Finished 2025: Under the Dome by Stephen King 📚
So many things wrong with this stupid book… but it was also a surprisingly compelling page-turner. It doesn’t matter if I rolled my eyes each time I turned a page. I kept turning the page.
The best thing I can say about this big book is that it made me want to re-read The Sirens of Titan and “Among the Hairy Earthmen”.
Solaris
Finished 2025: Solaris by Stanisław Lem 📚
It has been close to 20 years since I’ve seen the Tarkovsky or Soderbergh film adaptations. I figured that it was finally time to catch up with Lem’s original. And I’m glad I did.
Solaris is a bleak book. It is emotional horror. It is a cry of hopeless yearning for hope from a convinced atheist. It is among the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read.
That said, I’m not sure that the 1st person narrative voice of Kelvin works throughout the entire novel. In Moby-Dick, I believe Ishmael as a narrator/author who gets lost in his own narrating. Kelvin’s alternating from describing the plot on Solaris to describing his reading of the scientific history of Solaris seems less true to how this character in this situation would tell the story and just seems like a convenient way for Lem to do a whole lot of infodumping.
The Kemble Pipe
He was 80 years old, and he had to walk 120 miles back to jail, where he was tried and convicted for being a Catholic priest and for saying Mass. His execution was scheduled for August 22, 1679.
When this day came, the under-sheriff, called Digges, arrived at the gaol and informed the priest that the time had come for his execution. Fr Kemble asked for time to finish his prayers, which was granted. Prayers finished, the venerable old priest expressed the wish to smoke one last pipe before setting out. The under-sheriff, who could not help admiring this grand old man, readily agreed, and smoked a pipe himself to keep him company, and produced some wine as well. (Tigar 83-84)
This episode of sharing a pipe and a drink with his jailer launched a legend, and in Herefordshire, the custom emerged of calling the last pipe of the day a “Kemble pipe.” It’s time that we expanded the usage. It’s a convenient term, and as we ponder over and enjoy our last daily pipes, we have the terminology to better identify them.
from The Kemble Pipe May 16, 2025 by Chuck Stanion in Pipe Line
One of the blessings of the internet is gaining access to conference talks that I would have never had access to otherwise. In the next couple of weeks, I’m planning on catching up with these plenary presentations from the “Undiscovered C.S. Lewis” conference.
Finished 2025: Mr. Distinctive by Olga Tokarczuk 📚
The story on its own is slight and maybe even a little stupid. The story accompanied by the illustrations and the production design of this physical book? Quite lovely.
Finished 2025: Anji Kills a King by Evan Leikam 📚
Saw this on the new shelf and was intrigued. It’s not bad… but it’s not good. Characters working against oppression in the most crowd-pleasing non-offensive way, political realities glossed over in generic categories.
Finished 2025: Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King 📚
The short chapters narrating the monthly ‘cycle’ (full moon) of a werewolf are quite effective. I was initially turned off by the present tense narration, but I ended up liking this short King book more than I thought I would.
Finished 2025: Faith of the Founders: Religion and the New Nation, 177… by Edwin S. Gaustad 📚
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before– a bunch of Unitarians and Deists walk into a bar together…
This was a good summary of how “the firm foundations set down in the colonial era had been rudely shaken by a Revolution that was more anticlerical than most historians recognize, by a Constitution that acknowledged no God, and a First Amendment that permitted no national church.”
Finished 2025: The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han 📚
An “excess of positivity” strikes me as exactly right. I loved the ‘Bartleby’ reading. I didnt quite follow all of the Homo Sacer stuff at the end.
Finished 2025: Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now by Patrick McGrath 📚
Lovely, complex writing. I’m happy to have stumbled onto this book and discovered McGrath.
The Bicycle Race (1912) by Lyonel Feininger
Finished 2025: The Long Walk by Stephen King 📚
Angsty YA novel form SK. It landed flat as a level road for me, very few dazzling heights and surprisingly very few emotional gut punches for what is a novel about death and coming to terms with death (coming to terms with life). I hated the ending, but maybe I was expecting too much from King. What comes after the Long Walk is where the real horror is.
musical localism
Another possible answer to “Why is music important?” is the one Peter Leithart has been making for several years now: worship, and especially musical worship, is the end around which we must organize all our anthropology. It is the secret desire of our unfallen hearts that we do not understand but which awakens within us when, for instance, we hear the strains of polyphony. But how can we sing to God when we have forgotten how to sing? There will be no vibrant church music without vibrant folk music. There will not be loud congregational singing when there is not even loud singing in bars or barber shops. If you wanted to write sacred poetry as well as Donne or Herbert, you would be at an impossible disadvantage if you had forgotten how to write words altogether. Such a disadvantage is our inheritance with respect to music.
Musical Localism and the Rebirth of Culture
The essay is excellent and I have returned to it a few times. I’m sharing it today. Interestingly, though, I think I disagree to an extent that “there will not be loud congregational singing when there is not even loud singing in bars or barber shops.” I have been fortunate to find that the reverse is true. I have been blessed to be in a congregation that sings loudly for many years now… and that makes me all the more want to sing in bars and barber shops. I have found that the last refuge for communal singing is in the Church. In this, as in all things, I see a revival in public singing as a downstream effect of a revival in congregational singing. Ahern has this backwards.
When a customer orders a bowl of dumpling ramen at a kiosk, a robot activates. A steel nozzle swirls boiling water and spicy broth paste into a pot. Dried noodles drop from a dispenser. Cradling heat and spice, the pot glides onto a burner. An overhead chute sprinkles dried vegetable flakes. The ramen simmers.
Finally, a kitchen worker stirs the noodles and places a few dumplings on top. A robotic arm lifts the pot and pours the ramen into a bowl, which travels down a conveyor belt to the counter.
“Customer number 477, your food is ready,” an automated voice announces to a catchy tune.
The robots were developed by Chef Robot Tech, a startup based in Namyangju, a robotics hub outside Seoul. The company reprogrammed the RB5 co-bot, originally built by a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, to mimic human cooking motions. They used training data created from dozens of trial runs by a team of engineers and chefs. Their bots can cook ramen, udon, or stew.
Robot chefs take over at South Korea’s highway restaurants, to mixed reviews
Close reading is simply “a technique of reading that makes an account of the reading process the basis for interpretation.” It entails nothing more than showing one’s work. “We might be tempted to say of ‘showing the work of reading,’ ‘Is that all?’” Guillory writes. “Yes, that is all.” https://www.thenation.com/article/society/close-reading-john-guillory/
Finished 2025: Being Consumed by William T. Cavanaugh 📚
Really excellent. This focus on Eucharistic economics could change the Church (and by extension the world) if it were read and acted on.
The History teacher’s task in the “Information Age” has been made distressing when television and the Internet are the most active sources of our myths, folklore, and stories, without foundation in texts. How does the teacher distinguish for the student the historical past — events fossilized in a textbook: but also the events forming the nucleus of the student’s personality — from the news media, music, video games, comic strips, talk shows, magazines, and sports? In the News realm alone, current events are interpreted as fast as they are reported, in effect out-running History with a brand of hyper-historicism. How can the History teacher confidently instill in students a lasting flow of remembered time, when the regular conditions of contemporary life militate against effective remembering?
It would be another circumstance were the student exposed to two, three, or four information flows, and, thus, entrance into the Biblical stream, if you will, would have a chance of being a more vivid experience. Instead, the confluence of numerous streams floods the student’s mind and washes out the banks or sides that support the historical sense. Computers, televisions, radios, telephones, tape recorders, all of these gadgets allow him or her to obtain information whenever he feels like it, creating an increasing inattentiveness towards his experiences. If the teacher is not vitally aware of these conditions, he or she will be trapped within this same nonchalance and merely be contributing to the continued erosion of the historical sense.
From Desperation to Salvation: Concealing and Revealing Nothing in History - Robert Castle