Currently reading: Weird City by Joshua Long 📚
Finished reading: Lost in Austin by Alex Hannaford 📚
This Texas Monthly review, while harsh, is basically correct:
Like it or not, the Austin of today is a product of choices made by the electorate, by various local and state officials, and by forces that were beyond anyone’s control. So the last thing anyone needs is more Austin Jeremiahs—who those of us living elsewhere find insufferable, anyway. What the city does need, at this point, is better planning for the future—though, to be honest, it’s not always clear what that informed thinking might look like. Is the city trying to curb growth to preserve what’s special about the place, or shape its rapid development so that most of the people moving there can afford the rent?
Ross Byrd’s 20 Proverbs for the Digital Age is worth revisiting annually.
Currently reading: Untamed Hospitality (The Christian Practice of Everyday Life) by Elizabeth Newman 📚
Representational speech will carry a good many features that are irrelevant to prediction and control, but answer to something more like a sheer desire to understand and to deploy verbal symbols in ways that enlarge the repertoire of communication that can be both purposive and more playful or (to use a loaded word) contemplative—attuned both to scientia and sapientia in the language St Augustine used to distinguish instrumental and reflective or contemplative knowing, knowing whose point is simply knowing, in the sense of intelligently enjoying the presence of the other.
Literal and metaphorical speech are not related as more and less ‘faithful’ representations of an object: both seek to secure the intelligible presence of what is perceived. But it is arguable that the metaphorical, or at least the non-slavishly literal, has in some circumstances a better chance of representing what is spoken of, in so far as it seeks to identify a form of action that is active within another phenomenal shape—so that the distinctive form appears (paradoxically) more plainly when ‘playing away from home,’ detached from its original specific embodiment and linked to another context; just as the distinctive feature of or moment in the life of the ‘host’ subject becomes more itself when phrased in a borrowed terminology.
Currently reading: The Edge of Words by Rowan Williams 📚
Finished reading: God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright 📚
Finished reading: Church Unique by Will Mancini 📚