Laura Brown, The Great Lakes of North America
I just posted a new letter to my BMAC supporters.
Playing this morning: Khruangbin’s A LA SALA. ♫
This from Austin Kleon is great:
One of the reasons I didn’t connect with writer Nicholson Baker’s recent book about learning to draw, Finding a Likeness, is that he couldn’t seem to enjoy the process of drawing unless the drawing resulted in what he felt was visual accuracy. I remember watching him learn to draw on Twitter and Instagram and noticing a point at which he seemed to get much better, and saying so. Upon reading the book, I realized that point was when he started tracing photographs to begin his drawings….
I admire Baker greatly as a fiction writer, and we have the same general idea about the value of drawing as a way of noticing the world. But how you get there… that’s where we differ wildly. The last way I personally want to spend my time drawing is by taping a piece of paper to a computer screen and tracing a digital image with a pencil. I want drawing to take me out into the world, away from my screens and get me to look at it with my own eyeballs.
It’s pub day for my critical edition of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles!
Our new bee attractor.
Doug Stowe: “My proposal … was as follows: Start with the basic elements from Greek philosophy — earth, air, fire, and water — and divide the incoming freshman class according to their elemental inclinations. Then provide concrete activities for student engagement along those lines.”
Hebrew illuminated manuscripts from the Italian Renaissance
Portraits of 28 Japanese metal artists
On two novels that describe scientific/scholarly integrity – or the lack thereof.
A good introduction to the Mondragón model. We desperately need a version of this somewhere in the USA, just to demonstrate that business-as-usual is not the only way of doing business.
Related: the Uncovering Roman Carlisle site is fascinating.
Apparently the place for relics of Roman Britain is the Carlisle Cricket Club.
And finally, the Rio Grande as it emerges from the Santa Elena Canyon (whose walls reach 1500 feet in height) at the western end of the park.
The previous photo was of the Chisos Mountains in the center of the park; this one of the Rio Grande at the park’s eastern boundary.
This photo from Big Bend made me think about some of my own photos of the park, for instance this one.
I call my big blog the Homebound Symphony – for reasons explained here – but what does that Symphony hope to do? It hopes to build and celebrate the Vernacular Republic.
A lovely video of my buddy Jon Guerra, in a clearing above Laity Lodge, singing about Jesus.
This is the last day of my Great Texts in Christian Spirituality class, and I’m having my students read this 2007 sermon by Rowan Williams – largely because, better than any other text I know, it sums up the hope I live by.
I wrote about Dorothy L. Sayers as a middlebrow writer – in future posts I’ll be exploring the “brows” and asking whether that language is still useful (indeed, whether it ever was).
Leah Libresco Sargeant: “The struggles of much bigger tech companies to make their AI corrigible suggest Catholic Answers won’t have a reliably orthodox chatbot any time soon. But the problem with the project goes deeper: To imagine that a chatbot can be a catechist at all indicates a profound misunderstanding of how evangelization works. … God invites us to imitate him as sub-creators. It is a profound misuse of that invitation to build tools to take over our most human and relational tasks.”
Finished reading: Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard. Teaching this today. It is, every time I read it, a dazzling and disturbing book. 📚