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.”
“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.”
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.”