Current listening: Aaron Parks’s new quartet album By All Means—beautiful music; delightful cover art. I’ve been waiting for this one for a couple months and it’s worth the wait! 🎶
Current listening: Charles Lloyd’s beautiful new album, Figures in Blue, which kicks off with a haunting, spacious rendition of “Abide with Me” and never lets up. Very highly recommended. 🎶
Here’s a wonderful guest post from jazz bassist Thomas Morgan on Ethan Iverson’s Substack.
Morgan draws out the connections between jazz and hacker culture:
Whatever is shared, discovered, or invented has the potential to be applied in the very same moment or soon after. With such a tight feedback loop, ideas can compound, and the music is essentially optimized for learning as much as possible every time you play.
The essay goes deep into the weeds on how Morgan created his strange digital instrument WOODS, featured on Morgan’s new album Around You is a Forest. 🎶
Currently reading: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow 📚
Two miserable chumps hanging out together, plotting devious methods of destroying a beloved global sporting event. ⚽️
Currently reading: In Search of Lost Time, Volume II by Marcel Proust 📚
Currently reading: The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han 📚
Finished reading: Frost: Poems by Robert Frost.
I don’t think I ever really realized how powerful & profound Frost is—until this reading. The simplicity of his diction both masks & reveals a vision of strange, silent, often terrifying loneliness, along with rare moments of profound connection with other people & the natural world. I will be returning to Frost much more regularly in the future. 📚
Current listening: the new album from my favorite active jazz trio: Wolfgang Muthspiel, Scott Colley, & Brian Blade, Tokyo 🎶
Finished reading: The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han.
Provocative in the first half; unsatisfying in the second. Han is laser-focused on the core problems of modernity but his books are so short they feel, at times, perfunctory. 📚
Current listening: Johnathan Blake, My Life Matters 🎶
Currently reading: In Search of Lost Time, Volume II by Marcel Proust 📚
Currently reading: Frost: Poems by Robert Frost 📚
Currently reading: The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han 📚
A section of Psalm 119 forms part of today’s lectionary, so it’s a good time to remember that William Wilberforce had the entire psalm—all 176 verses—memorized and perfectly timed to his walk home from Parliament through Hyde Park. He’d finish his recitation as he arrived at his doorstep.
Finished reading: The Poisoned King by Katherine Rundell 📚
I recently finished Katherine Rundell’s wonderful new volume in her Impossible Creatures series and had to write a few words about it. In short, I doubt there’s a better week for it to have been released. If you could use some hope, this is one place to find it. 📚
Matthew Crawford on democracy, tradition, & authority 🔗
Here’s a very good essay by Matthew Crawford, drawing on Michael Polanyi, about how democracy depends upon forms of tradition & authority. Crawford also shows how Americans' reflexive anti-traditionalism “traps us in the present”:
How does this work? In the Lockean or Cartesian dispensation that Americans tacitly adopt, tradition is subject to a hermeneutic of suspicion. Our default is to think that inherited wisdom does little more that perpetuate forms of oppression, offered in bad faith as so-called knowledge. But cutting ourselves off from the past in this way, out of a determination not to be duped, we find that we have little ground to stand on against the tyranny of the majority. Intellectually, we find ourselves trapped in the present. This amounts to a kind of anti-culture, as the word “culture” implies something that grows over time, and it led Tocqueville to worry that America would be prone to a creeping “soft despotism.”
Cannot wait to dive into this one! I had to fend off two small but voracious children to preserve my claim. Fortunately I was up to the task. 💪📚
Currently reading: The Poisoned King by Katherine Rundell 📚