Audrey Hepburn taking guitar lessons — so she can play as she sings “Moon River.”
Someone asked me today about my micro.blog avatar, which is one of Paul Klee’s hand puppets, the one called The Philistine.
More stuff of mine related to that essay on “rewilding the internet”: I’ve written about mechanization and monoculture, about living in a plural world, and about monism and pluralism.
Me on rewilding the internet plus having a home on the open web — and note that micro.blog is part of that home.
Daniel Parris: “A New York Times analysis of Spotify data revealed that our most-played songs often stem from our teenage years, particularly between the ages of 13 and 16…. Indeed, YouGov survey data indicates a strong bias toward music from our teenage years, a phenomenon that is consistent across generations.” Curiously, I listen to almost nothing that I listened to in my teenage years, the one exception being Bob Dylan’s music, which was a part but not a big part of my adolescent listening. (Dylan became really central for me when I was in college, though.)
Nadine Chahine: “A typeface is a series of conversations happening simultaneously between different characters. For example, in the Latin script, the lowercase b talks to the d, talks to the p, talks to the q, and they respond. So there is this ongoing conversation between the b, d, p, and q, and then there is this other conversation happening between the m, n, and h. And then all the diagonals, like the v, the w, the x, and the y, are talking to one another as well. At some point, you realize that these conversations are all happening in the same space, and the groups start talking to one another as well. The role of the type designer is to facilitate these conversations.
Trying to get a pic of one of our roses, I am confronted by a photobomber
Start your weekend on a good note: listen to Sweet Honey in the Rock sing “Run Molly Run”
Butterflies and bees 🐝
From Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay on Maigret
People sometimes respond to my essay on anarchism by calling me a libertarian. But — to give a very brief account of an important issue — I think libertarianism and anarchism are quite different. The goal of libertarianism is to increase individual liberty, while the goal of anarchism is to expand the realm of cooperation and collaboration.
Good to hear that txt.fyi will be coming back. It was the best way to post chunks of text that you didn’t necessarily want on your own site or exposed to the toxicity of social media. People only saw it if they had the link. I didn’t use it often, but it was great to have around for special cases.
One of the first reviewers of Tolkien’s Silmarillion was Richard Adams, of Watership Down fame. Spoiler: He adored it.
Sydney Railway map, 1939
I love to see this terrific profile of Khruangbin, one of my favorite current bands, but I miss the days when listening to Khruangbin felt like a secret pleasure that you didn’t really want to share widely.
I’m reading Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England — it won’t be released until June — and it’s staggering. I didn’t think anyone could still write this kind of book: biographical, cultural, critical, moving easily between the close reading of poetic lines and tracing the sweep of vast social movements. I’ll be reviewing it later for The Hedgehog Review, but for now here’s my three-word review: it’s a masterpiece.
The last eclipse: “The last total solar eclipse will occur when the largest-looking moon just barely covers the smallest-looking sun. A bit of math involving the diameter of the moon and the apparent sizes of the moon and the sun yields an estimate for that eventuality of approximately 620 million years.”
The eclipse as seen from a weather satellite (time-lapse photo).