Alan Jacobs

Mo' myrtles

Well, where I come from it’s definitely a word.

Canna lilies grow like crazy in our garden, but I never quite get used to them.

TIL that John Le Carré said that he would refuse the Nobel Prize if it were offered to him, which makes me realize that I have shamefully neglected to consider what to do if the Swedish Academy comes knocking on my door.

Mark Helprin, many years ago:

Tending a fire enforces a sense of patience and tranquility. In that way it is like sailing a boat. You’re engaged by it and trapped by it; fire is captivating. Your time is captured so you have enforced idleness. Like music, it somehow coordinates the rhythms in your brain, or in your soul. It clears the air. Enforced idleness is the way I want to live. I want to be a prisoner of things that make me stop still.

A memory out of nowhere: In Rome for the first time, riding the Metro and seeing across from me a nodding-off municipal employee, with a shoulder badge on her uniform featuring the letters SPQR. I hadn’t known until that moment that the initialism is still in use. It was oddly dizzying.

The crêpe/crepe/crape myrtles around here are at their peak.

Robert Caro on working with Robert Gottlieb:

In all the hours of working on The Power Broker, Bob never said one nice thing to me — never a single complimentary word, either about the book as a whole or about a single portion of the book. That was also true of my second book, The Path to Power, the first volume of the Johnson biography. But then he got soft. When we finished the last page of the last book we worked on, Means of Ascent, he held up the manuscript for a moment and said, slowly, as if he didn’t want to say it, “Not bad.”

As a person who spends a lot of time in Austin, loves Austin, hates Austin traffic, and can’t afford to live in Austin, I was absolutely fascinated by this Lawrence Wright profile of the city as it was and is. Don’t know how I missed it when it came out.

“From tragedy it is seldom but a step to memorabilia.” — Larry McMurtry in Waco, 1993

I’m not a collector of anything, but this auction of Larry McMurtry memorabilia had some pretty interesting stuff.

David Brooks: “If autonomy-based liberals believe that society works best when it opens up individual options, gifts-based liberals believe that society works best when it creates ecologies of care that help people address difficulties all along the path of life.”

I have mixed feelings about the bokeh of iPhone “Portrait” shots. It’s often effective, I guess, but seems unnatural – it looks like a software-generated effect.

Douthat bringing some essential Dark Energy to the question of what matters most about Orange Man as a Presidential candidate