A hero for our moment: Curbside Larry

Currently reading Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas by Stephen Harrigan. 📚

It’s an extraordinary book, full of passages like this one:

The Edwards brothers, and Martin Parmer, another outraged colonist who called himself the Ringtailed Panther, launched a rebellion, wrote yet another declaration of independence, designed yet another flag, and established yet another evanescent republic. This one was called the Republic of Fredonia, a brand-new country that in the Edwardses’ mind included not just the territory of his former colony but the greater part of Texas itself. Though it was at heart an Anglo rebellion, Haden Edwards managed to enlist a smattering of Cherokee allies, under the leadership of Richard Fields, who was a tireless advocate of the tribe despite his run-of-the-mill Anglo American name and his one-eighth measure of Cherokee blood. “The flag of liberty,” Edwards exulted, “now waves in majestic triumph on the heights of Nacogdoches and despotism stands appalled at the sight.”

Previous two posts: I’m trying out micro.blog’s new Book Search feature, which, it turns out, is very cool. Thanks, @manton! Now … back to reading.

Currently reading: Through the Eye of a Needle by Peter Brown 📚

Currently reading: Early Auden, Later Auden by Edward Mendelson 📚

This photograph of Beirut looks like a scene from an apocalyptic video game.

current status

“In my tests, I found that wireless charging used, on average, around 47% more power than a cable.”

Jessa Crispin: “One … proposal is to replace police with social workers. But as my friend R. said to me as we discussed these ideas, ‘I don’t think these people have interacted with social workers.’”

I’ve said this before, but Ed Yong’s writing about the coronavirus has been just amazing.

“‘I have POC friends’ is a line used across the racist spectrum, but inventing your POC friend is next level.”

Nick Cave: “The idea of lyrics ‘not coming’ is basically a category error. What we are talking about is not a period of ‘not coming’ but a period of ‘not arriving’. The lyrics are always coming. They are always pending. They are always on their way toward us. But often they must journey a great distance and over vast stretches of time to get there.”

One of the strangest consequences of Covidtide has been its effect on my syntax. Everything is up in the air — I don’t know whether I’ll be teaching in person or online this fall, my son is looking for work in Chicago, any of us could get sick or not get sick, if we get sick we could face anything from no symptoms at all to death, etc. etc. — and as a result I find that several times a day I start a sentence only to pause halfway through for caveats, hypotheticals, if/then conditionals … It’s rather exhausting. I feel like I’m back in my undergrad Symbolic Logic class drawing truth-trees. I’m looking forward to a time when people aren’t dying of this damned disease and I can utter straightforward declarative sentences again.

Taken on the plane back to Alabama. She was with me then, and with me through the difficult years to come; and she’s still with me now, forty years later. I thank God every day for this woman.

Honeymoon over; in the airport and about to return to Alabama. If I look a little worried, I probably was. As soon as we got back we had to start packing to move to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I was beginning graduate school in just a couple of weeks. I didn’t feel prepared — and indeed I wasn’t.

Reader, she married me. Forty years ago today. I still can’t quite believe it. (Photo taken with a cheap camera on our honeymoon.)

I’m happy for all Gunners today, but happiest for this guy. What a class act and first-rate keeper. 🥅 ⚽️

South Fork, Guadalupe River (2017)

“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.” — Hazlitt