Last night, I listened to an interview with Gwern Branwen. Since he is an anonymous online writer, his identity was concealed using a computer-generated avatar and an AI-generated voice. He got me thinking, as I'm inclined to do, so I’m going to let my thoughts wander and we’ll see what appears on the page. Branwen’s writings cover a broad range of topics, but his main focus is the artificial intelligence…

I recently stumbled upon an article about David S. Terry, a 19th-century California judge. He was an intriguing figure, so I looked to see if there were any books written about him. There were four non-fiction texts. One, written when he was only thirty-three years old, is titled ‘Trial by the Committee of Vigilance’ (1856). This book is essentially a court transcript which details a particularly harrowing chapter in Terry’s life, which I will cover…

The communication breakdown here has to do with purpose. What was the purpose of the biblical text when it says X or Y? We’re taught in seminary that the Bible is not so much a book, but rather a library, and within this library are different genres, some more historical in nature, and some more poetical.

I chose to sit in the backroom of our house; it’s a multifunctional room, primarily the dining room, secondarily my wife’s office. When you’re really listening, just sitting for a moment, the fact that your house is in North Carolina becomes abundantly evident.

Published in 1959, it was the seminal work of Kevin Lynch, an MIT professor in the school of Architecture and Planning.  His book is about the way cities look, or rather the mental picture that we all form in our heads of cities. His book looks at three American cities: Boston, Jersey City (Part of the New York metropolitan area), and Los Angeles. So, we are surveying the city much like an artist might survey a piece of art, it brings to mind the Goethe quote that architecture is like “frozen music”. It differs however, in that unlike the semi-quaver on the page, or paint on the canvas, cities lack such controlled parameters; they vary, being affected by time, weather, and the interactions of those who populate them…

The obvious question – ‘Why would one want to undertake the Appalachian Trail hike?’

I’ll avoid the trite/clichéd answer, as the George Mallory quote goes, “because it is there!”

Instead, I will lean on my own academic of choice and quote Carl Jung, “people don’t have ideas, ideas have people.”

This quote comes much closer, I think, to how I experienced making the choice to walk the trail. I watched some videos. I watch a lot of videos about a lot of things, but the videos on the trail spoke to me, the idea captured me. This was about five years ago, and ever since then, the question has not been whether I will walk to Appalachian Trail, but when.

I did my first degree at a conservative Bible college. In my first year I would have assented to ‘The Fundamentals’ (the set of essays written from 1910 to 1915) from which ‘Christian fundamentalists’ derive their label. In my second year I began asking awkward questions; these questions slowly drew me away from fundamentalism (or evangelicalism) down broader avenues of enquiry. A question arises in the mind, an unknowing, an opening, and our initial impulse is to find the answer…

I am publishing on my website this Walt Whitman centenary edition of The Bookman (May 1919) as a PDF, as I believe it is not otherwise available in the public domain. The Bookman was a literary monthly magazine based in London.

“A still quickening pulse beats in his writings, and the mystic charge he gave – “this is not book; who touches this, touches a man” – serves to point to an occult and present survival in his pages of what a Sufist might teach us to call “the liberated essence” of himself.”