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Our Native Birds of Song and Beauty

The headline says, “How medieval carpenters are rebuilding Notre Dame”, which is dumb, because no medieval carpenters are alive today – people don’t live 700 years, duh. The the story is fascinating, about how (let’s get this right) craftsmen trained in medieval techniques are helping to rebuild the great cathedral. The story itself continues the imprecision: “Frédéric Épaud, a medieval wood specialist, tells the Observer” … “a specialist in medieval wood”? That sounds odd. Maybe he’s a specialist in medieval woodworking techniques? Anyway, he says this:

Michael Heizer’s megasculpture, “City” – about which I am immensely skeptical … but I think I have to see it, if only because of this: “The whole gestalt thwarts a culture of Instagram selfies, something Heizer is especially proud of.” And because Heizer has been working on this for fifty years.

I’m scheduling this for the usual Monday morning time, but – and here I’m quoting from a recent blog post – I’m off for a brief writing retreat, to see if I can finish a complete draft of my “biography” of Paradise Lost … which has been fun to write but also immensely challenging. It occurred to me the other day that if I had to rewrite the book using nothing I have used so far — none of the facts about Milton’s life, none of the quotations from Paradise Lost, none of the references to later readers and writers — I could easily do it. That’s how much material there is to draw on. And I have to keep the whole thing to 50,000 words!

A lovely page describing the conservation by the Getty Museum of a Roman sarcophagus.

A 17th-century woman’s will.

An illuminated manuscript from eighteenth-century Pennsylvania -- beautiful full-sized image here.

How Guernica flopped: “By nearly every measure, Picasso’s huge, dark painting stalled at the starting gate. Le Corbusier, the architect who reviewed all the murals at the World’s Fair, wrote that Guernica alone ‘saw only the backs of visitors, for they were repelled by it.’ Sert, who was by his own account at the pavilion constantly during its four-month run, was struck by the almost-universal disdain. ‘The people came there, they looked at this thing and they didn’t understand it,’ he said.”

Kazumasa Nagai

The Atlantic makes its entire 165-year archive available online – quite a big deal for those interested in American history.

Art by Kit Boyd

Decades ago, I looked in every issue of the Atlantic for the inevitable painting by Guy Billout -- so it’s nice to see that he has an Instagram.

My friend and colleague Philip Jenkins on iconoclasm old and new:

It me. No, wait, it a maize god.

Via my friend David Hooker: Isn’t it time for you to outhorse your email?

Paul Klee’s puppets are delightful or creepy, and sometimes both.

I love the idea that a university would create and publish its own calendar/diary for its members, and, though I have no connection whatever to Cambridge University, I share Mary Beard’s sadness that the little book will cease publication.

Why Soviet Poland banned Anne of Green Gables.

As the maker of a website called Gospel of the Trees, I see some exciting material in this story about great British trees and forests.

Most of my photos feature trees. The pictures probably look same-ish to others but every tree is different, and interestingly different, to me.

Another of these intermittent messages....

Look: The greatest a capella group in history is The Persuasions. This is not something about which reasonable people can disagree. Take a listen. No argument will ensue.

One shortcoming of many of us who critique our social media culture: We say what we don’t like but fail to say what we like. I have tried to remedy that deficiency in this brief essay for the Hedgehog Review. What you should do instead of hanging out on Twitter is read Dickens. Social media will make your lifeworld narrower; reading Dickens will help you see more expansive possibilities.

Best Dickens novels, in order (kinda):

• Bleak House
• Little Dorrit
• David Copperfield
• Great Expectations
• Our Mutual Friend

It’s often said that Dickens’s characters are larger than life, which is true when we let our lives get small enough. Let’s not do that.

Hello again. Here’s another of my intermittent messages.

The most time-consuming part of my old newsletter was selecting, formatting, and uploading the images. That’s the kind of thing I just don’t have time for these days, but in this Easter season it’s good to look at some paintings by Arcabas.

The blog lately has been mainly devoted to quotations – I have some larger pieces in the works but they may take a while to be ready. The end of the term is at our throats and we are busy people. “We” being teachers.

I have had four fairly substantial essays come out in the past few weeks – which gives an erroneous sense of my productivity. I didn’t write them all at the same time!

Hello folks!

I am not able to resume the newsletter at this point, not in its former glory anyway, but I do want to send a brief update.

I have an essay out in Comment called “Recovering Piety” -- I try to redefine and commend that dusty old virtue: “Renewal of trust in institutions will not happen unless the institutions recover their integrity, and that will not happen unless the people who work within them become pious — devoted, faithful, committed not to their own personal flourishing but to the flourishing of that which they serve. And if, as we have seen, utilitarianism banishes piety, the restoration of piety will depend on the banishing of utilitarianism.”

I also have an essay in the new issue of The New Atlantis called “Something Happened By Us: A Demonology”: “Several accounts of the spread of ideas jostle against one another in our moment: Richard Dawkins’s notion of ‘memes’ — ideas spreading by replication — competes with notions of ‘virality’ and of ‘social contagion.’ There is information theory and disease theory. I prefer demon theory.”

Hello folks, just briefly: I don’t expect to be able to resume this newsletter anytime soon, but

1. I am still writing at my main blog;
2. I post mainly photos but also the occasional link at my micro.blog, which you can subscribe to via email – see the “Subscribe” link at the top of that page. Those emails go out each Friday.

Each of those is different than this newsletter, though maybe if you’re interested in this you’ll be interested in them also. (Unfortunately, there’s not a simple way to enable email subscriptions to my main blog – one day I’ll figure something out, but not this day. Or this month.)

A blessed Feast of the Annunciation to all!

Piranesi’s fantasias.

And while we’re considering Roman things, here’s the extraordinary Aeneas intaglio from the Getty Museum:

David Jones, Flora in Calix-Light, 1950 (graphite & watercolor on paper). See a brief Lenten meditation on the drawing here.

The Franks Casket is an exceptionally curious object. Made probably in Northumbria in the 8th century, it offers an eclectic collection of images: The front (shown above) features both the Adoration of the Magi and that unpleasantly weird figure from Norse-Germanic legend, Wayland the Smith, and elsewhere presents scenes from Roman history. The text is sometimes in Old English and sometimes in Latin and sometimes runic. It’s nuts.

The Hove Amber Cup (ca. 1750 BC), one of many treasures at the World of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum.

Diana Bloomfield

Updating the furnishings of a 1960s church

A peacock mosaic at the recently excavated Church of the Holy Apostles in southern Hatay province, Turkey.

Claudia Rilling

Brazilian cover designs, from the invaluable Steven Heller.

Merry Christmas to all!

An East German Advent Calendar from 1980

Surely you all have enough of me, but ... micro.blog, where I keep my digital scrapbook -- photos and quotes and links, rather than full blog posts -- has introduced a new feature that allows you to get a weekly digest of posts. You may subscribe to it here.

We have entered Advent -- that first and most curious season of the Christian church’s year, which simultaneously awaits Christ’s Second Coming and looks back at centuries of patient or impatient waiting for the Incarnation. Essential reading: Auden’s long poem For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, a poem written in time of global war, which begins with an Advent section, including this meditation:

If, on account of the political situation,
There are quite a number of homes without roofs, and men
Lying about in the countryside neither drunk nor asleep,
If all sailings have been cancelled till further notice,
If it’s unwise now to say much in letters, and if,
Under the subnormal temperatures prevailing,
The two sexes are at present the weak and the strong,
That is not at all unusual for this time of year.
If that were all we should know how to manage. Flood, fire,
The desiccation of grasslands, restraint of princes,
Piracy on the high seas, physical pain and fiscal grief,
These after all are our familiar tribulations,
And we have been through them all before, many, many times.
As events which belong to the natural world where
The occupation of space is the real and final fact
And time turns round itself in an obedient circle,
They occur again and again but only to pass
Again and again into their formal opposites,
From sword to ploughshare, coffin to cradle, war to work,
So that, taking the bad with the good, the pattern composed
By the ten thousand odd things that can possibly happen
Is permanent in a general average way.

But then, something New comes into the world.

Recently, I was able to spend a few days at my great place of refuge, and also the co-sponsor of this newsletter, Laity Lodge. What a blessing. A few more photos are here.

World’s most beautiful libraries

“When London is in Ruins”: Gustave Doré’s The New Zealander

“Nautilus,” by Louise V. Durham

That’s a time-lapse photo of a highway (I believe U.S. Route 163 in Utah) leading to Monument Valley – with the center of the galaxy in the background. One of many astonishing astronomical photographs by Michael Abramy – but if that particular one doesn’t blow your mind I don’t know what will.

Jenny Holzer

Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man:

Autumn is just beginning to hint at us here in central Texas, but whenever it comes I find myself thinking about this passage from C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy in which he describes how in childhood he received certain “glimpses” of something beyond his experience, and yet connected somehow to his experience:

If you have read The Wind in the Willows -- and let me pause here to say that if you have not read the Wind in the Willows then what are you doing with your life? Stop reading this silly newsletter, call in sick to work, and start reading that wondrous book right now.

Carry Ackroyd paints the poems of John Clare

Musician, by Jim Leonard

The at the Art Institute of Chicago

Martin Gerlach

Welcome, friends, to the triumphant return of Snakes & Ladders! I trust that once more you’ll hear from me weekly, now that I’ve had a bit of a break. Two quick introductory thoughts: