Portrait of 17-year-old Arthur Rimbaud (making it clear he thinks you're dirt) by Étienne Carjat. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. My first real confrontation with Arthur Rimbaud was in a college French class, where "The Drunken Boat" was on the menu alongside Baudelaire’s "Enivrez-vous" (“Get Drunk”)....

Craig Sunter from Manchester, UK. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons For a number of reasons, I’ve been rereading a few books. It’s been enjoyable, rediscovering turns of phrase and plot twists and characters stuck so deeply in memory, you forget they were hiding out in all their clarity until prodded again—and once...

Erkki Voutilainen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons This is the second time I’ve taken this effing hat apart, unraveling hours’ worth of work and starting again from almost the very beginning. I’m not a bad knitter, but when things get complicated or a new-to-me technique is required, my tendency to rush ahead...

YuliaAndreeva, Repetition (1995). CC BY-SA 4.0 image via Wikimedia Commons Thanks to Simon Critchley’s use of it in Mysticism, I dove this weekend into Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm. Dillard comes in in part to help Critchley illuminate medieval Christian mysticism’s materiality—the fact that all the visions and the...

Embracing the existentialists in the face of subservience to AI.

The scary podcast Uncanny draws me in with much-needed conversation

Thinking about community, beauty, and knowing your neighbors.

Lamenting powerlessness in the face of growing US authoritarianism.

A review of David Hoon Kim's Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

Looking at the necessity of emotional freedom and the education, especially via art and literature, required to attain to it.

Consideration of Anders Kølle's tech criticism via information theory

A look at the way sung liturgy shaped me. In lamenting its disappearance, I also consider what belief could mean.