Rewarded.

Rockwell, Boy Reading of Adventure, 1920

The Atlantic says the end of reading is here ...

Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

Later ...

If we fill our time with short-form videos instead of books, our reading skills atrophy. We have less background knowledge to aid comprehension. There’s no danger of spontaneous mass illiteracy, but the complex cognitive skills that reading fosters start to degrade. The library of the mind falls into disrepair.

Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding. Eventually the process is more pleasurable than it is challenging. But as with physical exercise, the converse is true as well: The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge.

My students hear this from me every single day:  "Psst!  Hey all you readers!  Keep at it!  The habits of those around you are making it easier and easier for you to succeed!

Twain tried to warn us: The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot.

Real.

"Professor" McGonigle is the real deal ...

Capping an eight-pitch at-bat, the 2023 No. 37 overall draft pick doubled to right-center field, benefiting after Trout missed on a diving catch attempt. It was his 100th hit of the season, establishing a piece of franchise history.

McGonigle and Hall of Famer Ty Cobb are the only players aged 21 or under to hit the century mark before playing in 100 games. 

On July 12, McGonigle moved into third place all-time by reaching base 161 times before the All-Star break by players aged 21 or younger.

And he wears his pants properly. 

Right.

In my view all such definitions start from the wrong end of the subject, which is not about ‘things in the world’ but about a particular experience of them, and about the pursuit of meaning that springs from that experience. Does this imply that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, that there is no objective property that we recognize and about whose nature and value we can agree? My answer is simply this: everything I have said about the experience of beauty implies that it is rationally founded. It challenges us to find meaning in its object, to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find.  Art, nature and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the centre of our lives. If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire. But to imagine that we can do this, and still be free to see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference or a source of transient pleasure, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives. It is to fail to see that, for a free being, there is right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action. The judgement of beauty orders the emotions and desires of those who make it. It may express their pleasure and their taste: but it is pleasure in what they value and taste for their true ideals.

Sir Roger Scruton, from Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

Done.

Done and done.

A walk through Walker's Arms is always exciting.

Happy Birthday, Edgar Degas

Degas, Olive Trees Against a Mountainous Background, 1892

One sees what one wants to see. It is false, and that falsity is the foundation of art.  You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do today. Otherwise working is just a waste of time.

Edgar Degas, born on this day in 1834, from Renoir: His Life and Work, by Fosca Francois

Dwight Twilley, "I'm on Fire"

Order a carafe of Black Tower or Blue Nun ("... when you're not sure what you're having for dinner") and an extra side of ranch for your chicken nachos ...

Mackinac.

The 102nd Bayview to Mackinac Race begins today.

Watch live onboard Hot Ticket and Nobody's Fault ...

Track the boats HERE.

Watch the finish from the front yard of The Windemere.

Released.

Joy Division released Closer on this day in 1980.

Hooky's treatment of "Isolation" ...

Happy Birthday, Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart was born on this day in 1938.

With Lefty Dizz and some stragglers at The Chickerboard in '81, here's "Ugly Woman"...

Back.

Think of artificial intelligence as the "clear fire" as Professor Bloom reads from Chapter 119 of Moby-Dick, "The Candles" ...

Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.

AI will never be skeptical, it's programmed job is to satisfy you, validate you, make you feel "smart" (whatever that means) for ultimately doing nothing -- more symbolism over substance.  

YOU must be the skeptic and breathe the clear fire back intothe mouth of its fakery.

Released.

Echo &The Bunnymen released Crocodiles on this day in 1980.

"Stars Are Stars"...

Intricacies.

The Bodleian Map Room on the intricacies of ancient eclipse cartography ...

This map has ben copied four times very confused and scandalousy.

Since ye beginning of this new sett of maps now completely finish’d, several ignorant pretenders have started up & with great shew & noise frequently advertised their trifling performances: calling them cheap, curious, useful & correct: as to the first epithet, they are really dear at any price; in ye 2d. place , everybody may see they are wild, confused and poorly engraven; as for their usefulness, they tend only to lead people into errors; and so far from being correct, that the projection of their principal maps is notoriously false.

Traditional, "Pretty Saro"

Sam Shackleton has a go ...

Thanks, Mum.

Quality.

Big Jim Collie's shortcut through the Lairig Ghru, the highest mountain pass in the highest mountain range in Britain.

I've done this for years and I think it's the water of the hill water seems to add to the quality of the whiskey, as well. The way I drink it. 

... I have another little cargo in readiness.

Fortunately, Big Jim has another secret weapon, the Lairig Flyer. ...

Chaminade, Pièces humoristiques, Op. 87

Karin Lechner performs Autrefois ...

Strength.

The OAK

Live thy Life,

Young and old,

Like yon oak,

Bright in spring,

Living gold;

Summer-rich

Then; and then

Autumn-changed,

Soberer-hued

Gold again.

All his leaves

Fallen at length,

Look, he stands,

Trunk and bough

Naked strength.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Rest.

More.

Put out more flags.

Right.

Right compared to what? 

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

... to prioritize victory over, rather than coexistence with, the communist threat.

Retreat.

Didier Francois, nyckelharpa, Rolf Lislevand, theorbo, and Andre Lislevand, viola da gamba, provide this morning's Kapsberger retreat ...

Again.

Do not tread on the dirgey darkness of my Oyster Month gloamings.

Prepare ye.

Grieg, Holberg Suite, Op.40

The New England Conservatory Chamber Orchestra performs ...

Happy Birthday, Sir Joshua

Reynolds, Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1769

In the practice of art... it is necessary to keep a watchful and jealous eye over ourselves; idleness, assuming the specious disguise of industry... may be employed to evade and shuffle off real labor - the real labor of thinking.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, born on this day in 1723, from Discourses

Happy Birthday, Stewart Copeland

Stewart Copeland was born on this day in 1952.

"Reggatta de Blanc"...

Published.

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them -- if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

J.D. Salinger, from The Catcher in the Rye, published on this day in 1951

More.

Put out more flags.

Released.

Killing Joke released Fire Dances on this day in 1983.

"Let's All Go (To the Fire Dances)"...

Released.

D-wight Lightnin' released Under the Covers on this day in 1997.

"Claudette"...

I love it when a cover is better than the original.

Already.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

Frank Zappa, from an interview titled "Revolt Against Mediocrity" conducted by Batya Friedman and Steve Lyons in 1986

Boyce, Trio Sonata No. 1 in A-Minor

Beneath a Tree performs ...

Happy Birthday, Inigo Jones

Jones, The Walled Gardens at Milton Manor House, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, 1663

All these composed ornaments do not well in solid architecture and the façades of houses, but in gardens, loggias, stucco or ornaments of chimney pieces.  For as outwardly every wise man carrieth a gravity in public places, yet inwardly hath his imagination set free, so in architecture the outward ornaments ought to be solid, proportionable, according to the rules, masculine and unaffected.

Inigo Jones, born on this day in 1573, from Vaughan Hart's Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings

Simon Thurleyt's talk, Inigo Jones: The Architecture of Necessity

Happy Birthday, Andy Newmark

Andy Newmark was born on this day in 1950.

"My Only Love" with Roxy Music ...

Never.

Benjamin Warner’s Revolutionary-era linen knapsack and note to future generations remain two of Fort Ticonderoga’s most treasured artifacts ...

And whilst one shred of it shall remain, never surrender your liberties to a foreign invader or an aspiring demagogue.

Marvellous.

The Bodleian Map Room has the Oxfordshire Sheldon tapestry ...

Made from a mix of wool and silk the tapestries are both marvellous in their own right but are also important cartographic records, made at a time when England was beginning to be mapped properly for the first time. Each one would have originally measured approximately 15 by 20 feet and each has a "featured" county at its centre, bordered in red. Rivers and settlements feature prominently as do scenes of local interest such as the Rollright Stones, a prehistoric stone circle in north Oxfordshire, or a brief bit of text on the Worcestershire tapestry telling of a land slip. Important houses are shown though none as big as Sheldon’s, Weston House, which appears on all four tapestries, the very centre of the area the tapestries show. And what an area, when put together as a set of maps the range goes from as far north as the suburbs of Birmingham down past a beautiful, though comically inaccurate, White Horse at Uffington and from the Welsh border across to the Tower of London the whole of central England is depicted in glorious detail.

Beyond.

Ari Weinzweig on reading ...

Of course, as the news reports all too frequently of late, the drive to read is not the modern-day norm. Last summer, The New York Times cited a study from University College London and the University of Florida that found Americans’ rate of reading has declined roughly 3 percent a year for the last 20 years. 

The numbers are not encouraging, but there’s no time like the present to turn things around. In the larger context of the world, what’s at stake is not just reading for the benefit of the reader. Rather, it seems ever clearer to me that democratic constructs—whether in companies or countries—really depend on it. Regular reading builds the sort of empathy, curiosity, and culture of learning and creativity that we need to run the kind of caring, healthy organizations we’re out to create. As advocate Luis González Martin wrote last fall, 

Democracy depends on reading, but not in the abstract. It depends on the kind of reading that slows us down, unsettles us, and teaches us to think beyond ourselves. At a time when noise travels faster than nuance and democratic life feels increasingly fragile, the simple act of engaging deeply with a text becomes a form of resistance. Reading ambitious, critical, reflective reading remains one of the few spaces where citizens can rehearse complexity, recover attention, and cultivate the inner freedoms that public freedoms require.

What goes wrong, then? Well, to a great extent, Peter Senge says, the problem lies with the pervasiveness of hierarchical thinking in Western society:

The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.

In his famous 1949 novel, 1984, George Orwell writes, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” One way that autocrats take charge is, indeed, by managing information—including the suppression or even outright banning of certain books and materials that offer alternative pasts, presents, and futures out of sync with the autocrats’ preferred story. As I learned in my time studying Russian history, this sort of thing has been going on in Russia for the greater part of the last 500 years. Officially sanctioned reading materials supported the tsars, and then their successors: the Bolsheviks, Lenin, Stalin, and beyond. Opposition writings were banned, and their authors often went to prison or were pushed into exile. Today, it’s Vladimir Putin and his people who manage the information, cutting off the internet where they can, kicking unruly writers out of the country, et cetera, but the theme remains pretty much the same. 

One way to take back the past, present, and future is to read. In the process, we lean into and learn about alternative angles on the world. When we read, we are increasingly able to pursue new perspectives, think things through more effectively, enhance empathy, and compound compassion. In the presence of autocratic leaders at any level, Timothy Snyder reminds us, “reading good books is important.” Their import is being seen right now in Ukraine. As Snyder posted on Instagram last month, “A lesson from Ukraine: In moments where life meets death, they don’t put books down. Reading is resistance.” 

Happy Birthday, Gustav Klimt

Klimt, The Sunflower, 1908

Gustav Klimt was born on this day in 1862.

Buxtehude, Benedicam Dominum, BuxWV 113

Raphaël Pichon conducts Ensemble Pygmalion ...

Traveling.

BREATHING SPACE, JULY

Listen

The one who’s lying on his back under the tall trees

is also up there within them. He’s flowing out into thousands of twigs,

swaying to and fro,

sitting in an ejector seat that lets go in slow motion.

The one who’s standing down by the docks squints at the water.

The docks age faster than people.

They have silver-gray lumber and stones in their gut.

The glaring light pounds all the way in.

The one who’s traveling all day in an open boat

over the glittering bays

will fall asleep at last inside a blue lamp

while the islands crawl like huge moths over the glass.

Tomas Tranströmer

Happy Birthday, James McNeill Whistler

Whistler, Nocturne, The Falling Rocket, 1875

James McNeill Whistler was born on this day in 1834.

Magnificence.

On the afternoon of this day in 1985, I steeped into a bar on Mackinac Island, ordered a Mount Gay and tonic, and looked up to see this magnificence unfolding on the TV ...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Schubert, Der Schmetterling (The Butterfly), D 633

The BUTTERFLY

Why should I not dance?

It costs me no effort,

and enchanting colours

shimmer here amid the verdure.

Ever lovelier

my brightly-coloured wings glisten;

ever sweeter is the scent

from each tiny blossom.

I sip from the blossoms;

you cannot protect them.

How great my joy,

be it early or late,

to flit so blithely

over hill and dale.

When the evening murmurs

you see the clouds glow;

when the air is golden

the meadows are more radiantly green.

I sip from the blossoms;

you cannot protect them.

Franz Schubert

According to medieval superstitions, witches turned into butterflies at night to spoil or steal cream or milk. Schmetten, Schmette (Slav. Smetana) is the old east/central German word of Slavic origin for sour cream or butter.

Window.

The HALF-FINISHED HEAVEN

Despondency breaks off its course.

Anguish breaks off its course.

The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,

even the ghosts take a draught.

And our paintings see daylight,

our red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything begins to look around.

We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door

leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

The water is shining among the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

Tomas Tranströmer

Continually.

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking . . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

Charles Baudelaire

Mozart, "The Great" Mass in C-Minor, K. 427

Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Monteverdi Choir and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance of the Credo ...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

... to prioritize victory over, rather than coexistence with, the communist threat.