Author Archives: oook

Dreams of Glory

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to shop stuff, as I scheme the renovation of the barn and plot the reconstitution of my woodworking environment. Bought an upgrade for the table saw fence a week ago, and a serious planer a couple of days ago, and so kicked off a flurry of thoughts about tools and sharpening and still more necessary additions to the array (real dust collection… better lighting… more attention to precision… and so on). My instrument-building fantasies are alive and well again. Two videos exemplify resources that weren’t available a few years ago, when I was last thinking about luthierie:

Oud construction:

Oud as object of beauty:

Guy Davenport

I can’t recall at whose behest I ordered The Geography of the Imagination, but I did and it came and I’ve been nibbling at it for a week or so now. Quite a few memorable bits of erudition and copious novel linkages of things I only sort-of know about, but tonight I was brought up short by one sentence:

One suspects that Thoreau would have married a woodchuck or a raccoon, if the biology of the union could have been arranged… (pg 71)

links for 2008-07-18

  • Ethan Persoff’s Poodle Samizdat
    New Yorker (“Goal is to see if it’s possible to make a universally offensive cover out of this wishy washy half-satire”) and moooore. “This website proudly digs up, restores, and exhibits some of the rarest political ephemera you will ever see…”
    (tags: argybargy comics)
  • Nuristan Backgrounder
    from Ghosts of Alexander. More here than I can readily assimilate, and greater clarity than almost anything else I’ve seen on the Other Catastrope
    (tags: afghanistan geopolitics anthropology)