James Rebanks : On one level, clearly, a drought is just bad luck, the savage will of the gods. If it doesn’t rain for long enough, then every farming system grinds to a halt. But the severity of how drought affects a place is shaped by how it has been managed before. And the fact is that a lot of British farmland is now being farmed so efficiently — in monocultures, and fed with synthetic…
Repainted what is essentially my studio bathroom, formerly my daughter’s bathroom, which I had permitted her to paint bright salmon pink. Color yes, pink no. It was the most annoying room I have ever painted—all obstacles, no room to maneuver—but it’s done, and now I get to build a wall cabinet.
View from my driveway after the wettest July since the 1930s
Speaking of buying things: The very last straw for me with SquareSpace was discovering that without my choice or even knowledge it was now possible to buy, via my website , a $30 spreader in four easy payments of $7.50. Make a new plan, Stan. We’re finished.
Why is it that there are more items for sale on the internet than protons in the sun but I cannot find the thing I actually want
Challenge: Create a two hour setlist of cover songs appropriate for a farmers market busker that does not contain any songs you have ever heard sung or played at a farmers market.
This one is titled “To Me the Converging Objects of the Universe Perpetually Flow,” which is what happens when you fill the time between customers at the craft market reading your pocket edition of Walt Whitman and doodling.
This is, I don’t know what. Reptilian love child of Pennsylvania Dutch and Zuni?
Recently there have been several major mathematical breakthroughs enabled entirely by AI: both proofs and counterexamples to long-held conjectures. Ordinarily I read about this sort of ting with interest. Now I find I simply don’t care. Mathematics may have its uses but it is not interesting because it is useful; it is interesting because it is beautiful. The pursuit of mathematics is…
At Roy Underhill’s window-making class, 2022… At the end of the first day he went around the room sweeping the entire class’s shavings to each bench and took these faked photos.
Facing the usual early-July glut of cherry tomatoes I made confit: basil leaves in a baking dish, a layer of whole cherry tomatoes, a few crushed cloves of garlic, a liberal sprinkle of salt and enough olive oil to come about halfway up the tomatoes. Roast at 325F for maybe an hour until slightly brown on top and wrinkled. I was afraid I was wasting two pints of tomatoes but honestly the result is…
“It is any thing but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum.” —Hawthorne
New woodworking website is live .
When I finished Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers last month I wanted to post something here more than the “finished reading” flag that feels like awarding myself a medal; but I didn’t get around to it. Read Morten Høi Jensen’s review instead , and then do read the book: For the most part, they are characters we only ever know socially, as it were, either in dialogue or by…
Ran across this fascinating toy that lets you see the night sky from any point on earth at any time in history.
Hey folks, I need to ask a favor if anyone has a few minutes. I am replacing my SquareSpace woodworking website with a new, hand-built one and would like a few people to test it out for me : look around, see if you run into any problems, and reply here or send me a message through the contact form. There is no online store as such, only an email-request form. So you might even choose a carving,…
Proposition: Video replay should be used, if it is used at all, only to correct on-field, real-time calls that may by objective standards have been incorrect: was the ball fair or foul, was the runner safe or out, was the receiver’s foot in or out of bounds, did the puck cross the line. Video replay should never be used to make or alter subjective judgments. Given enough time and analysis I…
Stories of European tourists being pleasantly surprised that we’re not all ogres over here have me thinking of Frances Trollope and remembering that I should be glad Americans don’t spit as much as we used to.
Granted I chose my angles carefully, but the native perennials have managed this well so far without any city water, only what’s fallen from the sky.
“May Song II.” Four panels in a reclaimed window, 20×25 inches. The text is my somewhat free translation of a portion of Goethe’s poem “Mailied,” and all but one of the flowers depicted are drawn from photos of my front-yard flower meadow (in past years, when it rained).
Rain barrel installed, after two additional (unforeseen but unsurprising) trips to Lowe’s. Now I expect either the eastern piedmont will turn into a temperate rain forest, or it will never rain again and we’ll all wind up as extras in a film version of Ezekiel 37.
Two inches of rain in the past week has Crabtree Creek rushing by at a normal height, but the wetland area by Raleigh Road tells the full story. The stumps in the first photo and the cracked earth in the last should be well under water. We have a long way to go before we’re out of this drought.
The empty coffee cup sits on the park bench. It has had a busy morning, filled with ambition, and now it has found its peace. City Zen
Mary Harrington : Most secular modern and post-modern creatives intuit that the age of naturalism is long since over. But this discovery confronts us with the enormous, gaping hole that yawns, where we’d expect to find a metaphysical framework able to give coherence and moral order to non-naturalistic artworks…. I submit that this is the real sickness in contemporary culture: not the…
This week’s work