You may have noticed how much I’ve been quoting Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality lately. It’s been so engaging that about a third of the way through I knew I needed to return the library copy and buy my own.

Which I received today. Flipping through it tonight I came across the publisher on the copyright page:

Guys, that’s like right over there. I’m not sure you can appreciate how utterly bizarre it is that this book I love so much was published by a company not five minutes from my house—in this obscure town. I am restraining myself from going on and on here. Suffice it to say I might actually call this publishing company tomorrow just to say “what the hell?”

Many years ago, mom needed some books to fill up her bookshelves so I gave her some that I still had around but no longer cared about. Now I’m cleaning out some stuff in her house and there are a few I’m taking back to my shelves. There was a time when Wilson and Sproul were very important to me, despite one of them becoming quite notorious of late. I told a friend recently never to be embarrassed about who they were before; that’s what makes them who they are now.

Austin Kleon recommends studying something you love in depth - and it just so happens that I’m reading through the collected poetry of Robinson Jeffers. I’m keeping notes in Craft and hope to turn those notes into occasional posts. There are themes running through his work that very much interest me.

I’d also love to do something like this for the albums of Over the Rhine, or blog through the Tao Te Ching. Blogging through books (in the style of blockquote followed by commentary) was very common on the blogs I used to read fifteen years ago. I miss that sort of amateur scholarship.