Big leaf pile, beautiful day

The wonderful Andrew O’Hagen on literature vs. “the dark babble of social media."

The London Review of Books has a new podcast up, on Auden. It’s excellent. Supplement with Alan Jacobs on “The Public Poetry of W. H. Auden”.

Current listening: two albums from London’s jazz scene: Nubya Garcia’s Nubya’s Five (check out her cover of “Contemplation”); Alfa Mist’s Antiphon.

If forced to pick the greatest song of all time, I might choose “I Want You Back”. That bass line…

Turns out things are pretty much the same, except wetter, and Siri works better.

Captain Abemerica. Saving the world, and stopping to smell all the flowers.

So glad to be present at a very full @AnselmHouseUMN for a talk by Dan Siedell on modern art.

Current listening: Tyshawn Sorey’s Verisimilitude, a beguiling fusion of jazz & classical (a fusion that’s incredibly fertile at the moment).

“You are the Product." John Lanchester, brilliant as always, in the London Review on why Facebook is terrifying.

D is for dreary.

Stunning: “The Majestic Marble Quarries of Northern Italy”, h/t Prufrock News.

Sandbar, with canoe. Cross Lake, MN.

“The Economics of the Protestant Reformation”. (I love when academic research like this is freely accessible, btw. One of the most frustrating things about my discipline, literary studies, is how dependent the discipline is upon noxious …

Current listening: “Lazarus”, from Bowie’s late, great Blackstar.

Current listening: Matthew Shipp, I’ve Been to Many Places. I especially like his version of “Summertime.”

Success! Finished uploading old WP posts to my new Jekyll-based site. Next adventure: a custom domain?

J.M. Coetzee’s early poetry was written in binary, hex, & FORTRAN, anticipating the digital-humanities turn by decades.

On my commutes, I’ve been listening to Tony Judt’s Postwar. It’s a remarkable book, & I will write more later—but for now, I just wanted to say I have only 19 hours left in this 43 hour long behemoth!

Digging moss with Nana.