With Advent approaching, ‘tis the season to read Auden’s Christmas Oratorio For the Time Being — ideally in this lovely edition, edited by, um, me. I’ve added a long introduction and many notes, but the poem’s the thing. I also wrote a bit about the poem in this post.
This has been a three-Blackwing job and it’s not done yet.
Excellent maps of the Divine Comedy — I wish I had come across these years ago, to use in class. (But the ones in the Sayers Penguin translation are great, even if the translation itself really isn’t.)
I never read people’s Holiday Gift Guides … except for Robin Sloan’s.
Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year is “enshittification” — an excellent choice. And this also gives me the chance to say that while I dip into Bluesky for time to time, I won’t commit to it, because enshittification is its inevitable fate also. (Great links in that post.)
When asked about the chatbot “hallucinations,” data scientist Jörg Pohle says, “I don’t have hallucination or bias problems because I’m not looking for the truth…. I just don’t use the system for learning something or for understanding.” Well, there you go! Problem solved.
My recommended Substack policy: First, establish the maximum monthly amount you’re willing to pay. Then, choose monthly rather than annual subscriptions. When you reach your max and want to subscribe to a new Substack, you can only do so if you unsubscribe from one of your current ones. Gradually you’ll converge on the ones that are essential to you.
(You could do this will annual subscriptions as well but it would take you a lot longer to achieve that convergence.)
Freddie: “If I had to have American policy be determined by polling the userbase of X or the userbase of BlueSky, I would choose the latter and sigh as they passed a law that ordered my own personal execution on public safety grounds. They’d probably do it by forcing me to drink fair trade cyanide through a paper straw.”
Picasso, “Leaping Bulls”
I’m probably going to regret this, but I’ve enabled crossposting from micro.blog — Home of the Truly Cool — to Bluesky. I won’t be be otherwise present. Advertisements for myself will begin immediately.
The Economist: “New work led by Roza Kamiloglu, a psychologist at the Free University of Amsterdam, provides evidence that there are just two primary types of laughter: one generated when people find something funny and one that can be induced only through the physical act of tickling.” I’m laughing about this, but only because I’m currently being tickled.
My colleague Philip Jenkins settles a few persistent myths about the Council of Nicaea. It’s one of those events about which people always feel free to tell Big Lies.