"Minds wiped calm as sea-leveled sands"

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Child in the womb, Or saint on a tomb — Which way shall I lie To fall asleep? The keen moon stares From the back of the sky, The clouds are all home Like driven sheep. Bright drops of time, One and two chime, I turn and lie straight With folded hands; Convent-child, Pope, They choose this state, And their minds are wiped calm As sea-leveled sands. So my thoughts are: But sleep stays as far, Till I crouch on one side Like a foetus again — For sleeping, like death, Must be won without pride, With a nod from nature, And a lack of strain, And a loss of stature.

Philip Larkin. Via Maud Newton. Filed under: sleep.

American Gigolo

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American Gigolo. Fantastic movie. One current is an electric crime drama (and the challenge of justice for outsider groups). Another is the steady melancholy, loneliness, and emptiness of the protagonist’s life. Awesome clothes. And OMG Lauren Hutton. Another good movie that explores the tensions between a criminal profession and desire for a normal life: Thief, of course.

Flush

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I read Virginia Woolf’s Flush, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. We grew up with two cocker spaniels (first Nugget, then Rusty, and I still take pride in choosing such good names), so I was rooting for this one from the start. It’s short and breezy and completely charming.

The true philosopher is he who has lost his coat but is free from fleas.

Matt Thomas reads the Sunday Times so you don't have to

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austinkleon:

I highly recommend subscribing to Matt Thomas’s NYTimes Sunday Digest:

Every Sunday since 2007 (that’s 346 consecutive weeks), I’ve posted links to and quotes from articles I thought were interesting in that day’s New York Times on my blog. I started doing it to give myself a Sunday…

I can’t reblog this hard enough.

Matt Thomas reads the Sunday Times so you don't have to

Manhunts: A Philosophical History

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I read Grégoire Chamayou’s Manhunts. I may not have given it a fair shake – it has a way more academic bent than what I was in the mood for – but there are some neat ideas here. The most useful:

Every hunt is accompanied by a theory of its prey that explains why, by virtue of what difference, of what distinction, some men can be hunted and others not.

One of the better parts of reading this wasn’t the book itself, but how it related to other things I’ve come across. Manhunter, clearly, and how pursuit puts one’s soul at peril. Njál’s Saga frequently deals with banishment and outlaws, vengeance and vulnerability. Also the book Columbine and other events like the OKC bombing and Isla Vista, and how theories of exclusion always follow closely behind. Zero Dark Thirty, too.

The Cold Stoicism of Advice Columns for Men

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Advice columns for men, however, seem not to have made the leap from proscriptive notions of rectitude to the smart-older-sister vibe of advice for women. In GQ and Esquire and even Maxim, which are full of Q&A-format advice for readers, situations are often posed in a joking tone and answered as if the writer were the dude from the Dos Equis commercials and the ultimate ethical standard is masculinity rather than humanity. “How to be a man” literature is the new conduct literature: it’s not that men haven’t cared about ideals of masculinity before now, but the idea verges on obsession these days, cf. everything from Shia LaBoeuf’s resignation note to the fact that someone greenlit How to Be a Gentleman. It’s a whole genre and evidently a popular one—but, while advice columns are the delicious and healthy snack of things to devour on the Internet, it matters for men and women alike that advice columns for men evolve, not by abandoning their gentlemanly tone but by choosing the right questions to answer.

That’s one reason why I read waaaaay more of Carolyn Hax than anything in men’s magazines. The Cold Stoicism of Advice Columns for Men

Manhunter

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Manhunter. Safe to call Michael Mann my favorite director now? So very good. I wish I’d planned it consciously, but I ended up unintentionally re-watching this around the same time I was reading Manhunts. Another recommended pairing: Matt Zoller Seitz’s reflections (heh) on the mirrors, doppelgängers, doubles, duality, etc. in this and Mann’s other works.