Seba Jun: one of one.
Currently listening: Nujabes, Spiritual State ♫
Two quotations on what exists. The twoquotes tag is a favorite one of mine.
That experience, of meeting the audience on the dreaming plane, is what Lynch excelled at above any other director I can name. More than Luis Buñuel, or Ken Russell, or David Cronenberg, or Hayao Miyazaki, when I watch Lynch, I feel like I have been invited into his private dreams. Sometimes, as with Eraserhead or Blue Velvet, the result is an extraordinary feeling of communion. Other times, as with Inland Empire, I feel unable to meet him there; the world is too hermetic, and these are not my dreams.
My former colleague Beth Felker Jones: Christopher Hays “writes of a God who does bad things and has to learn better. He writes of a God who needs correction from humans, a God to whom we 21st century folk are morally superior…. Why would we worship a God who is so much less than us that he needs, according to CH, us (or Abraham, or Moses) to be his conscience? Why would we worship a God who is not fundamentally good?”
Every few days I read another piece about 😱The Tragedy of Literature In Our Post-Literate Society 😳, and when I do I always want to ask the authors just one question: When Milton wrote Paradise Lost, what percentage of the English population were literate enough to read it?
A terrific post by Damon Krukowski about the brilliancies and inconsistencies of the Whole Earth Catalog and its offshoots. I remember poring over The Last Whole Earth Catalog when I was taking breaks in the back room of the bookstore where I worked in 1975.
I wanted to read a post from a Substack I’m not subscribed to, and I could read it for free if I downloaded the Substack app. So I did. After working my way through six screens of Substack either suggesting (Subscribe to these newsletters!) or demanding (Tell us your interests!) that I do something, I quit and deleted the app.
WALKIES???
Here Brad East considers Houellebecq’s Submission in light of P. D. James’s The Children of Men — a good comparison. I reviewed Submission some years ago. It’s a fascinating book.
Yes, this is an old theme of mine, but re: doomscrolling, you don’t have to be there.
There is already copious evidence that we cannot sustain a modest euthanasia regime. Though advocacy for euthanasia began with the avoidance of pain, it has inevitably slipped into making an idol of autonomy. But no human person has ever fully possessed bodily autonomy, and the legal right to destroy the body cannot make this aspiration achievable. Opposing euthanasia begins with care for the weak, but it ultimately depends on simply telling this truth about the human person.
Cross section of Étienne-Louis Boullée’s design for Newton’s Cenotaph, 1784 — from the invaluable and endlessly fascinating Public Domain Review, which you can support here.
If you’re absolutely determined to use a social media platform, then sure, Free Our Feeds is a good idea. But the essential protocols are already in place, and your feeds are already free, on the open web.
Wonderful clouds partly covering the full moon this pre-dawn. I found myself wondering what John Ruskin, who was obsessed by clouds, would say about that sky. Here’s a wonderful essay by Sandra Kemp on Ruskin’s fascination with clouds.
Poster by Tall Paul Kelly.
Didn’t have a proper telephoto lens — this is from my iPhone camera at 10x — but it was fun to watch the aoudad meandering about when I was up on the hilltop. They were introduced to Texas, somewhat accidentally, a hundred years ago and have become, in the opinion of some, an invasive species. Fun fact for those interested in the venereal game: a herd of aoudad is called an anger.
