Alan Jacobs

We have four mature live oaks on our property, but this is the one I look at the most often. It has a curiously sinuous interior architecture.

The Cosmati Pavement in Westminster Abbey: “In the year of Christ one thousand two hundred and twelve plus sixty minus four, the third King Henry, the city, Odoricus and the abbot put these porphyry stones together. If the reader wisely considers all that is laid down, he will find here the end of the primum mobile.” From a story in the Guardian: “Only a handful of brass letters remains of the original long inscription, but it was transcribed centuries ago. It names the king, the chief craftsman as Odoricus, gives the date in a tortuous riddle, and then mysteriously suggests that the world will last for 19,683 years, by adding together the life spans of different animals: "add dogs and horses and men, stags and ravens, eagles, enormous whales….” 

I got a lot of problems with you people, and you know what the top one is? Many of you are possessed by demons. Or at least oppressed by them. And it needs to stop.

But as always, the first step is acknowledging that you’re afflicted by powerful forces beyond your control. So I try to lay out my demonology in this essay.

You’re welcome.

I do like a frittata.

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I saw this lovely old thing at a friend’s house the other day. 

A few brief notes:

You’re seeing more posts about movies these days because I have a couple of long-term projects in mind that concern cinematic art, especially things made in the middle third of the 20th century. I am having a lot of fun watching!  

Related: Remember to explore this blog using the tags, like this one: #movies. Also, a couple of years ago I wrote a summary of this blog’s chief themes with links to the most important tags: see that here. 

I use micro.blog almost exclusively for two things: photos and a record of the books I’m reading. (I love micro.blog and would post there exclusively except that I have fifteen years of tagged posts here.) If you’re interested in those little things, you can subscribe to a weekly digest of my posts here — though you should know that while I am an enthusiastic photographer I am not a skilled one. The digest goes out every Friday afternoon. 

It still feels very weird to me to offer the opportunity to support this blog financially via Buy Me a Coffee (see the link above). But I’m doing it, because I really like writing here and feel that I can genuinely explore ideas in ways not easily done in other media, and I need to make my writing here financially defensible if I possibly can. Recently I added the possibility of monthly or annual memberships — which feels even weirder, but … I am so grateful for any and all support.  

My Laity Lodge retreat with Sara Hendren filled up in 24 hours! My regrets to those who wanted to but could not register — maybe there will be a second edition at some point in the future. 

Adam Roberts’s translation of the Lord of the Rings rhyme into Latin is fun. I think the line “In terra Mordoris tenebrosissima” is especially melodious. I’m going around the house chanting it under my breath. 

I think my three recent posts on neighborliness — one and two and three — add up to something, though I’m not wholly sure just what. 

I had cause today to remember that of all the essays I have published — more than a hundred now, I guess — the one that best encapsulates what I believe and what I care about is this one: “Filth Therapy.”