“I See the Birds” — beautiful new song by Jon Guerra. If only more devotional music (that’s Jon’s phrase for what he does) sounded like this.
Finished reading: Perplexing Plots by David Bordwell. A really remarkable book, which argues — employing an astonishingly wide range of examples — that the kinds of narrative experimentation typically associated with avant-garde literature was in fact largely pioneered in pop culture: genre fiction, movies, radio drama, etc.
My father in Christ really knows how to put the spiritual pressure on.
I am unusually sensitive to loud and abrasive sounds, so I am particularly interested to see how sound design can contribute to calm environments (or, more often, contribute to my misery).
The great John Fuller writes about Auden’s Shield of Achilles. He’s not quite persuaded by my argument about the organization of the book, but he’s not dismissive either. The main point here is how good the poems are.
I wrote about what a bad writer Freeman Wills Crofts is, but basically I just wanted the chance to use the phrase “Fang Apparatus.”
In the new Hedgehog Review I write about the best book — by miles — yet written on Terrence Malick.
David Thomson: “This is the great American film about the highest artistic dreams leading you to madness.”
Finished reading: Lonely Magdalen by Henry Wade. A remarkable Golden Age detective novel that starts as a police procedural, then around halfway through turns into a social novel about events from twenty years earlier — then becomes a procedural again. It reminds me in several ways of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. 📚
How do we distinguish our ordinary suffering from the unacceptable, and what do families and cultures and states do about it? Philosophical and ancient wisdom traditions are ready with insight, but schools don’t teach these domains. So we stretch the logic of accommodations far beyond what it can hold. We speak in the thinnest therapeutic language for all our troubles. We resign ourselves to the ever-receding goalposts that hold something like “belonging,” because we can’t imagine shoring up forms of life outside the machines-and-markets shape of the modern world.
It would be possible — and highly desirable — to build a large intellectual/practical project around this single insight. A project involving scholars, writers, artists, medical practitioners, and maybe especially therapists (who need the insights here more than almost anyone else). Jointly funded by the Templeton and Gates foundations.
Austin made this at the Laity retreat last week. So great to hang with him. What a smart, funny, talented guy.
I’ve been trying to figure out how I might resume my thoughts on Douthat’s thoughts on belief, and I’m still musing, but I got a big boost to that musing this morning from this post by Noah Millman.
A usefully long piece on our our cities ended up with so many “aesthetically forgettable but highly profitable buildings.”
Noticing that Jeff Tweedy and A. C. Newman have Substacks now, I’m starting to think that I’m the last person over fifty who doesn’t have a Substack.
I wrote, and then updated, one last post on the ridiculous current kerfuffle about Wheaton College.