Leszek KoΕakowski, Preface to The Presence of Myth (1972):
I venture to say β and in this I merely follow many brave masters of the art of philosophy β that I am simply making available the existing inheritance. This enables me to refrain from a precise division between thoughts that are mine and those that are others’, especially since this is an impossible task; for it is impossible to remember all those to whom one owes something, and in the final analysis it would assuredly turn out that whatever we have, we owe to others.
Just came across in an NYT article the phrase “post-SoundCloud rap glamlord” β a fine example of a peculiar style of writing about music that was pioneered at Pitchfork twenty years ago. You don’t describe or analyze, you just accumulate references to kinds for the benefit of Those Who Know. Itβs all about sorting-by-kind. I call it Typological Stacking.
Beautiful new tune by Julian Lage β with John Medeski on organ! β«
I worried the other day about the lack of coordinated resistance to the ecological damage done by the explosion of AI datacenters, and it turns out that there’s more resistance than I was aware of: here’s Mark Hurst at Techtonic interviewing Paul Mozur of the NYT.
In the TLS, Austin Spendlowe says that my biography of Paradise Lost is βan enduringly readable work of intellectual history that will justify the ways of Milton to many.β
I’m not a Jacob Collier fan, but if you’re a guitarist, this conversation with Paul Davids is riveting and enormously generative of musical ideas. Now I’m wanting one of his five-string guitars. β«
I pity the fool who doesn’t have a subscription to The Hedgehog Review, because there are many cool things in the new issue, among the least cool of which is my review of a new collection of CzesΕaw MiΕosz’s post-WW2 poems. “If you read the poems collected here in chronological order, what you will see, primarily, is a man thinking about hope β what sustains it, and what happens when you lose it.”
Polish movie posters really are nuts.
