Eric Harvey: “Learning about reggae, or even Bob Marley himself, by listening to Legend is like learning about a big city by sticking to its downtown. You’ll no doubt have a good time amid the most publicly accessible art and cultural opportunities that require little work to access, but your trip won’t nearly represent the broader cultures and hidden treasures that take years or decades to fully understand.”
Finished reading: The Gales of November by John U. Bacon 📚
01/23/26
The winds made the bus feel like a ship at sea this morning. We’ve got cold and snow warnings everywhere, just need to get home before anything else hits.
Today:
- Vermont’s general stores
- Taming the Demon - Article from 2019 linked to in a recent Know Your Enemy podcast
Status: I spent yesterday cleaning up the email newsletter subscriptions. Feedbin helpfully allows you to subscribe to newsletters with custom addresses so I updated subscriptions to use one of six addresses (Substack, non-Substack paid subscriptions, NYT, Guardian, Guardian Sports, and General). Just need to make sure nothing got lost in the changes.
Reading: Gales of November, a history of the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking in a storm of the century is kind of apt right now.
Last Watched: The Testament of Ann Lee. I really wanted to love this movie and it has so much going for it. The costuming, the scenes, yet it falls so flat. It’s too long and too much of the movie cuts to either the same basic dance sequence or scene setting that could’ve been cut. By the third act all I could think about was the movie ending.
01/22/26
We’re promised a snow-whatever-fun-term-you-want-to-use this weekend which is liable to disrupt a state that simply does not have to capacity to respond to winter weather.
Today: Grading and small chores around the house. Ran to the big box home store for a coat rack to hang on the wall and everything outside was chaos. Costco gas lines all the way back to the end of the lot, grocery store packing lot mostly full. No thank you.
Status: The thought of hibernating in a blizzard is enlightening.
Reading: Hey, we’re done with Blood of Winter and can now fully concentrate on Gales of November, the recent history of “the pride of the American side,” the Edmund Fitzgerald
Listening: Lots of jazz, it just blends so well with cold weather.
01/21/26
I’m five pages away from finally finishing The Blood in Winter and I left it sitting on the table at home, so it’ll have to wait until this evening to be done.
Today: First in-class writing day of the semester, time to put pen to paper, at least for a short period.
Status: I like the house colder, alas I am alone in that respect, so I let the heat mellow during the day but kick on in the evening to accommodate normal heating preferences. The problem is when it does kick on, it kicks on for a while to bump up the temperature. When I’m in the office upstairs I don’t feel it I start to feel a bit sick and every single time that happens I forget that it’s just the house warming up.
Reading: I’ve read enough of Blood in Winter to say it’s a pretty good book on the beginnings of the English Civil War. Livelily written but with a huge cast of characters. The book does provide a helpful characters index but still, it’s quite a bit to keep straight.
Listening: Know Your Enemy had a good bonus episode with Matt Dinan on the issues of AI and teaching and I can’t say it truly answered the million dollar question of effectively confronting the new reality but it was nevertheless a good bus ride companion this morning.
