Reading Liberal Currents, saw the word "despisal", and wondered if that could really be the noun form of "despise". Merriam-Webster says "despisement", which is also pretty exotic. Maybe the language isn't structurally uniform, with single well-accepted variant forms of every word!

I've been getting some new followers, from being on a list of Academics who Listen to Free Jazz. (Soon they'll find I'm an imposter!) But it was amusing to see one who has a version of Escher's reflecting mirror as his avatar. Parmigianino salutes! escherinhetpaleis.nl/en/about-esc...

This #ModWrite I am working on my chapter on Mina Loy's spirituality during her time living in the post-WWII New York Bowery

The day has just begun here. I don’t know if this falls in the intended scope, but the date fits, and it at least reverberates with what’s usually called modernism in music: youtu.be/px59G3t-biM?... #ModWrite

This is a cat checkpoint, relinquish your most recent cat picture on your phone.

What do you call it when you realize that an artist (writer, etc.) has decided to do something, and is doing it well, but isn't making it interesting beyond the obvious intention? I kind of thought "tour de force" was used for this, but I'm not sure dictionaries agree

This is so odd, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do with the question. None of us listens to music without prior context. Maybe the aliens need to start with “The Wheels on the Bus”, or that might be moving too fast

Star City is watchable but - thinly written, only the most directly plotty dialogue - everyone speaks with a British accent, strongest when saying Russian proper names - the evil apparatchik is modeled on Lotte Lenya's Rosa Klebb

Not a fresh take, but: Gray’s Elegy. Amazingly beautiful and richly detailed defense of hierarchy.

Dylan going electric Max Brod deciding not to destroy Kafka’s work

Now I've heard this piece in rehearsal, and can attest that it's fun. Probably not a stylistic direction I will take very far, but with some virtues I haven't managed before. Saturday, June 6 8 pm Old First Church 1751 Sacramento St. (at Van Ness), San Francisco

I’ve lived in the Bay Area for 35 years and don’t get the obsession with brunch. Long lines at 10:30 Sunday morning, for what

I don't believe we are born or meant to do things -- it's a figure of speech. But what I find myself desiring intensely at 60 is in fact what I was into at 16. (for some reason I couldn't find an "original" post that started this chain or forest of quotations)

Web apps that can’t make progress unless they hog the keyboard focus — so you can’t switch windows while they work

Moi non plus — there were some loose distributional requirements, but I was able to satisfy them by taking eccentric specialized classes. I wonder if core requirements have come back

RIP youtu.be/-QtwXvu1uGA?...

I don't think Patricia and I are so different, but emotional content is hard to talk about. Some music that I love has very little emotion to it other than "whee!" www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1Id...

The one thing you know for sure after reading that sentence is that his name is not Ishmael.

A longtime Internet friend mentioned Slaughterhouse-Five, and I've been taking a look. Here too the style is really not for me. I sense a theme of sorts.

Something that inspired me at the right adolescent moment, and that I’ve had trouble weeding out of my thinking since: Robert Hughes’s “The Shock of the New”

Uh...neither? A diffuse cultural movement doesn't have a singular purpose? Attributing intention is a harmful shorthand? This is about T.J. Clark, but somehow I don't remember him being so teleological. interccect.com/2026/04/22/g...

One big difference: the Pollock has special value to the world. The wealthy art buyers are paying for the privilege of keeping it from the public. (The claim of primacy is hype, but that’s by the way.) www.spiritualarts.org.uk/product/flow...

I’ve often daydreamed of programming a string orchestra concert, and I think I’ve found the right piece to complete it. Strauss, Metamorphosen Bacewicz, Concerto for String Orchestra Xenakis, Pithoprakta (a few extra instruments in the last, admittedly) youtu.be/uJk1flnPj4w?...

My grad school buddy and I wrote a conference paper in which we pointed out a useful identity for how often code in different parts of a computer program is executed. The paper has been cited 150 times or so, and I suspect most authors haven't read it -- the citation is a hat-tip for the identity.

It’s beautifully balanced, Johnsonian even. And the flight into whimsical formality is perfect for dry self-irony. …

Trying to read a spy novel mentioned by someone on here, and the prose is so bad. Of course the genre depends on “the romance of competence”. But when the hero does something, we don’t need an explanation of why it’s smart. Show, I suppose, don’t tell.

With Elektra coming up soon in SF, I'm listening to it again and remembering the first time. It was in Santa Fe, in a gathering rainstorm. I was about 15, and it was the second or third opera I had ever been to. The natural setting was dramatic, and the staging bloody...

There are broadly two schools of how to write test code: “mockist”, using special conveniences called mocks, and (amusingly) “classical”, avoiding them, sometimes by contortions. I’m now in a mockist shop, conforming to house style, but with a strong mental reservation. youtu.be/Jeu3iH0R_GM?...

Considering going to a concert including The Soldier's Tale, wishing I liked the story and narration as well as I do the music. www.leftcoastensemble.org/left-coast-e...

NGL I'm pretty happy about this one www.sfchronicle.com/entertainmen...

Liberal Currents has arrived!

to quibble with the wall text -- all portraits do this [*]. I think what cwolbrecht is getting at (and probably the text meant) is that the "sitter" is in the driver's seat, projecting their identity through the representation, mediated by a sculptor or an iPhone camera.

Another example: when my opera based on Yeats was performed, my Irish friend got in touch afterward, to say nice things but also specifically to tell me that Yeats was not really an Irish poet. (I had carefully avoided calling him that in the program and notices.)

Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian and Aeolian. (Locrian has been theorized but is rare in nature.)

A horn player I know told me she didn’t really get Bruckner. I said there’s not much to get, and she looked at me oddly. I think she heard “How can you not get it??” rather than “Oh, you’ve definitely gotten it, the question is if you find it interesting.”

Not a quarrel, but for me, bread reaches higher highs than the others. Yesterday we tried some bagels from a pizza place in North Berkeley, and while they weren’t very bagelly, they had that good crust and gluten that made me want to come back for the pizza

This is a valid etymological account, but the wide diffusion and easy intelligibility of “grilled cheese” alone suggests it doesn’t reflect the synchronic workings of the phrases and words.

Best film adaptation of the Odyssey, wrong answers only youtu.be/xsZAfkcKb4E?...

Starting Carmen Maria Machado's version of Carmilla -- I did not realize that she had made lots of small cuts in the text, apparently for speed, as well as larger edits. The result is an odd texture, Victorian amplitude interrupted

Historians of political thought can't be trusted with footnotes.

The internet deserves a free edition of Fanny Hensel's Easter Sonata. With Angela's blessing, I have made my own edition.

Just a tangential remark by the author -- but the combining of registers and historic strata in "la parole" is how language works. At the level of words, language is discrete. Our experience of the words may be continuously shaded, but the tokens are not.... www.thewesternedge.media/p/the-age-of...

"pathway" is a metaphor, right? Something (the focus of consciousness or narration) is "moving" through abstract dimensions of ... reference?

Since I had extra syllables, I let this stand as an alexandrine. But now I see it would work better in blank verse, with the awkwardness increased by enjambment. Prof! off whom the pupils rapt most dread To piss,

My record with these puzzles was strong on accuracy and slow on time, so I was consistently behind around 150-200 quicker competitors (among them @aedwardslevy.bsky.social and other names we know on here). But in the last puzzle I got careless and submitted without a full last scan -- two points off

I found the first Devil Wears Prada moderately entertaining, with good actors making the best of a dilute script. And oddly given the subject, it’s visually flat. (I’m not the right audience, indifferent to fashion in person but eager to be ravished by it onscreen.)

Contrarily: what do you expect to get when you google “crumble”? For a definition, “define crumble” has been the query for at least 15 years. For a recipe, I think we’ve always needed to disambiguate, e.g. “blueberry crumble”

It was once common to be asked for ID when you paid with a credit card. Not defending him, obviously, but he is trying for a degree of plausibility in the bullshit

If you see this, post a concert photo you took

To be dull about this, the piece is a stunt. You may find it very successful, as I do, but you have to acknowledge that it’s doing something obviously limiting on purpose. (Also, I haven’t heard “pop is dumb” from classical musicians in ages….)