for...
a year ago
32
a year ago
I have been pursuing the sophists, the great antagonists of Socrates and Plato.  Minimized for centuries in the history of philosophy as, following Plato (but not Socrates), hucksters, they, or some of them, are now taken seriously as an intermediate step between the cosmological...
This Space
Literature likes to hide Last December I was fortunate enough to borrow a copy of The Unmediated Vision, Geoffrey Hartman's...
a year ago
72
a year ago
Last December I was fortunate enough to borrow a copy of The Unmediated Vision, Geoffrey Hartman's first book, published in 1954. It is difficult to find a copy now but you can download a digital version of the book via the link. The opening chapter is a 50-page study of "Tintern...
The American Scholar
Moondance Experience the marvel that is The post Moondance appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
Ben Borgers
Publishing Class Notes
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Censure of Knaves and Fools' “Mr. Michael Johnson was a man of large and robust body, and of a strong and active mind; yet, as in...
2 months ago
19
2 months ago
“Mr. Michael Johnson was a man of large and robust body, and of a strong and active mind; yet, as in the most solid rocks veins of unsound substance are often discovered, there was in him a mixture of that disease, the nature of which eludes the most minute enquiry, though the...
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
17
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
'. . . Or That He Did Not' Some of us enjoy footnotes and other annotations. Thoughtful, non-Kinbotean notes accompanying older...
6 months ago
44
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
'A Collection of Scraps and Shards of Knowledge' “During this time we know [John] Donne was collecting his fascinations in a book: a collection of...
4 months ago
40
4 months ago
“During this time we know [John] Donne was collecting his fascinations in a book: a collection of scraps and shards of knowledge known as a commonplace book.” Like Donne (1572-1621), some of us are magpie-minded, collecting objects shiny and drab, often without obvious utility....
The Marginalian
Are You Living a Fairy Tale, a Novel, or a Poem? When reality fissures along the fault line of our expectations and the unwelcome happens — a death,...
5 months ago
50
5 months ago
When reality fissures along the fault line of our expectations and the unwelcome happens — a death, an abandonment, a promise broken, a kindness withheld — we tend to cope in one of two ways: We question our own sanity, assuming the outside world coherent and our response a form...
Anecdotal Evidence
'In Itself and Forever Shipwreck' I’ve just finished rereading William Maxwell’s final novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, published in...
a year ago
11
a year ago
I’ve just finished rereading William Maxwell’s final novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, published in two issues of The New Yorker in 1979 and as a book the following year. I read it in the magazine and I’ve since read the book – Maxwell’s finest, written when he was seventy years...
The Elysian
Free speech in the age of social media A discussion about misinformation, echo chambers, media spin, social trolling, and how we can create...
a week ago
8
a week ago
A discussion about misinformation, echo chambers, media spin, social trolling, and how we can create something better.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Life Is So Long' Several years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called MGUS (pronounced EM-gus) -- monoclonal...
8 months ago
22
8 months ago
Several years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called MGUS (pronounced EM-gus) -- monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance. It’s a symptom-less and in most cases benign disorder, but it can be a precursor to multiple myeloma. It means I see my oncologist once a...
The Marginalian
The Human Scale: Oliver Sacks on How to Save Humanity from Itself "...or there will be genocide, atomic bombs, and we'll all perish and take the planet with us."
a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Personal Affections' Only recently have I learned of the entrenched snobbery in certain quarters against anthologies. It...
2 months ago
30
2 months ago
Only recently have I learned of the entrenched snobbery in certain quarters against anthologies. It seems to be rooted in the conviction that readers ought to read writers in their original volumes, not someone’s curated selection, or something like that. In common with most...
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...
7 months ago
61
7 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."
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...
10 months ago
19
10 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...
Josh Thompson
Exploring source code via Griddler and Griddler-Mailgun Proofpoint had a two-day “hack day” recently. My coworker John and I teamed up on a cool little...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
Proofpoint had a two-day “hack day” recently. My coworker John and I teamed up on a cool little feature. I’ll give some context in a moment, but this post isn’t about the hack day, or email - it’s about exploring source code. Here’s the context: In my day-to-day, I work on a...
Ben Borgers
5% of things go wrong
a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Confined to Famous Defunct Chefs' Never underestimate the satisfactions of contrariness. It starts as an impulse in adolescence,...
a year ago
12
a year ago
Never underestimate the satisfactions of contrariness. It starts as an impulse in adolescence, of course, when the will to disagree and provoke comes naturally. It’s enormously entertaining to the provokers, irritatingly tiresome to the rest of us. We outgrow it or at least it...
This Space
A review from abroad In April 2016, a review by Alexander Carnera of my book This Space of Writing appeared in the...
over a year ago
35
over a year ago
In April 2016, a review by Alexander Carnera of my book This Space of Writing appeared in the Norwegian edition of Le Monde diplomatique as a supplement to the delightfully named Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen. Even though I can't read Danish, it was not only a highlight of the...
The American Scholar
Heart of Semi-Darkness A writer’s delectable quest for rare flavors The post Heart of Semi-Darkness appeared first on The...
3 months ago
24
3 months ago
A writer’s delectable quest for rare flavors The post Heart of Semi-Darkness appeared first on The American Scholar.
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
17
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...
The Elysian
I'm traveling the world to study utopia An update about my life and artistic process.
6 months ago
The Marginalian
D.H. Lawrence on the Hypocrisies of Social Change and What It Actually Takes to Shift the Status Quo "We have created a great, almost overwhelming incubus of falsity and ugliness on top of us, so that...
a year ago
Ben Borgers
The Magic of the Common Room
over a year ago
Ben Borgers
Streaks Are Extremely Powerful
over a year ago
Blog -...
Book Review - Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples, 2019 Edition I don’t anticipate giving many perfect ratings, but this book is a rare gem – a captivating...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
I don’t anticipate giving many perfect ratings, but this book is a rare gem – a captivating page-turner packed full of aha moments. The authors have woven together decades of personal research and experience in the field of intimate relationships to create a classic...
This Space
39 Books: 1986 In my second year of reading, I read four novels by DM Thomas, beginning with his most famous, The...
8 months ago
26
8 months ago
In my second year of reading, I read four novels by DM Thomas, beginning with his most famous, The White Hotel, in the edition below with its very 1980s cover design. I look at the single-word titles of the others and can remember absolutely nothing about them. Both the title...
Ben Borgers
Trash Bags in the Laundry Room
over a year ago
The American Scholar
The Fair Fields Only rarely did the outside world intrude on an idyllic Connecticut childhood, but in the tumultuous...
2 weeks ago
5
2 weeks ago
Only rarely did the outside world intrude on an idyllic Connecticut childhood, but in the tumultuous 1960s, that intrusion included an encounter with evil The post The Fair Fields appeared first on The American Scholar.
Ben Borgers
My Office Makes Me Feel Stupid
over a year ago
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
56
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...
Ben Borgers
A Small Life Radius
over a year ago
Ben Borgers
Pictures as Memories
over a year ago
The Elysian
Elysian gatherings around the world Picnic with me in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and San Francisco.
4 days ago
Wuthering...
Books I read, and desks I saw, in July - hoping he might tell me, / tell me what the waves don't... Right, July, July, so long ago.  I was on the road a little bit, making literary pilgrimages. ...
4 months ago
42
4 months ago
Right, July, July, so long ago.  I was on the road a little bit, making literary pilgrimages.  Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for example, to Herman Melville’s Arrowhead: On this spot, not at this exact desk but in front of this exact window, Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick,...
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
52
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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Culmination of Contemporary Economism' For half a century my brother earned his living making picture frames, some of which were themselves...
3 months ago
30
3 months ago
For half a century my brother earned his living making picture frames, some of which were themselves works of art. In later years he relied more on accounts with hotel chains and the glass office buildings in downtown Cleveland. Frames for these corporate accounts he called...
The Marginalian
A Victorian Visionary’s Prescient Case for Animal Rights and Vegetarianism "Once upon a time your fore-fathers made no scruple about not only killing, but also eating their...
a year ago
Ben Borgers
Formulaic Classes
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
Whole Messages in Slack I use Slack at work. And used it in Turing. And am in a few programming-related Slack groups. (Ahoy,...
over a year ago
1
over a year ago
I use Slack at work. And used it in Turing. And am in a few programming-related Slack groups. (Ahoy, #DenverDevs). My last job, I used Slack. The job before that, I got the whole company on Slack. I’ve used it for years. Slack delivers value to me, and induces little anxiety, and...
The Marginalian
A Spell Against Stagnation: John O’Donohue on Beginnings "Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning."
11 months ago
The Marginalian
An Antidote to the Anxiety About Imperfection: Parenting Advice from Mister Rogers "It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and...
a year ago
Escaping Flatland
Seeing people clearly Head of people operations for the entire friend group
a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Chap Who Doesn't Care Much About Anything' Below the masthead of the August 19, 2024 issue of The Daily Chronicle is a brief, boxed...
4 months ago
41
4 months ago
Below the masthead of the August 19, 2024 issue of The Daily Chronicle is a brief, boxed announcement:  “Today is National Orangutan Day. The apes are the largest tree-dwelling animals on Earth. They spend 90 percent of their time in trees, even sleeping in leafy nests. No wonder...
Ben Borgers
Productivity YouTubers
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Mouldering Boots of Other Days' The triolet, like its cousins the rondeau, rondel, and rondelet, is an intricate French verse form,...
9 months ago
48
9 months ago
The triolet, like its cousins the rondeau, rondel, and rondelet, is an intricate French verse form, usually eight lines long and written in iambic tetrameter. The first line is repeated as the fourth and seventh lines. Among English-language poets, Robert Bridges and Thomas Hardy...
The Marginalian
Let the Last Thing Be Song "When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold."
5 months ago
The Marginalian
200 Years of Solitude: Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists in Praise of the Creative and... There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows...
5 months ago
45
5 months ago
There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is to find the voice in the silence that has something to say to the world. In...
Ben Borgers
Schmooze
over a year ago
Ben Borgers
Have Your Cake and Eat It Too
over a year ago
Ben Borgers
gerp
over a year ago
The Marginalian
From Cells to Souls: The Poetic Science of How the Brain Became The making of our densely networked crucible of thought and tenderness.
a year ago
Josh Thompson
The Housing Market Is Absolutely Insane: How To Fix It I had a brief exchange with a good friend recently: The housing market is indeed insane. This...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
I had a brief exchange with a good friend recently: The housing market is indeed insane. This problem that we’re both discussing is: Unbelievable ($650,000 for a fixer upper) Oppressive (“unjustly inflicting hardship and constraint, especially on a minority or other subordinate...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Beauty, Clarity, Consolation, Truth' The blogosphere is infested with hair-trigger book critics whose job it is, at long last, to set you...
a year ago
9
a year ago
The blogosphere is infested with hair-trigger book critics whose job it is, at long last, to set you straight. Their world is strictly binary --  like/dislike, good/bad – and they are fond of superlatives: the best/the worst. Dissent sparks crackdowns and there is no appeals...
Josh Thompson
Can You Recover From Months (YEARS!) of Not Climbing? A few weeks ago, I headed into the gym thinking that I felt a little off-kilter. I’d not climbed in...
over a year ago
1
over a year ago
A few weeks ago, I headed into the gym thinking that I felt a little off-kilter. I’d not climbed in a week, I though, and maybe I was getting weaker or something. Turns out that wasn’t the problem - I had actually been climbing too much, and was feeling it. This is an odd...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Memories Packed in the Rapid-Access File' Last Saturday morning, the day my brother would die, the Uber driver who carried me from hotel to...
3 months ago
33
3 months ago
Last Saturday morning, the day my brother would die, the Uber driver who carried me from hotel to hospice in the morning went by the professional name “Lazarus” – an omen I choose to leave unexamined and merely enjoy. Ken would have enjoyed it. Shortly after his death one of the...
Ben Borgers
Good Software Has a Clear Geography
over a year ago
The Marginalian
Everything Is Happening All the Time: Legendary Physicist John Archibald Wheeler on Death and the... “To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” Walt Whitman writes in the prime of...
2 months ago
13
2 months ago
“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” Walt Whitman writes in the prime of life. “What happens when you get to the end of things?” four-year-old Johnny in Ohio asks his mother from the bathtub while Whitman’s borrowed atoms are becoming young grass in a...
ribbonfarm
Covid and Noun-Memory Effects Ever since I got a bout of Covid a couple of years ago (late 2022), I’ve noticed memory problems of...
6 months ago
1
6 months ago
Ever since I got a bout of Covid a couple of years ago (late 2022), I’ve noticed memory problems of a very specific sort: Difficulty remembering names. Especially people names, but also other sorts of proper nouns. This is especially marked when it comes to remembering names of...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Shadow Cabinet of Writers' “All of us, probably, have some favorite unfashionable author. Occasionally a minority taste can be...
2 months ago
28
2 months ago
“All of us, probably, have some favorite unfashionable author. Occasionally a minority taste can be powerful enough to make for some isolated masterpiece a small niche in literary history -- Henry Green’s Loving and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr. Fortune's Maggot have both...
Ben Borgers
Professorship Bias
over a year ago
This Space
39 Books: 1997 I found this ghastly 60-page Grove Press hardback edition in a second-hand bookshop, its large...
7 months ago
51
7 months ago
I found this ghastly 60-page Grove Press hardback edition in a second-hand bookshop, its large typeface and generous spacing very similar to Beckett's late works (Barbara Bray, Beckett's translator, also translated this). Such productions are rare now, and perhaps were when it...
The American Scholar
Cancer The post Cancer appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
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
9
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...
The American Scholar
Set in Seclusion The post Set in Seclusion appeared first on The American Scholar.
6 months ago
Ben Borgers
Thursday, January 13, 2022
over a year ago
The Marginalian
Mars and Our Search for Meaning: A Planetary Scientist’s Love Letter to Life "It is the search for infinity, the search for evidence that our capacious universe might hold life...
a year ago
10
a year ago
"It is the search for infinity, the search for evidence that our capacious universe might hold life elsewhere, in a different place or at a different time or in a different form."
Escaping Flatland
The third chair I remembered my loneliness; I felt it with a defencelessness that I had denied myself at the time....
10 months ago
20
10 months ago
I remembered my loneliness; I felt it with a defencelessness that I had denied myself at the time. The feeling that writing was impossible; that I would never find a place in the world that felt like home; that no one except my wife would ever care about me, about the things that...
Ben Borgers
The Land of Endless Socialization
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Now You Are Elsewhere' I came late to the poet Henri Coulette, long after his death in 1988 at age sixty, and promptly fell...
9 months ago
23
9 months ago
I came late to the poet Henri Coulette, long after his death in 1988 at age sixty, and promptly fell for his charms. Chief among them are elegance, technical virtuosity, wit and devotion to his native turf, Southern California. Like one of his favorite writers, Raymond Chandler,...
The American Scholar
Sheep Jones Swimming below the surface The post Sheep Jones appeared first on The American Scholar.
5 months ago
The Marginalian
The Universe in Verse Book "We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and...
7 months ago
23
7 months ago
"We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. At the crossing point of the two we may find a way of clarifying our experience and of sanctifying it."
The Marginalian
The Birth of the Byline: How a Bronze Age Woman Became the World’s First Named Author and Used the... Days after I arrived in America as a lone teenager, the same age Mary Shelley was when she wrote...
6 months ago
41
6 months ago
Days after I arrived in America as a lone teenager, the same age Mary Shelley was when she wrote Frankenstein, not yet knowing I too was to become a writer, I found myself wandering the vast cool halls of the Penn Museum. There among the thousands of ancient artifacts was one to...
The American Scholar
Born to Be Wild One founding family’s centuries-long journey The post Born to Be Wild appeared first on The American...
6 months ago
30
6 months ago
One founding family’s centuries-long journey The post Born to Be Wild appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
“Guests” by Celia Thaxter  Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Guests” by Celia Thaxter  appeared first on The American...
5 days ago
The American Scholar
Turning the World to Powder Jay Owens on the tiny particles that float through our lives The post Turning the World to Powder...
5 months ago
50
5 months ago
Jay Owens on the tiny particles that float through our lives The post Turning the World to Powder appeared first on The American Scholar.
Wuthering...
The endlessly adaptable plays of Plautus - I’ll make it into a comedy with some tragedy mixed in The plays of Plautus are the foundation of Western comedy.  That they are based on the plays of...
a year ago
49
a year ago
The plays of Plautus are the foundation of Western comedy.  That they are based on the plays of Menander and the other Greek New Comedy writers was irrelevant, since all of those texts were soon lost.  Plautus (and his successor Terence) carried the stage traditions, the...
The Elysian
The rich are controlling our government Ok but what can we do about it?
a week ago
Josh Thompson
Robert Moses - The Most Important Person You've Never Heard Of this was originally posted a few years ago, republishing as a blog post as I organize an...
7 months ago
2
7 months ago
this was originally posted a few years ago, republishing as a blog post as I organize an increasingly large number of links and resources here. Here’s a big dumping ground for some resources on robert moses I’ve got floating around. Obviously, this has grown to an unwieldy sizy...
The American Scholar
Our Pets, Our Plates In defense of the furred and the hoofed The post Our Pets, Our Plates appeared first on The American...
6 months ago
60
6 months ago
In defense of the furred and the hoofed The post Our Pets, Our Plates appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Like to Think of Pasteur in Elysium' In 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo, the scholar and...
7 months ago
56
7 months ago
In 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo, the scholar and translator Clarence Brown published The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, a selection ranging from Tolstoy and Chekhov to Voinovich and Sokolov. In the introduction he...
Ben Borgers
The Cost of Building an Idea
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Time Is Tight' My brother is dying as he lived – stubbornly. He has been in hospice for two weeks and is...
4 months ago
27
4 months ago
My brother is dying as he lived – stubbornly. He has been in hospice for two weeks and is failing incrementally. On Monday we were swapping memories and he stopped talking on Tuesday, the same day he stopped eating. He lies on his back on the hospice bed, mouth open, eyes staring...
Josh Thompson
Piece by Piece The following is inspired by Amy Hoy. I’ve got a secret to share: I’m working on building a product...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
The following is inspired by Amy Hoy. I’ve got a secret to share: I’m working on building a product (of the digital variety) that will be so damn goodpeople will pay me $100 or more to get it.  I’ve got a lot of bits and pieces of it littered around the internet, my computer,...
The Elysian
Hint #2 I'm publishing a new print collection in two weeks.
4 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Find It Hard to Read Great Books at All' A young reader tells me he is unable to read most books written before “about the middle of the 60s....
8 months ago
20
8 months ago
A young reader tells me he is unable to read most books written before “about the middle of the 60s. I like Vonnegut. A lot of the stuff before that is like a foreign language to me.” I’m reminded of an English professor who told me more than half a century ago that most of her...
Josh Thompson
Use an Alarm to Go to Bed Ironically, this is about going to bed early. See, it’s 10:40p, and I’m getting up tomorrow at 6:00....
over a year ago
1
over a year ago
Ironically, this is about going to bed early. See, it’s 10:40p, and I’m getting up tomorrow at 6:00. So I’m looking at about 7 hours of sleep. This is perfect. But, that is only if I’m asleep in the next twenty minutes. I know how long it takes to get ready to leave in the...
This Space
Favourite books 2021 If such things matter, and they don't, my book of the year is Peter Holm Jensen’s The Moment. As I...
over a year ago
29
over a year ago
If such things matter, and they don't, my book of the year is Peter Holm Jensen’s The Moment. As I wrote in April, it’s one in which the writer seeks “a modest, self-effacing place within the intersection of time and eternity” and can be read again and again for this reason, as...
The Marginalian
Eunice Newton Foote and the Birth of Climate Science: The Forgotten Woman Who Discovered the... On an anonymous desk in a spartan classroom of the pioneering Troy Female Seminary, a teenage girl...
a year ago
7
a year ago
On an anonymous desk in a spartan classroom of the pioneering Troy Female Seminary, a teenage girl with blue-grey eyes and an oceanic mind is bent over an astronomy book, preparing to revolutionize our understanding of the planet. The year is 1836. No university anywhere in the...
Ben Borgers
Sunk Cost Chinese
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'For Now I Am As Lilliputian As All the Rest' “My mood is like the weather,” Chekhov writes on April 8, 1889. “I’m not doing any work, just...
8 months ago
51
8 months ago
“My mood is like the weather,” Chekhov writes on April 8, 1889. “I’m not doing any work, just reading or pacing up and down. However, I don’t really mind having the time to read. It’s more enjoyable than writing. I feel that if I could live another forty years and spend the whole...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Kind of Representative Figure of His Era' We gave our sons Hebrew names: Joshua, Michael, David. They roughly translate as “God is...
a year ago
8
a year ago
We gave our sons Hebrew names: Joshua, Michael, David. They roughly translate as “God is deliverance,” “gift of God” and “beloved,” respectively. We are not Jewish and not linguists but we like plain names rooted in tradition, names with an identifiable history traceable, in this...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Otherwise, as Apolitical as Possible" “If Ralph Nader is for it, I am against it; otherwise, as apolitical as possible.”  That sort...
9 months ago
14
9 months ago
“If Ralph Nader is for it, I am against it; otherwise, as apolitical as possible.”  That sort of common sense becomes as rare as humility by the hour. It’s the time of year when we start filling the recycling bin with unsolicited, unread campaign literature. This season’s favored...
ribbonfarm
News from the Universe I did not expect to see auroras in the Seattle area. Or ever in my life without a special...
7 months ago
2
7 months ago
I did not expect to see auroras in the Seattle area. Or ever in my life without a special bucket-list effort I had no particular intention of making. Though now I might. It feels a bit like I’ve just seen giraffes in the wild without going to Africa. You’ve probably seen some of...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Soul of Reading!' Don’t invariably mistake a digression for sloppy storytelling. True, a clumsy storyteller will...
2 months ago
19
2 months ago
Don’t invariably mistake a digression for sloppy storytelling. True, a clumsy storyteller will digress out of sheer rambling confusion and indifference to his audience. My father was like that. We arrived at some destination and he would promptly relate the details of the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Word Can Open Like a Tomb to Reveal Its Past' The poet William Wenthe opens his essay “The Glamour of Words” with a provocative memory. It was the...
8 months ago
32
8 months ago
The poet William Wenthe opens his essay “The Glamour of Words” with a provocative memory. It was the anniversary of Charles Dickens’ death and he was in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, where Dickens is interred and his sister is speaking to mark the occasion. Wenthe looks...
The American Scholar
American Horror Story Jeremy Dauber on our obsession with fear The post American Horror Story appeared first on The...
a month ago
18
a month ago
Jeremy Dauber on our obsession with fear The post American Horror Story appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Although Too Many Readers Have Forgotten' My education continues. Here is “Artillery” (Hazards, 1930) by the English poet Wilfrid Wilson...
3 weeks ago
14
3 weeks 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
'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
34
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...
This Space
39 Books: 2022 "Hölderlin...asked only that we accept silence as the one meaningful syllable in the...
6 months ago
66
6 months ago
"Hölderlin...asked only that we accept silence as the one meaningful syllable in the universe." This line from Paul Stubbs' remarkable essay collection The Return to Silence is not an epigram to Marjorie Perloff's Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics, but it might have...
Ben Borgers
The Day Should End at 3am
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Pick Up a Machete and Start Exploring' A splendid day for American literature: born on March 1 are Ralph Ellison (1914), Howard Nemerov...
9 months ago
23
9 months ago
A splendid day for American literature: born on March 1 are Ralph Ellison (1914), Howard Nemerov (1920) and Richard Wilbur (1921). I’m reminded of how important contemporary American writers were to me when I was young, in the 60s and 70s. Everything was new and promising, and I...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Seeing Means Going Over the Details' Isaac Waisberg, the internet’s librarian-in-chief, has published two passages by...
a year ago
43
a year ago
Isaac Waisberg, the internet’s librarian-in-chief, has published two passages by Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951), the French proto-blogger better known as Alain. He was a professor of philosophy whose students included Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Both excerpts are taken from...
The Marginalian
No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on the Most Devastating of Losses and the Meaning of Life "We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other."
7 months ago
Ben Borgers
JumboCode plans for Head of Engineering
a year ago
Astral Codex Ten
Open Thread 356 ...
a month ago
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...
5 months ago
26
5 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...
Ben Borgers
Prototyping an AI-powered note-taking app
a year ago
The American Scholar
Let Us Compare Mythologies Exploding the Canon, Episode 4 The post Let Us Compare Mythologies appeared first on The American...
8 months ago
29
8 months ago
Exploding the Canon, Episode 4 The post Let Us Compare Mythologies appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Similar Universality of Voice' I reproach my younger self for being lazy and not seriously studying languages other than English. I...
5 months ago
35
5 months ago
I reproach my younger self for being lazy and not seriously studying languages other than English. I dabbled in Latin and German and retain a smattering of vocabulary and little grammar. If I were to study another language today my first choice would likely be Italian in order to...
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
27
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...
The Marginalian
Bertrand Russell on the Salve for Our Modern Helplessness and Overwhelm "A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be...
a year ago
12
a year ago
"A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams."
The Marginalian
Jealousy and Its Antidote: Pioneering Psychiatrist Leslie Farber on the Tangled Psychology of Our... "Every jealous person knows jealousy to be a brutally degrading experience and resists with all his...
a year ago
Wuthering...
Books I Read in April 2024 - this irritation passes over into patient completed understanding Grinding away at Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), a genuine monster.  “As I...
7 months ago
59
7 months ago
Grinding away at Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), a genuine monster.  “As I was saying it is often irritating to listen to the repeating they are doing, always then that one has it as being to love repeating that is the whole history of each one, such a one has it...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Doing Valuable Work in Literary Criticism' “Part of the drama of reading Boswell’s Life for the first time is that one can never (however much...
4 months ago
47
4 months ago
“Part of the drama of reading Boswell’s Life for the first time is that one can never (however much classical or Christian erudition one brings to the task) predict confidently how Johnson is going to respond to this or that specific question; yet of course by the end one...
Ben Borgers
Class Council: “Brutally Honest”
over a year ago
The Marginalian
Of Wonder, the Courage of Uncertainty, and How to Hear Your Soul: The Best of The Marginalian 2023 Hindsight is our finest instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year...
12 months ago
14
12 months ago
Hindsight is our finest instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year of reading, a year of writing, is to discover a secret map of the mind, revealing the landscape of living — after all, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives. In...
Ben Borgers
Heart Reacts
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Painstakingly Logical and Precise' A thought that never occurred to me but feels self-evidently right:  “In the course of a reading...
4 months ago
42
4 months ago
A thought that never occurred to me but feels self-evidently right:  “In the course of a reading life, one often stumbles on excellent prose writers never before encountered; such discoveries, however, are less likely in poetry. First-rate poetry is a more manageable quantity....
The American Scholar
The Importance of Being Different A travel writer’s education The post The Importance of Being Different appeared first on The...
7 months ago
75
7 months ago
A travel writer’s education The post The Importance of Being Different appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Training for climbing (progress update) I am at the end of my second iteration of climbing training, and this is how it went and what I...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
I am at the end of my second iteration of climbing training, and this is how it went and what I learned: I completed the workout twelve times, but I took a twelve-day break between workout eleven and twelve. I first skipped a workout because I had ripped skin open on one of my...
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Is Some Twentie Sev’rall Men at Least' Whitman “contained multitudes,” of course, while George Herbert says of a man: “He is some...
7 months ago
34
7 months ago
Whitman “contained multitudes,” of course, while George Herbert says of a man: “He is some twentie sev’rall men at least / Each sev’rall houre.” What sounds self-dramatizing in the American simply acknowledges our inconstancy, our fickle nature, in Herbert’s poem “Giddinesse.” In...
Ben Borgers
First Name Usernames
over a year ago
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
48
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...
Josh Thompson
Train Hard When’s the last time you participated in a sporting event? (Football, Ultimate Frisbee, rock...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
When’s the last time you participated in a sporting event? (Football, Ultimate Frisbee, rock climbing, running biking, wrestling, whatever) When’s the last time you trained for that activity? Finally: When is the last time you trained for that activity with someone else?...
Astral Codex Ten
Hidden Open Thread 356.5 ...
a month ago
Blog -...
Book Review - The Surrender Experiment With the book The Surrender Experiment, author Michael (Mickey) Singer, gives us a gift. In this...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
With the book The Surrender Experiment, author Michael (Mickey) Singer, gives us a gift. In this eloquently penned biography of his “journey into life’s perfection”, he demonstrates the beauty that life can provide for us when we are not solely guided by our logical,...
Josh Thompson
Change your MAC address with a shell script For a while, I’ve had notes from Change or Spoof a MAC Address in Windows or OS X saved, so if I am...
over a year ago
1
over a year ago
For a while, I’ve had notes from Change or Spoof a MAC Address in Windows or OS X saved, so if I am using a wifi connection that limits me to thirty minutes or an hour or whatever, I can “spoof” a new MAC address, and when I re-connect to the wifi, the access point thinks I’m on...
Josh Thompson
Workflow for developers (AKA My current tools) I’m a huge fan of “a good workflow”. Makes you think better. This is still under construction, but...
over a year ago
1
over a year ago
I’m a huge fan of “a good workflow”. Makes you think better. This is still under construction, but I’m fleshing out all the tools, tidbits, and other things that serve me well every day as I build my skills as a developer. It will always be a work in progress, but will hopefully...