Sydney Railway map, 1939
I love to see this terrific profile of Khruangbin, one of my favorite current bands, but I miss the days when listening to Khruangbin felt like a secret pleasure that you didn’t really want to share widely. ♫
I’m reading Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England — it won’t be released until June — and it’s staggering. I didn’t think anyone could still write this kind of book: biographical, cultural, critical, moving easily between the close reading of poetic lines and tracing the sweep of vast social movements. I’ll be reviewing it later for The Hedgehog Review, but for now here’s my three-word review: it’s a masterpiece.
The last eclipse: “The last total solar eclipse will occur when the largest-looking moon just barely covers the smallest-looking sun. A bit of math involving the diameter of the moon and the apparent sizes of the moon and the sun yields an estimate for that eventuality of approximately 620 million years.”
The eclipse as seen from a weather satellite (time-lapse photo).
I’m sorta digging these slightly wrong pictures. (“Wrong” in the sense that I didn’t remember to disable the various software “corrections” to the image.) They sort of look like scenes from Malick’s The Voyage of Time.
The eclipse, partial right now, is overwhelming my camera sensor, but this photo still looks kinda Genesis 1-ish.
A justly famous image from Black Narcissus
I wrote about The Pilgrim’s Progress and maps thereof. This should perhaps be read in conjunction with my review, from a few years back, of an amazing book called The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands.