“The whole universe was created by God, God was born of Mary. God created all things, and Mary gave birth to God…Without God's Son, nothing could exist; without Mary's Son, nothing could be redeemed.” -St. Anselm Merry Christmas!

Jane Kenyon

Oh, good luck with your Fourierism

“Love is sufficient in itself, gives pleasure through itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself…I love because I love, I love so that I may love” St Bernard quoted in DBH, Experience of God

"The Conqueror's victory would have profited us nothing if the battle had been fought outside our human condition. But through this wonderful blending the mystery of new birth shone upon us" - Pope Leo I on the Incarnation

Good afternoon open.spotify.com/track/4wOuyj...

"Ayer also said that Wittgenstein often made friends not because of their intellectual gifts but because of their moral qualities" -Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly Bottle

“Then [Murdoch] said that she had some things in common, as a moral philosopher, with Miss Anscombe and Mrs Foot..they were interested in ‘the reality that surrounds man—transcendent or whatever.’” -Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle

“Lord [Bertrand] Russell explained that he had two models for his own style—Milton’s prose and Baedeker’s guidebooks” -Ved Mehta, “Fly and the Fly-Bottle”

Happy Friday open.spotify.com/track/2IVxSQ...

At the office holiday party saying “Must be nice.” to everything anyone says

Now is a great time to read this great little book (as I have just myself discovered)

“It would be hard to count the number of times the death of the novel has been announced, in tragic tones. But despite its execution new novels continue to appear, some of them quite good ones” -Leszek Kołakowski

I went to the sale today of his books and it was an absolutely insane experience.

Ecce quam bonum

happy bandcamp friday! i haven't completed a lot of projects lately, but i am very proud of SWEETHEART OF THE PLANETARIUM, an album of lo-fi instrumental dream pop / ambient i released this summer. it's pay-what-you-want and i'd be honored if you'd listen dragonwarrior.bandcamp.com/album/sweeth...

“We simply like knowing things, quite apart from any practical benefits to be derived from knowledge; we like truth for no better reason than that it is truth. Without the joy of truth we would no longer be rational creatures” -Leszek Kołakowski

“Wake Up Dead Man” using “Come On Up to the House” as the credits song was an unnecessary act of pandering (I had already enjoyed the film) but one I can only support

For those getting started today open.spotify.com/playlist/5kY...

“I'd howl like a dog, I'd sound like a real one/I'd burn like a candle and grin in your face”

Happy Thanksgiving www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9rq...

"She struck up acquaintances at the Palais du Café with ersatz students wearing jackets that were too tight at the waist and tortoiseshell glasses" (From Patrick Modiano's "Flowers of Ruin")

If your novella doesn’t contain a list of French auto shops, I’m not interested

MJ Lenderman playing guitar and drums on Mavis Staples's new album...it really is a sad and beautiful world

Anora, Tár…slowly catching up on all the big films from recent years. Oppenheimer next probably

Good evening open.spotify.com/album/3GwZKo...

I lay down in that street My favorite city's artery And I stared into the moon Like it was staring back at me

Novels that appeared the same year: Memento Mori (Spark) and The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson) (1959); Quartet in Autumn (Pym) and The Honorable Schoolboy (Le Carré) (1977); The Transit of Venus (Hazzard) and Housekeeping (Robinson) (1980)

“Brief Encounter” (1945) is a great example of why we need more 90 minute movies set significantly in train stations

“While King Louis’s austerity came from his genuine piety, Charles’s was an instrument to gratify his longing for power. His piety was in its way genuine, but it chiefly took the form of a belief that he was the chosen instrument of God” -Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers

Tony Judt on the only lecture by Leszek Kołakowski he ever attended

A poem for All Souls’ Day from Jane Kenyon

"Paris, Texas" is a Thanksgiving movie

Once again in the turning of the year we have made it—to the best month of the year

Surprise — Katie and Allison Crutchfield's new band with MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook is called Snocaps, and their debut album is out now:

Happy Halloween youtu.be/Wp_JUkP2FUc?...

this is my new halloween album. creaky toy-keyboard soundscapes, odd samples, funny voices, tape hiss, it's all here dragonwarrior.bandcamp.com/album/childr...

It's a great week to give good gifts one to another and peace, joy, and comfort gladly bestow

One of the greatest albums ever made for this time of year, imo open.spotify.com/album/33CP9P...

Marjorie Taylor Greene and John Fetterman enter the ring…only one will emerge victorious

David Bentley Hart in 2013 (from “The Experience of God”): “[Belief in “strong AI” arises when] like Narcissus bent above the waters, we look down at our creations and, captivated by what we see reflected in them, imagine that another gaze has met our own”

Brodernism is back, baybee

“The house agent was in no way legally bound to mention the poltergeist, though he perhaps alluded to it in the phrase /usual period atmosphere/” -Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

“It is that universal and primordial human experience of simple wonder at the being of things to which all true philosophy is ultimately answerable” -David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God

Considering the possibility of offering subscription based online courses independently in the near future. Would anyone be interested in this? And if so, what kind of course would you be interested in taking?

Chuckling again at the time DBH was like “I have an immensely grave thing to say tomorrow and I am preparing you in advance in the anxious hope you will be scandalized by it” and the thing was that he didn’t enjoy going to church very much

This ruled. Wodehouse meets Iannucci meets the Shirley Hazzard of “People in Glass Houses”

“Captain Segura squeezed out a smile. It seemed to come from the wrong place like toothpaste when the tube splits.” -Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana