The Melancholaholic

Well, this could be a bit of a time suck… 😬

🎵Listening to different versions of “Wayfaring Stranger” while I cook dinner. I think this one by Rhiannon Giddens is probably my favorite, but I’m a fan of the grittiness of this one as well, from the soundtrack of The Last Of Us II. Do you know the song? Have a favorite version?

I was first introduced to John O’Donohue years ago by my friend David, via this amazing interview by Krista Tippett for On Being. I finally picked up the book that made him such a beloved voice for so many a couple of weeks ago and I’m really enjoying it at the moment. 📚#worldbookday

Location check in 🗺 — The Roundel

Had the opportunity to visit the exhibition of Nick Cave’s The Devil — A Life at the Xavier Hufkens Gallery (St-Georges) in Brussels just over a week ago. I found it beautiful, and surprisingly moving. - 🎨

Umberto Eco on asking librarians for aid as you research your thesis: ”You must overcome any shyness and have a conversation with the librarian, because he can offer you reliable advice that will save you much time. You must consider that the librarian (if not overworked or neurotic) is happy when he can demonstrate two things: the quality of his memory and erudition and the richness of his library, especially if it is small. The more isolated and disregarded the library, the more the librarian is consumed with sorrow for its underestimation. A person who asks for help makes the librarian happy.”

Eco again (File under “Things that fuel this researcher’s neuroses”): “An idea contained almost by mistake on a page of an otherwise useless (and widely ignored) book may prove decisive for your research. You must discover this page on your own, with your own intuition and a little luck, and without anybody serving it to you on a silver platter.”

“Amalia, I find that my religiousness is a slowly emergent state, one that is entirely drawn to the Anglican church of my childhood, and that the haunted presence of Christ is the essential and defining quality of that state of being. Christianity, for me, is bound up in the liturgy and the ritual and the poetry that swirls around the restless, tortured figure of Jesus, as presented within the sacred domain of the church itself. My religiousness is softly spoken, both sorrowful and joyful, broadening and deepening, imagined and true. It is worship and prayer. It is resilient yet doubting, and forever wrestles with the forces of rationality, armed with little other than the merest hunch or whispered intuition. The defining characteristic of my belief, and which I consider to be a fundamental imperative in my life, is uncertainty. This questioning impulse is the essence of freedom and the creative catalyst that keeps the wheels rotating irrevocably toward God.” - N.C.

Freshly roasted pumpkin seeds are one of the best things fall has to offer. 🍽

Finished reading: Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin 📚

“But is not Christ a general direction? asked the elder. What other kind of direction do you seek? And how do you even understand the journey anyway? As the vast expanses you left behind? … Do not become like your beloved Alexander who had a journey but had no goal. And do not be enamored of excessive horizontal motion.”

“Unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere modernity cannot kill.” - Jonathan Harker’s Journal, Dracula, Bram Stoker 📚

Things I learned the hard way: The #2 attachment on my beard trimmer is significantly shorter than the #2 attachment on a Barber’s clippers.

🎵 Any release day that includes new music from Slowdive is red letter. everything is alive is gorgeous.

A fun and nostalgic read from W. David Marx on They Might Be Giants, early-90’s music fandom and the delightful nerdyness of the early days of the internet: “I wanted to offer a first-hand account of this particular moment of forgotten online culture. More objectively this era is interesting as further example of the general principle that content on platforms always bends to the taste of the median user. The internet was once an AV lab inside of a college library and then it became a combination Spencer’s Gifts/rural weekend militia camp for white nationalists.”

Alan Jacobs: “It is not true that silence is violence. The mandate to comment, to take a stand, to lend your voice — that is a violence against art. We need at least some artists who are too busy thinking and creating to notice what everyone else is talking about. We need artists who never, ever tweet or post or vlog — artists who block what blocks art. When accepting an Emmy for her TV show I May Destroy You in 2021, Michaela Coel counselled her fellow artists, ‘Do not be afraid to disappear — from it, from us — for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence.’ Silence, I think, is the first cunning, the aboriginal resistance.”

Tim Adams on Tom Waits upcoming remastered mid-80’s Trilogy: ‘Waits, he recalls, would never be specific about what he wanted; it would be “play like a Russian barmitzvah, or Alice in Wonderland”. “You didn’t say, ‘What does that mean, Tom?’ – you just went for it. I think when something began to sound like the song he wrote in his mind, that’s where we started.”’

Wyatt Mason/Tom Waits (2017)“We also touched upon Leonard Cohen, who once said, ‘If I knew where the good songs came from I’d go there more often.’ (‘For the rest of us,' Waits said, ‘it appears, not only did he go there often, he got a room in the tower, and he paid in advance for a whole month.')”

Currently reading: A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible by Robert M. Grant, David Tracy 📚

“Jesus is not a theologian but the despair of theologians. No systematic treatment can do justice to the richness and variety of his thought.” (18)

Where my theologians at? Thoughts?

Richard Brody on the vocational awakening found in a children’s book:

”I learned, through Anatole’s cheese reviews, that, by expressing one’s pleasures and displeasures, one could make a positive contribution to the world, and that the expression of one’s very personal sense of taste, if done the right way, could itself be a creative act.”