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I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.

Kurt Vonnegut

The Royal Portuguese Reading Room in Rio de Janeiro houses more than 350,000 books in floor-to-ceiling bookcases, all under a domed skylight of stained glass. (via Condé Nast Traveler)

Self-care means, for me, indulging at the end of an infuriating and depressing day with something you like.

I like Sam Cooke.

Hamlet’s concern for truth merits more attention, for it is total and goes far towards accounting for much in his behaviour and for the hold he has taken on the imaginations of audiences and readers alike. Many-sided in his activities and multifarious in his interests, Hamlet is powered, so to speak, by his consuming urge to know and to understand. It remains with him to the end. On his last day on earth, he stops to talk and question ‘curiously’ with the Gravedigger in an effort to glean what he can from one so familiar with death. He does not, as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus does, sell that urge for an insubstantial mess of diabolical pottage. Hamlet’s love of truth and his respect for facts manifest themselves in his almost infallible capacity for recognizing and rejecting that which is not true. In his first words he refuses to accept the King’s reference to him as ‘my son.’ As the play nears it close he toys with the pretensions of Osric to expose the courtier for the bubble that he is. Moving in a world given over to lies, he is ruthless and unsparing in his readiness to tell others that he sees them for what they are.

G.R. Hibbard, The Oxford Shakespeare

‘Hamlet’ is like a sponge. Unless it is produced in a stylized or antiquarian fashion, it immediately absorbs all the problems of our time.

Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary

I like the term that John Finn and Jack Balkin are using instead of 'constitutional crisis,' they use 'constitutional rot.' They say this is not necessarily something that is going to detonate in our face one day. It's just this slow seepage through the floorboards, that we might not even notice when we're in a constitutional crisis. For that very reason, I think you want to watch what happens to Rod Rosenstein, you want to watch what happens to Jeff Sessions, because focusing all of our attention—you know, 'we're going to take to the streets the day that Mueller is fired'—really ignores all the other ways a crisis can happen and it ignores all the ways that it's already happening ... More pointedly, it absolves us of tracking what's going on, like we'll just wait until the lawyers tell us we're in crisis. That worries me.

Dahlia Lithwick

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Train in Vain – The Clash (London Calling, 1979)

Juliet, the dice was loaded from the start, And I bet, and you exploded into my heart.

Sunday lunch: Neapolitan Margherita at home.

"The Imperial March,” from The Empire Strikes Back, performed by the Prague Film Orchestra (2010)

With Darth Vader in attendance, of course.

me 90% of the time: media is subjective, everybody has different tastes, we watch movies and shows and read books for different reasons and get different things about them

me when someone says they didn't like Paradise Lost: Ummmm, wow, okay, what the hell? Who made you a poetry expert? Did you go to poetry school? What, you think you can do better? I can't even talk to you anymore. This is unacceptable. Please love yourself

Sunday night discussion question: Do we live in a world where this song randomly plays in public places, or do we live in a world where we Gen-Xers/Xennials are finally in control public music playlists?

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life... and hold it fixed so that 100 years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again.

William Faulkner, interview with The Paris Review

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Just an English Professor