dan

@deanwball Got to see her perform this piece live last year - divine. Prob my fav orchestral piece.

On most days, Mitsuko Uchida is my favorite interpreter of the Beethoven fourth piano concerto.

Recents

Very good post from Daniel Frank (link below).

@nabeelqu I do actually like the exercise of taking these seriously, but what I struggle with is even if the trip feels more vivid/transformative than a dream, isn’t it the same idea? Why treat one as more real?

One of the most interesting questions in life, IMO, is how seriously to take these types of experiences/reports:

Javier Marías - best fiction find in a min. Similar vibe to Proust, Sebald, Knausgaard, sharp descriptions of the things people think and feel but never say. Gripping plot as a bonus.

Weekend recs

There is a literature on everything

One of those quotes I've thought about weekly since first reading it

Shostakovich 5 has gotta be the best orchestral slow movement of all time - the 7:40 peak as good as it gets.

@rhodestris Hiatus for now!

@dnschlz So is Undertone done or what?

@nabeelqu As an aside, probably no reading experience is enhanced more by an LLM than Borges.

As for me, I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.

Any median-level work task that involves clicking a mouse or typing on a keyboard is going to be fully automatable within 2 years. Price that in and act accordingly.

@dwarkesh_sp 2666, The Book of Disquiet, Austerlitz, Knausgaard, Ferrante

Favorite novels?

Still the most underrated blog with the best reading list on the whole internet

Weekend watches

Goddard on what Falstaff is.

@misha_saul Paris, Texas

The Bach's as the most remarkable dynasty in cultural history: The Bach family was now entering upon the musical scene in bewildering profusion. We know of some four hundred Bachs between 1550 and 1850: all musicians, sixty of them holding important posts in the musical world of their time. They formed a kind of family guild, meeting periodically at their headquarters in Eisenach, Arnstadt, or Erfurt. They constitute unquestionably the most extensive and remarkable dynasty in cultural history, impressive not merely by their number, but by devotion to their art, by a typically Germanic steadiness of purpose, and by their productivity and influence.

History as a race between war and art: Moreover, and contrary to all reasonable expectations, this age was one of the most productive in German architecture. It saw the first flowering of German baroque, which gave a new front of charm and gaiety to Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Dresden, Bayreuth, Würzburg, and Vienna. It was the time of builders like Johann Fischer von Erlach, Jakob Prandtauer, Johann and Kilian and Cristoph Dientzenhofer, and Andreas Schlüter, whose names would be as well known to English-speaking peoples as those of Wren and Inigo Jones, were it not for the prison of frontiers and the babel of tongues. Some of their work, however, was destroyed in the invasions of Germany by French armies (1689), and some in the Second World War. History is a race between art and war.

Some favorite quotes from Will Durant's The Age of Louis XIV. Inspired by @HenryEOliver and @tylercowen's conversation highlighting the greatness of the 17th century. Newton, Spinoza, Leibniz, Milton, Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, Locke, Hobbes, Bach, Molière, Bernoulli, Boyle, so many others.