Current listening: Brian Blade & the Fellowship Band, Season of Changes 🎶
Current listening: Brian Blade & the Fellowship Band, Season of Changes 🎶
Finished reading: The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. Profoundly bleak, even for Houellebecq, though there are some moments of beauty, particularly late in the novel. 📚
Finished reading: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. An amazing novel of revolutionary consciousness, conscience, & truth. 📚
Finished reading: The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World by Andy Crouch.
A wise essay on the importance of instruments, households, and history in resisting the technological idols of our age.📚
Finished reading: Purgatory Mount by Adam Roberts 📚
Finished reading: Bells In Winter by Czeslaw Milosz 📚
R.I.P., Bill Russell—an amazing athlete and man. Tributes to Russell reminded of an essay by a former professor of mine, Edward Griffin, entitled “Hoops & Hurdles: The Unlikely Story of How I Learned to Learn,”. It’s an absolutely delightful, astonishing reflection on Griffin’s time on the USF track & field & JV basketball teams—while Russell (on varsity basketball, of course) was dominating the NCAA. There is a wild cameo about halfway through the essay that I guarantee you won’t expect.
In life and work alike, his contradictions are pressed together like layers in metamorphic rock. It is in the nature of monoliths not to grow old.
~Alex Ross on Thomas Mann, in the New Yorker. My favorite Mann is *The Magic Mountain*—it speaks with clarity to our world. 🔗📚
I finally finished Iain McGilchrist’s The Master & His Emissary this morning. It’s taken me about 6 months, but the time was well spent—the book is as rich in neuroscience and psychology as in historical and cultural analysis, & a profound guide to our current cultural dislocations. It’s earned a place in my personal pantheon—one of the best books I’ve read, and one I will return to often in years to come.
Thanks to MinnPost for publishing this rich, illuminating portrait of MSP drummer Dave King (of The Bad Plus, Happy Apple, & Julian Lage’s current trio, among many other groups & projects). 🔗🎶🥁