I feel sad. I haven’t visited my island since Halloween! I want to get back into it. I miss the mundane tasks! I always felt so comforted doing them.

Philip Roth, in his introduction to Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog:

The character of Moses Herzog, that labyrinth of contradiction and self-division—the wild man and the earnest person with a “Biblical sense of personal experience” and an innocence as phenomenal as his sophistication, intense yet passive, reflective yet impulsive, sane yet insane, emotional, complicated, an expert on pain vibrant with feeling and yet disarmingly simple, a clown in his vengeance and rage, a fool in whom hatred breeds comedy, a sage and knowing scholar in a treacherous world, yet still adrift in the great pool of childhood love, trust, and excitement in things (and hopelessly attached to this condition), an aging lover of enormous vanity and narcissism with a lovingly harsh attitude toward himself, whirling in the wash cycle of a rather generous self-awareness while at the same time aesthetically attracted to anyone vivid, overpoweringly drawn to bullies and bosses, to theatrical know-it-alls, lured by their seeming certainty and by the raw authority of their unambiguity, feeding on their intensity until he’s all but crushed by it—this Herzog is Bellow’s grandest creation, American literature’s Leopold Bloom, except with a difference: in Ulysses, the encyclopedic mind of the author is transmuted into the linguistic flesh of the novel, and Joyce never cedes to Bloom his own great erudition, intellect, and breadth of rhetoric, whereas in Herzog Bellow endows his hero with all of that, not only with a state of mind and a cast of mind but with a mind that is a mind.

Try saying all 244 words five times fast.

ASMR fire sounds. This is the fire I wrote about here.

Careful not to stare at the flame too long lest you be caught up in its spell.

As flawed as this country is (and forever will be), I’m still a pretty proud American. And the kids are truly the future, so let’s take care of them and nourish them and teach them well.

I finally had some time to update my Colophon page today. I quite like it!

I’ve been reading a volume of Demon Slayer every morning this week, and I’m just enthralled with it. It’s so good.

Morning skies are the best skies.

I took this last summer, a week after I purchased my macro lens. I remember following this little guy for a while because he wouldn’t stay still long enough for a photo. I had so much fun doing so that I really miss the vibrancy of life that winter seems to lack.

Craig Mod in his introduction to his new newsletter huh:

As I was conjuring up the shape of huh it struck me as slightly insane that more photographers don’t do this — mail out a single photo once a week. Ideally we’d subscribe to a cadre of our favorites. Maybe they’d all arrive on Wednesday and Wednesday would be this visual inbox party. No comments, no likes, no stream of other images to compete against, no Reels to be sucked into, no algorithmic curveballs. Just a few beautiful images, from the four or five photographers whose work we adore. Things to be enjoyed as units unto themselves in ways that are difficult to do in the din of social streams. And best of all — if we want to say something nice, we just have to hit reply. No public-space posturing.

Photography Wednesdays sounds amazing.