Song of the Wandering Althouse.

Meade used A.I. to animate one of his "Sunrise path" photos from this morning. It's funny to see how I walk in the world according to A.I.

You can listen to the whole Donovan song here. And here's the original Yeats poem, "The Song of Wandering Aengus." I recommend memorizing that and having conversations about it. We did and do.

"I was thrilled by its truthfulness. It stuck with me for the rest of my life. And I’d still swear by that. I felt, 'This is true. Everything else is fake. This is really what’s going on.'"

Said Wallace Shawn, about the Eugene O’Neill play "Long Day’s Journey Into Night," which he saw when he was 13 in 1956.

Quoted in "Is Wallace Shawn the Only Avant-Garde Artist Who Gets Stopped in Times Square? He’s most commonly recognized for his screen roles as a plotting hit man and an unlikely Lothario, but it’s his work as a playwright that shows more of his true self" (NYT)(gift link, because the article is long and there's a lot going on, including the way strangers are always exclaiming "Inconceivable!" at him).

Unlike many of his characters, Shawn speaks slowly and with many pauses in the service of sentences that ultimately emerge perfectly formed. He is also polite and courtly and at great pains not to offend, so much so that one fears inadvertently violating whatever code of etiquette is obviously almost sacred to him. So private that he asked me not to reveal what he ate throughout our meetings, he nonetheless has written a play whose broad outlines, and even some poignant details, are flagrantly autobiographical....

The new play is "Moth Days." There's also a new production of his older play "The Fever." And you don't have to tell me, Althouse, you should go to New York and see both plays. I haven't traveled in years.

ADDED: The full title of the play is "What We Did Before Our Moth Days." According to the linked article, "Moth Days" are "those fluttery, flyaway moments before death, as one of the characters imagines them." Poetically, "moth" calls to mind mother... and also that Yeats line, "And when white moths were on the wing/And moth-like stars were flickering out...."

"In the end I decided that the only way I could defeat the manosphere was to double down on men’s retreats. "

"And so I became a guru. Well, technically, not quite a guru. More a gur-ette. I started leading 'journalling' sessions at Both Sides weekends. It’s a process that I picked up from novel writing and involves uninterrupted scribbling, stream of consciousness-style, every morning for 20 minutes in an attempt to liberate hidden ideas from the quirkier corners of the brain.... I kick off the session with The Song of Wandering Aengus because the forest location seems appropriate and because the image of Yeats heading off to wrestle with a 'fire' in his head seems very men’s retreat. That’s why many of them come.... How can you influence the wider world from a woody enclave in Cornwall?"

Writes Kevin Maher, in "Yoga pants, man bun, crying. I’ve become a men’s guru/He once mocked male bonding weekends as hippy nonsense. Now Kevin Maher leads them" (London Times).

I can't speak about male bonding weekends, but I just wanted to express my great admiration for that particular poem, which made a great impression on me when I was young, half a century ago:

"It makes a weird kind of sense that 'The Apprentice' is arriving in theaters Friday, a week after 'Joker: Folie à Deux.'"

"Both movies are set in New York in the 1970s and/or ’80s. Both are about larger-than-life antiheroes perceived as monsters by many and lionized by others. And both seem perversely designed to disappoint audiences on either side of the aisle...."

Wrote Ty Burr, in "Trump biopic ‘The Apprentice’ avoids taking sides. Good luck with that. Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong star as the young Don and his soulless mentor, Roy Cohn" (WaPo)(published last Tuesday).

"It goes back to a poem by Yeats," said the architect Eric Owen Moss...

"... citing The Second Coming, which includes the line 'the centre cannot hold.' It is one of the many references he casually invokes throughout our conversation, from Moby-Dick to Dionysus and Apollo, the paintings of Gustave Courbet and Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. I ask him about deconstructivism, the 1980s style of architecture with which he is associated, to which he responds that he prefers the term 'dialectical lyric.'... Moss may like to operate on a higher conceptual plane, but why should we care about the hermetic theories behind his big steel pile? 'That’s a fair question,' he shrugs. 'Does anybody give a shit? Is anybody listening? Maybe three people we know, one in London, one in Shanghai. But I think the effect of it is what interests me. It’s an opportunity to show there are other ways to imagine.' He narrows his eyes, as if summoning a momentous truth. 'What you see isn’t all there is to see. Can you listen for things you haven’t heard?'... Moss is right: there is more to see than we have seen. But it might be better for all of us if it remained unseen...."

Writes Oliver Wainwright, in "‘A gas-guzzling villain’s lair’: welcome to LA’s grotesque new high-rise/Inspired by Yeats, Wagner and French realist painting, the (W)rapper tower was meant to reawaken the city skyline. But is this monstrous erection just a monument to its designer’s ego?" (The Guardian)