‘…and still / The book-club, guarded from your modern trick / Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease, / Preserved her intellectual.’ —E.B. Browning, ‘Aurora Leigh’

What five movies would you tell people to watch to get to know who you are and how you feel and think in the world? Modern Times Yojimbo The Thin Man Stalker Howl’s Moving Castle

Meeting up with old friends.

Another walk along the river.

Thinking back over the books I’ve finished reading so far this year, and Auden’s ‘The Dyer’s Hand’ and Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ stand out as the best, but Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s ‘Recollections of Gustav Mahler’ is definitely the funniest (well, ‘most amusing’).

Remember the Armenians.

Hanging out with my most toxic neighbor.

Do you need more mediocre verse from the late nineteenth century in your life? Yes, of course you do. Special guest criticism by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Jack Kerouac. www.eudaemonist.com/biblion/marz...

‘There are types of character which are like a prism, whose various and brilliant colours are but broken reflections of a single ray of concentrated light’ —R.H. Tawney (‘Religion and the Rise of Capitalism’, p. 156)

‘Become the imitable thing’ —William James, ‘The Gospel of Relaxation’

Spell check wants to change ‘bibliometrische’ to ‘bibliomantische’.

‘Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface’ —William James, ‘On Vital Reserves’

‘Nor hope to be my self less miserable By what I seek, but others to make such As I, though thereby worse to me redound: For onely in destroying I find ease To my relentless thoughts’ —Milton, ‘Paradise Lost’, IX.126–130

the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy

‘So there’s an end to that—it’s commonplace: light goes with life, and in the winter of your years the dark comes early…’ —Tom Stoppard, ‘Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead’

‘Somehow his memory irritates me! He possessed the truth and answered to the heavenly calling, and yet always without joy and almost always without grace. His puerility, as you say, was heartrending.’ —Edmund Gosse, unimpressed with Andrew Lang in a letter to Henry James

‘Opposite to exercise is idleness (the badge of gentry) or want of exercise, the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, stepmother of discipline, the chief author of all mischief….’ —Robert Burton (‘Anatomy of Melancholy’)

‘Of seasons of the year, the autumn is most melancholy’ —Robert Burton, ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’, 1.1.3.2

Ulrich von Hutten’s poem ‘Nemo’ (nemo, nam, nemo omnibus horis sapit, etc.) is briefly quoted in ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, and it reminded me of: ‘Well, one time when things was looking bright I started to whittling on a stick one night Who said, “Hey! That's dynamite!”? Nobody.’

‘Some prank up their bodies, and have their minds full of execrable vices. Some trot about to bear false witness, and say anything for money; and though judges know of it, yet for a bribe they wink at it, and suffer false contracts to prevail against equity.’ —Burton, ‘Democritus Jr. to the Reader’

‘The natural dreariness of the place is not a little increased by the melancholy croakings of innumerable penguins with which the Shore is lined. Nature seems to have designed this Spot solely for the use of Sea Lions, Seals, penguins and Sea Fowls.’ —James Burney, Journals, 25.xii.1776

A moment’s pause while tidying.

‘As readers, most of us, to some degree, are like those urchins who pencil mustaches on the faces of girls in advertisements’ —Auden, ‘Reading’, in ‘The Dyer’s Hand’

‘There’s really no point in writing normal novels’ —Yoko Tawada, ‘Exophony’ (trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda), p. 81

‘Why novels have to follow the logic of department stores is beyond me’ —Yoko Tawada, ‘Exophony’ (trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, p. 54)

If you are looking for creepy stories about ghosts, uncanny children, and other oddities, I cannot recommend M.R. James’s translation of ‘The Apocryphal New Testament: Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses with Other Narratives and Fragments’ enough. Snarky notes a bonus.

‘To grow bigger every moment in your own conceit, and the world to lessen: to deify yourself at the expense of your species; to judge the world—this is the acme and supreme point of your mystery—these the true PLEASURES of SULKINESS.’ —Charles Lamb, ‘Popular Fallacies’ no. XVI

August was a somewhat slow reading month. Standouts include James C. Scott, ‘The Art of Not Being Governed’; Marguerite Yourcenar, ‘The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays’; and finally finishing Tolkien’s diplomatic edition of ‘Ancrene Wisse’. www.eudaemonist.com/biblio/2025-...

‘How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of all freedom!’ —Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Poetics of Space’, trans. Maria Jolas

Evening books. ‘Magic Mountain’ is not as clever as I recall it being. ‘A Monk’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind’ is the best text about cleanings toilets I’ve encountered save for ‘Perfect Days’. Lamb is cute. Bachelard is not setting things on fire. ‘The Candidate’ is unsettling. Zambreno is fine.

There is a Shame of Nobleness— Confronting Sudden Pelf— A finer Shame of Ecstasy— Convicted of Itself—

A little wilderness experience.

In other information retrieval news, punch cards are also very good bookmarks.

A good set of morning books at the moment: autonomy at the peripheries, Marxist Romantics, regional cults (with bonus spicy academic drama), wrenchfule wicchecreftes, and, you know, commodities.

One can get a fair amount of reading done by reducing one’s daily allotment of doomscrolling. www.eudaemonist.com/biblio/2025-...

Any time I find a line of poetry I like, I think: ‘That’s good; “mobled queen” is good.’

‘I have never made an acquaintance since, that lasted; or a friendship, that answered; with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding.’ —Charles Lamb, ‘All Fools’ Day’

I talk a lot of nonsense. www.eudaemonist.com/21vii2025/

Yeah, yeah, I went to the woods with the dog because I wished to sniff deliberately… www.eudaemonist.com/16vii2025/

So I sometimes get John Cheever and Raymond Carver confused on stylistic grounds; I also get Roald Amundsen and Fridtjof Nansen confused based on their photos, even tho’ Amundsen clearly looks more like a clean-shaven Edward Gorey. Fun fact.

‘And in another place were gravel-stones sharper than swords or any spit, heated with fire, and men and women clad in filthy rags rolled upon them in torment. And these were they that were rich and trusted in their riches’ —Apocalypse of Peter (trans. M.R. James)

‘…all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.’

Meant to write about morning walks in the wilderness with the dog, but found a quotation from Wittgenstein about potatoes and Spinoza. One does one’s true work where one can. www.eudaemonist.com/16vi2025/