My friend and colleague David Corey told me that this is how he explains to his students how musical fugues work. What a cool animation.
Yeah, sure, y’all keep looking stuff up on the “internet,” I’ll just be over here with my REFERENCE BOOKS.
It seems, my dear friend, that the brains of the greatest men contract when they are gathered together, and that where there are more wise men, there you will also find less wisdom. The great assemblies are so preoccupied with minutiae, with formalities, and with empty orthodoxies, that essential issues are always relegated to the end.
— Montesquieu, The Persian Letters
I approve of the design and typography of this poster.
Decades ago I started porting my Desires and Preferences to my Reason, but WOW are there still a zillion bugs in the code.
Real talk:
- The best version of Rhapsody in Blue is the arrangement for piano, especially as played by Gershwin himself.
- The best version of Appalachian Spring is the original 13-instrument score, written as a ballet for the Martha Graham Dance Company.
Sometimes less really is more.
Currently reading: Passions of the Soul by Rowan Williams. This book is exactly what I need right now. 📚
Ove at the Hog Blog, I wrote about how Montesquieu teaches us the value of triangulation. (That may sound somewhat forbidding, but I promise, it’s an accessible post.)
The primary work of the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop is letter cutting in stone, and you couldn’t find a better example than this:
You can pursue a three-year apprenticeship at the Workshop, and I am greatly tempted to apply.
Stone carving by the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop for Clare College, Cambridge.
TIL (from John McWhorter) that long ago the opposite of business or busyness was busiless.
And little by little I began to wake up to the fact that I am, like everyone else in the academic humanities, really just scraping by in a ghost-career, a vestige of an older order that no one has yet worked up the courage to put out of its misery, but that really cannot continue to fulfill its purported function of shaping well-rounded citizens, when it is so fully subordinated to the primary function of the 21st-century university, which is, namely, fundraising.
“Content Creator” is a title that inadvertently tells on itself. It’s a tacit admission that the nature of the “content“ is meaningless and it exists to fill space. Might as well call yourself “Stuff Maker” or “Thing Doer.”
Josh Gluckstein’s cardboard coral reef
Two consecutive stories in my RSS feed. Turns out that if culture is being lost it’s also being found.
Another fascinating report on trends in American religion by Ruth Graham, the best religion reporter around. (Did I mention that she was my student? Only about a hundred times.)