At the galleys stage of my biography of Paradise Lost — an exciting moment because I don’t have to use Word any more. Here are the epigraphs.
I wrote about articulateness — and the lack thereof — in American Presidents and Presidential candidates. Not so much about politics as about our expectations for public language.
I experience a certain vague ‘spiritualness’ within the world’s chaos, an approximate understanding that God is implicit in some latent, metaphysical way, yet it is only really in church – that profoundly fallible human institution – that I become truly spiritually liberated. I am swept up in a poetic story that is both true and imaginative and fully participatory, where my spiritual imagination can be both contained and free. The church may appear to some as small, even stifling, its congregation herdlike, yet within its architecture, music, litanies, and stories, I find a place of immense spiritual recognition and liberation.
Thinking about it now, the same can be applied to marriage – another audacious feat of the imagination – which, for some of us, like art, like faith, draws into focus what it is to love. It is order itself that allows us to be free.
Listening to: Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles ♫
Researchers say AI transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said. And some of the things it invents are psychotic.
Adam Roberts has a Substack! This should be cause for general rejoicing, and everyone should subscribe. And pay the man! He’s been offering top pun/parody/poetry/pontification content online for years, for free, so you all owe him several thousand dollars each!
Maybe this is a good season for me to re-up my old post on being informed but not absorbed.
In the middle of Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett, I came across a funny/insightful passage I thought I might blog about — only to discover that it has its own Wikipedia page. 📚
A very happy boy after playing in the hose.
Sometimes teaching — or the kind of teaching I do, anyway — forces you to confront certain dramatic juxtapositions, as I was recently reminded.
I’m delighted that Davide Mascioli, who had first thought of the Space Exploration Logo Archive as a website, decided to turn it into a series of booklets.
Truthless. I am psyched. I would be under any circumstances but especially because of my long career as a fabulist.
My question for those who make an economic defense of the liberal arts is always this: If the liberal arts cease to be financially rewarding, will you cease defending them?
Bruce Herman, “Meditation”
I’m going to spend some time with my first-years today discussing the skill of critical ignoring. First step: encouraging them to remember that any claim made without evidence can and should be dismissed without evidence.
At this stage of a campaign season, journalism consists largely of frantically shouting at people who would never in a million years vote for Candidate X that they shouldn’t vote for Candidate X.
There’s no major topic in American media that’s covered with less openness to new perspectives than education, no subject that’s more of a citadel for establishment narratives and business-as-usual. And none more obviously cries out for real rebel thinking; it’s a subject that’s considered of massive public importance, governed by a sclerotic and self-righteous conventional wisdom, where the “reform” agenda has produced decades of failure despite all of its no-excuses rhetoric. We spend extravagantly in this country, to no avail, and yet people still insist that it’s a funding problem. We institute endless school-side accountability programs, nothing gets better, and yet people still insist it’s an accountability problem. The whole education experience of the last 50 years proves that our issues cannot be solved at the school side, and yet no arguments to that effect are made in establishment media.