Happy June to my lovely and intelligent readers (redundant). This week the hermitage has gone fishing (birding).
In the meantime, some items for your perusal and enjoyment.
Links.
Bees: How they navigate the world. (They also know the difference between Impressionism and Cubism.)
The consolation of Van Gogh’s cypress trees.
A new biography of Mandelstam. “Eternal is the taste of fresh whipped cream,/As is the smell of orange peel.”
Mahler’s Komponierhäuschen (composing huts):
Against a farm-free future: Ashley Colby on the philosophical roots of a long-standing fissure in the environmental movement.
RIP Martin Amis. His 15 or 16 rules for writers. Whatever your work is, get it done with style:
Are artists creative because of mental illness, or in spite of it?
(E.g. Flaubert: “In your life be regular and orderly as a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”)
The starry stillness of Sark Island.
You have only interpreted and changed the world; what matters is to describe it.
—Peter Handke
As ever,
J