Please read my friend Bharat Ranganathan’s essay on Scripture, immigration, and Christian ethics. It’s a good overview of why Jeff Sessions’s comments were so deeply misguided.

So excited for the World Cup, starting today. ⚽️

• My prediction for the final: 🇦🇷 3:2 🇧🇷
• Dark horses: 🇹🇳, 🇨🇷
• And I can’t help but hope that 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 will have a great Cup, at least making it to the quarter finals.

My beloved #MNUFC ground out (truly—it wasn’t fun to watch) a US Open Cup win in penalties against FC Cincinnati tonight, thanks to typically great goalkeeping from B🚫bby Shuttleworth, and a pretty lackluster performance from pretty everyone else. I …

View from the desk this morning.

Rainy day in MSP—perfect day for a day at the Children’s Museum with grandma.

I’m a sucker for gossip & insider info on editors & publishing. This NYT piece on TLS editor Stig Abell was esp. delightful in uncovering Abell’s MN connections—I trust he’s also now an #MNUFC supporter.

I had the great privilege to listen in on Krista Tippett’s conversation with Teju Cole this evening. The subjects ranged widely: baptism, art and politics, Google and memory, Thomas Tranströmer, Elizabeth Bishop, improvisation and presence, and more. …

Finished my first Muriel Spark novel this morning, Aiding and Abetting, and greatly enjoyed its very dark comedy. I will certainly read more of her. Look for some, er, Spark notes here soon.

This morning’s listening: the Cedar Walton Trio’s Ironclad: Live at Yoshi’s (Apple Muisc link), featuring what is surely some of the greatest album cover art of all time.

All holy books are works of fiction.

Saw this bumper sticker today (on the way to church, of course). I disagree with some of this dude’s core assumptions—especially regarding the nature, truth, and value of fiction!

My good friend Brad wrote about Mississippi’s Yazoo River, where attempts to prevent flooding threaten to have dramatic unintended consequences elsewhere in the river basin.

Just wrote a long post on awkwardness in Vodolazkin’s “novel” Laurus — mjkaul.com/2018/05/0…

From the NYRB, a fascinating essay on Berenice Abbott, jazz-age photographer in NYC and Paris.

Time, place, and circumstance: they are like three balls that you toss in the air, and they control your life.

An exceptional essay by Garnette Cadogan, “Due North”—an oddly edited, but also delightful and profound, essay on walking NYC from the Upper East Side to the South Bronx.

These photos of Lake Baikal are absolutely stunning (though I could do without any of the ones with people in them).

The further I go in Laurus, the more I see Dostoevsky all over the place. That’s not surprising—you can’t write a work of fiction about Orthodoxy set in Russia and without reflecting deeply on Dostoevsky. In some ways, it’s as if …

Addendum to my Cecil Taylor post: Ethan Iverson’s essay on Taylor is remarkable, and does justice to Taylor’s sui generis work.

Like every post on Iverson’s blog, it’s essential reading.

Latern Waste; or, April in Minnesota

I’m finally starting Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus, in anticipation of the Anselm House book night in a week and a half. So far (50 pp in), it’s wonderfully strange, its medieval-modern form heavily dependent on pastiche and parataxis for …

This short essay in the Guardian makes a case for a Christian-democratic movement in the US to counter the rise of secular authoritarianism. The authors state that it was a distinctly Christian Democratic movement that successfully defeated fascism …

The a-fore-quoted interview with Cecil Taylor harmonizes with this interview with Ursula K. LeGuin, which begins with a lengthy and fascinating discussion of rhythm and grammar, the foundations of LeGuin’s own remarkable craft.

Start with Ben Ratliff’s obituary for the NYT.

NPR’s coverage of Taylor’s life and work is also excellent:

• Jazz, Freed: On Cecil Taylor’s Expansive Brilliance
• an obituary by Tom Vitale
• finally, and most importantly, Taylor’s appearance on Marian …

A fascinating new release from Princeton University Press: John Blair’s Building Anglo-Saxon England. Here’s the book description:

This beautifully illustrated book draws on the latest archaeological discoveries to present a radical reappraisal of …