my personal site
Q: Do you have a song that you are particularly proud of?
A: I don’t. I like some of them better than others. Every record has a few that prove themselves deeply reliable on the road, and over time those become the heart of your work, but you have to write them all to write the good ones. As a rule the simpler ones are better. (Emphasis mine).
~ Jeffrey Foucault, singer/songwriter
Via: http://www.midwesterngentleman.com/stories/jeffrey-foucault-interview/
Last night the kids and I ran in the “1st Run” 5k here in town. It was a great way for us to start off 2018, with both Nora and Jonah running the whole thing. Nora’s goal was to literally RUN the whole race, without walking which she did. Jonah ran a fast 9:34 pace which helped him take first place in his age division.
I also acquired a cool little “scratch-off” calendar for the year put out by Tracksmith in New England. It’s a “No Days Off” calendar where for each day of running you scratch out the day and beneath the ink is a word which will make up a complete story as the year goes by. Now, I don’t plan on literally taking no days off from running as that is not how my body works, but I’m looking forward to scratching off the dates as this year rolls by.
Happy New Year!
This was created by a friend of mine who is a Landscape Architecture professor here in the College of Design. Basically he took the published data for the dates and times of the sunrise and sunset and created a chart. It shows the dates and times of the earliest SUNSET, after which the light lasts a little bit longer each evening. Also on the chart is the time of the latest SUNRISE, afterwhich the sunrise will begin rising a little bit earlier as the planet makes its way around the sun. Great graphic of this phenomenon, in my opinion. 🙂
Of course there are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a remote echo—or to which silence is by far the best response. Nature does not name itself. Granite does not self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject. Sometimes on the top of a mountain I just say, “Wow.”
Robert Macfarlane lives in Cambridge and is author of The Wild Places and The Old Ways. The text that appears here is adapted from his book Landmarks, forthcoming from Trafalgar in June.
I found this today, in an essay by Sean Michael Morris. It’s worth the long read but the piece that really resonates for me is this:
But maybe instead we should tip large. And give A’s. Believe reasons for missing a deadline. Refuse to get to know students through the window of a rubric. We are not dealing with students, but people with dreams, people who will fail and people who will succeed, people who may end up alone and people whose high point of the day may be a conversation with us. Being kind may seem counterintuitive to the academic ethos—especially when being kind can sometimes mean being wrong—but we owe it to ourselves to think outside our setting, to see past the artificial boundaries of generation, expertise, and authority. And while we’re at it: race, gender, sexuality, religion.
