To contrast: that where Don Quixote’s Spiritual Vision occurs in the depths of the earth in the Cave of Montesinos, Sancho Panza’s Vision occurs high over the earth, as he supposes, on the enchanted flying wooden horse Clavileño.

People will say “both sides are to blame,” which I guess is intellectually the easiest position, but a whole lot of people are going to suffer because the patently worse side has prevailed.

Satyajit Ray's The Music Room always made me want to check out Indian classical music more, but I never found a good resource. Here are a couple of the music scenes of it, which I was reminded of tonight. www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfWR...

I’m putting up these lines from the Wallace Stevens poem “Comedian as the letter C” not just because I’ve learned a new word from it, dibbled, perfectly employed here, but because I thought @charlayn.bsky.social would enjoy its envisioning of sea waves as mustachios:

Out of the blue I got a chance to see Bob Dylan last night. Very atmospheric, funereal, the band set way back on the stage and dressed in black. Dylan deeply ensconced in a hoodie, almost a parka, and hidden the whole time behind the grand piano which had two holiday-style illumined bushes on it.

« Quand j’aurai inspiré le dégoût et l’horreur universels, j’aurai conquis la solitude. » When I have inspired universal disgust and horror, I will have conquered solitude. Baudelaire

Not an economist by any means but it looks like both the supply and the demand for labor are shrinking in the U.S.. We’re losing workers (deportation, aging population) *and* losing jobs (tariffs, gov’t positions, possibly also a deportation effect.)

Fun to re-encounter Bo Diddley: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iLc...

Did I say going out "strong"? I meant going out "extremely strong" -- www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMUt...

that's what we love about art/ it seems to prefer us and stays

Going out with a bang: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBhb...

Folks I am taking a bit of a hiatus from here as I contend with a bevy of summer activities. I hope the sheep and the flower bots, and the shepherd and the sculptor bots (and the sculpture bots,

Can't remember wear I came across this, so I can't repost, but this was quite a nice discussion of Brother's K., and I look forward to listening to more in the series: www.buzzsprout.com/1859895/epis...

too cool to be forgotten

TO BE CONTINUED. Who is the Silver Knight’s “unbeatable foe”, who but the Silver Knight himself? It is not governments, parents, corporations, gays, immigrants, Janet Yellen, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or people who abuse their Metro bus passes — It is the Silver Knight!

Is Europe in a proxy war with China? I'm not sure, but definitely wish I was in Namaqualand. Mood is negative. (Liberals: can we can we get serious and start winning elections?)

Apparently this dress-trousers combo was considered both feminist and suitable to exercise in in the U.S. of the 1860s. American History Museum.

Surprised to find it's strongly suspected, but not definitively known, whether the words 'Syria' and 'Assyria' are linked. Wikipedia article, Name of Syria: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of...

🌻

At the coffeeshop, I always recommended to tourists that they visit the mineral and gem exhibit of the National History Museum, "the secret source of DC's power being contained in these mystical, amazing crystals and gems," I joked, and a favorite place of mine,

19th century fireman's helmet, American History Museum, americanhistory.si.edu/collections/...

hm www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

I can see @charlayn.bsky.social wearing this hat, if they ever give her a body. www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

These shoes would be more interesting if from the distant past, but still. www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

Remembering Band of Susans tonight www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s2f...

to dream the indefatigable dream... to fight the unfrightable fox... to squelch the unquenchable scum… I was actually moved by that yesterday, so resigned has The Silver Knight become, so low his expectations!

"Find myself vulnerable to writing a bad poem": allpurposeblog.com/2025/07/16/f...

"To know what mattered 4,500 years ago, don’t ask poets – ask the garbage."

I was okay with having woken late in the morning, since I was awake for more of the night than I could handle. So much to handle, at 2 am, at 4 am, I had to pick up the Emerson. I laughed, I shut the book, I read L’Homme and La Mer, I turned off the light, I laughed, I failed to return to sleep.

Anyone with even a passing interest in Beckett needs to read Emilie Morin's biography of Suzanne Dumesnil: it's free to download for the next two weeks. This is feminist restorative history in action: read this book!!!

A passage in Walden reminding me that birds don’t have “backwards knees”: rather, what we think are their knees are in fact their ankles…. (What did the Archaic English word ‘yclept’ mean again?) (It meant “Named, called.” “He was yclept Paul,” for example). Photography was a technology and so was

Derek Thompson: "The quiet miracle of charity and global aid is that the uneven distribution of global wealth creates an asymmetry by which relatively trivial amounts of money from the rich can prevent immense suffering and death among the poor." substack.com/home/post/p-...

Starting to think of Thoreau as just an incipient form of what has become a general psychological condition I may share.

Phrase of the day was "falling behind." I'm falling behind, you're falling behind, he's falling behind, we're all falling behind, according to my dad today.

a dizzard, a fool, a covetous wretch, a beast, etc... a filthy loathsome carcass, a Gorgon's head puffed up by parasites

Looking down at my bare calf I am so surprised not to see a mosquito I don’t even bother to scratch the itch.

Nice to hear a British accent today. This was on that narrow stretch of sidewalk along Canal in front of Georgetown University.

I have never experienced what they call a runner’s high, but I will say that, during long runs my experience of time will be altered.

Jean Cocteau on Marcel Proust (tr. Margaret Crosland)

Piece of scrap paper I’m reluctant to throw away, one underlined word written on it — Cheri. This was the name of a regular customer who came in sporadically enough I could never get her name straight. Was it Cheri or Sharon... could it even be Cherise? (It was Cheri.)

On the strange idioms of dreams again... Last night I was telling former customer Sheila I'd tried to make 7 eclairs and only 2 of them came out right. (Never eat eclairs but did as a child. 7: Pharaoh's dreams.)

This is a new one from me, a long one, though it is basically a stitching together (rhapsodizing???) of old ideas. The attempt indeed was to stitch together some of my oddest ideas. I tentatively call it.... Self Respect and Freedom of Thought: allpurposeblog.com/self-respect...

Thunder Cakes and Boulders of Bacon and Sky Bagels (gently solar roasted) with a plentiful helping of Meteorite Mash (and don’t forget the Star Gravy), none of these compares with my actual favorite:

DREAM. At an outdoor bar, a server (as he is delivering a pint of beer to someone else) directs the pint into my two fingers and claims that I have “knifed it.” “Dude, you knifed it!” I have never heard this expression before yet know exactly what it means.

Another thing I learned yesterday: the French word for utensil is ustensile. I like the tenacity with which that extra s has survived.

Best case scenario for U.S. is that... the UN will become necessary, as a governing body, in ways that haven't been dreamed of What are your hopes, expectations about South Africa?

Getting straight what a postilion is: not driving the carriage like a coachman, but actually mounted on a lead horse and directing the carriage or cart or what have you, by those means.

"Now might the one day be many days…." is a thought that almost mounts the neck’s horseback into the mind’s mane; it nails its landing from the pommel horse, two feet planted firm in the eyes’ soft blue mat.