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.”
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.”’
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.”
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?
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.')”