“Everything impinges on everything else… Everything is potentially everywhere.”
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable — Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.
World’s heaviest flying bird may be self-medicating on plants used in traditional medicine Frontiers Science News. Humans aren’t the only species that self-medicates!
The Invasion of the Super Insects Nautilus
The thin blue records that opened up musical horizons for Soviet youth Pressing Plant
The possible worlds of Saul Kripke The Institute of Art and Ideas
How to Be a Swimmer in the Stream of Time: Poet, Painter, and Philosopher Etel Adnan on the Antidote to Disorientation and Isolation
“The definition of the soul is made of these places where you feel that the world came into being so that they could exist.”
How to swim in the stream of time without drowning is what the great poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan (February 24, 1925–November 14, 2021) explores throughout her entire body of work, but nowhere more passionately than in her slender, splendid 1993 book Paris, When It’s Naked (public library).
Born and raised in Lebanon, Adnan found her artistic voice in America, at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, then fell in love with the artist Simone Fattal and spent the latter part of her century-long life with her love in Paris, where she had earned her degree in philosophy half a lifetime earlier.
“I’d rather die trying to take them down than die giving them what they want.”
John Inazu (Washington University; Google Scholar), Tim Keller on Forgiveness:
My past two newsletters have examined the topic of forgiveness [Pandemic Forgiveness and The Incomprehensible Witness Of Forgiveness]. ... I thought the topic merited one more engagement, so I reached out to my friend, Tim Keller. ...
Tim’s latest book, out just this month, is Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? [blogged here]. It explores the power of forgiveness and how we can practice it in our lives.
Two books give Stephen Sondheim and Mary Rodgers the last word - Los Angeles Times.
‘She mewed to every watery god’
‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’ (Thomas Gray, 1747). The tub in question / one of the UK’s most important Modern Movement houses, High and Over, is for sale / the death of the American shopping mall / The Final Curtain, cinemas at the end of their life, photography by Darren Holden / renovation opportunity near Cambridge (UK) / Death is Not the End, archives of historic music, from pre-war blues to pirate radio / Tokyo Build, meticulous model recreations of the quotidian cityscape / see also, a collection of high fidelity city walks / a map celebrating John le Carré’s London. See also Len Deighton’s London Dossier / the six stages of having too many books / rock songs with raw emotion / things that have been Killed by Google / a collection of playgrounds / stimulating visual imagery at Archillect / 3D art by Josef / Art on a Postcard, 2022 / Driving 405 freeway North, 1988 vs 2022 / another very valid dunk on Neom, or how instant megacities are simply impossible without repressive regimes / ‘Trads forget the past at their peril‘, or to quote Hawksmoor (from the article), post-fire London was ‘… noe city, nor Streets, nor Houses, but a Chaos of Dirty Rotten Sheds, allways Tumbling or takeing fire, with winding Crooked passages (Scarse practicable) Lakes of Mud and Rills of Stinking Mire running through them.’