Iโ€™m partly back โ€” with the help of the divine Ella Fitzgerald.ย 

Stingโ€™s song โ€œAll This Timeโ€ plays a pretty significant role in my mental world. It came out a few months after my first trip to England, a trip centered on London and Oxford, and it alerted me to the wholly different texture of a Northern city, a Northern upbringing. And it made me imaginatively aware of what it might be like to grow up in a country with a Roman history โ€” for instance, in โ€œan edge-of-the-Empire garrison town.โ€ It set me on a path of inquiry that made me highly receptive to what would become one of my favorite books, Susanna Clarkeโ€™s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Also, itโ€™s one of Stingโ€™s best songs. ๐ŸŽต

Me: โ€œWhat people do in response to violence is consolidate the myths they live by.โ€ย 

A record that has received a lot of love but never enough love is Dโ€™Angeloโ€™s Black Messiah. Eleven years after its release it sounds as fresh as tomorrow. ๐ŸŽต

Interviewer: โ€œYou look tanned and rested.โ€ Ange Postecoglu: โ€œIf a manager looks tanned and rested, that means heโ€™s out of a job, mate.โ€ Dudeโ€™s kinda crazy but Iโ€™m really glad heโ€™s back in the PL. โšฝ๏ธ

Leszek Koล‚akowski wrote about the

unpleasant and insoluble dilemmas that loom up every time we try to be perfectly consistent when we try to think about our culture, our politics, and our religious life. More often than not we want to have the best from incompatible worlds and, as a result, we get nothing; when we instead pawn our mental resources on one side, we cannot buy them out again and we are trapped in a kind of dogmatic immobility.

Thus Koล‚akowski appeals for what he winningly calls “moderation in consistency.”

A post I wrote a while back on diseases of the intellect seems relevant to this moment.

I successfully adjusted the truss rod in my guitar, ama