Andre Malraux was a major French writer, a cultural icon, and also an arrogant, incompetent, and unrepentant thief of Khmer cultural antiquities.
The Milky Way over the Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park. Photo by Stephen Alvarez. This area is part of the world’s largest international dark sky reserve. It’s hard to describe, for the modern person who lives in brightly lit areas, the magnificence of the night sky in such dark places. I am blessed to live relatively near some of the darkest skies in the world.
Speaking of love or money, Joni Mitchell’s song by that name from her 1974 live record Miles of Aisles absolutely crushes. The band is super-tight, the recording and mixing are superb, and Joni … is Joni.
Re: my recent post on how I use Claude: I have never used a chatbot to write even one word for me, and I never will. The reason is simple: I love making sentences, and paragraphs, and stories, and arguments. Love the act of writing more than I can say; wouldn’t outsource it for love or money. One unexpected revelation of the chatbot era — unexpected to me anyway — is how many writers, especially but not only journalists, dislike writing and are delighted to get someone or something else to do it for them.
Writers love to talk about how hard writing it, what a struggle, what misery, yadda yadda yadda. I have always thought this rhetoric a big smokescreen, a way to avoid admitting that they’re getting to do what they love. But maybe they don’t love it. Maybe they got into because they thought they would love it but it turns out that every job is a grind. And maybe they prefer just laying around on their ass totally watching television.
The gift which I am sending you is called a dog, and is in fact the most precious and valuable possession of mankind. For while other animals are each of them of use to us in virtue of one particular quality, and possess a special and distinguishing excellence, this one animal is responsible for greatest and highest points of excellence. A lion excels in courage, an ox in reliability and adaptability to agriculture, the horse in intelligence and speed, the ass and mule, as is stated by the poets, in patience and hard work; and other animals have other good points: this one animal combines the excellence of all others without one exception. He is naturally suitable for war work and the pursuits of peace, and equally fitted to be of use and to be a pleasant companion. It would not be easy, as you will believe, to enumerate all the excellences and all the services to ourselves of this animal.
— Theodorus Gaza, Laudatio Canis, via Futility Closet. (The date given there, 1482, is probably too late.) Further research turns up this article by Sophia Xenophontos on Byzantine dogs — from the dogs’ point of view. One important question pursued there: Can dogs actually sing?
My dear friend Wesley Hill is going to Wycilffe College at the University of Toronto — this, I predict, will be a great thing for the college and the professor alike.
Years ago, we bought a big box of new doorknobs for our old house. Once I had my technique down, I could replace a doorknob in a couple minutes, but every door was slightly different, warped with time, so there was enough thinking involved to keep each replacement interesting. I found the process enormously satisfying. So satisfying, in fact, that I didn’t replace all the doorknobs at once. I saved a handful of doorknobs for times when I was feeling really stressed out.
It seems that temps perdu doesn’t just mean “lost time” but also “spare time.” Proust in search of spare time?
The Bills That Destroyed Urban America — The New Atlantis:
Americans are now three generations into a set of policies that, on the one hand, provide open-ended subsidies for sprawl and, on the other, do little to ameliorate the problems of the urban core — and maybe even aggravate them. Over time, this has come to seem like an unalterable fact of life and the work of the invisible hand of the market. But in this case, the hand is being nudged by Uncle Sam.
The sequel is here.