Ummagumma

  The Georgia Bulldogs won their second consecutive SEC Championship in 2025.  They beat the Alabama Crimson Tide for one of the few times in my lifetime.  It was a very satisfying 28-7 victory. The Dawgs offense was okay but their defense, especially against the rush was an unmovable force.  Great to watch! Georgia was ranked Number 3 nationally and got a first round bye in the College Football Playoffs. They needed an extra week off.  They were banged up in a couple of positions and even the depth was pretty beat up this late in the season.  So, the rest was welcome. We played the Ole Miss Rebels (ranked 6th) in the Sugar Bowl yesterday.  Oh how many wonderful Sugar Bowls I can remember for Georgia through the years!  I can still hear Munson saying "Look at the sugar!  There's sugar falling out of the sky!" Saner times. Georgia has had an incredible season under Kirby Smart, the top college coach in a very elite group of such people....

Most of what passes for wisdom is really just outcome management with better posture. We want things to go our way, and when they don’t, we assume something has gone cosmically wrong. As if Being made us a promise and then broke it. As if reality ever signed anything. But that expectation is the original error. Reality never agreed to cooperate with our preferences. It just keeps on happening. What is available, even when the dice roll badly, are certain capacities. Orientation. Responsiveness. The ability to stand somewhere without immediately trying to improve the view. These aren’t consolations, they’re structural. They don’t depend on success, luck, timing, or mood. They’re there whether the plan works or implodes. That’s why they matter more than outcomes, which come and go like weather pretending to be destiny. This is where disappointment gets interesting. Desire collapses, and instead of immediately rushing to replace it with a new want or a new grievance, there’s a pause. In t...

I have to start with Barry Lyndon . It turned 50 at the start of this year and normally I would write a review about an all-time favorite film, but I never developed a thirst for this one all year long. I can’t believe I apparently haven’t seen it since 2011 . So much time gone, I need to work in 3+ hours and, more importantly, the head space to take this marvelous film in again. At the time, I was all timed up in Proust and other writings and never got back to it. You don’t just up and watch Barry Lyndon the way I did with One Flew Over the C uc koo’s Nest or Jaws . Kubrick’s film does not entertain in that manner. There’s no easy hook. Instead you have to be willing to become mesmerized on its terms. There is a story but it isn’t remotely compelling. The pacing is deliberately, relentlessly slow. You are to existentially immerse yourself in 18 th century Europe and that just didn’t jibe with me this year for whatever reason. Nevertheless, I have seen it enough to know it...

Fifty years ago this year, three albums came out that deserve more than silence from me. I didn't blog about them on their actual anniversary dates—not because I didn't listen to them, but because I wrote two books and am about to publish another. I listened to Tonight's the Night , Zuma , and Eagles' One of These Nights more than once in their turn. The tunes were churning over in my head for days and weeks after. So here they are, three rather incredible records from 1975 that shaped the sound of that year and, in different ways, shaped me. The story of why Tonight's the Night finally came out in June 1975 starts with a listening party at Neil's ranch early that year. He'd finished Homegrown , a clean, mostly acoustic album about his breakup with Carrie Snodgress, and it was ready to go. He invited some friends over to hear it, and (supposedly) at the end of the night someone suggested they play the Tonight's the Night tapes that had been sitting...

 

[ Read Part One ]  [ Read Part Two ] What's remarkable about Proust's philosophy of self is how closely it parallels insights from radically different traditions—Buddhist philosophy, Nietzschean psychology, and contemporary neuroscience. These convergences suggest that Proust wasn't just making a literary observation but identifying something fundamental about human consciousness. The Buddhist doctrine of anatta (no-self) teaches that there is no permanent, unchanging essence we can call "I." Instead, what we experience as self is merely a collection of five aggregates ( skandhas ): form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. These aggregates are in constant flux, arising and passing away moment by moment. This is precisely what Proust describes: selves as temporary configurations of sensations, perceptions, desires, and beliefs—compounds that form and dissolve as circumstances change. Buddhism's principle of anicca (impermanence) ho...