Better Than Friday - 76 (Patreon)

Happy Friday ya'll, hope this finds you well. Thank you so much for your support. 

1. Zibaldone by Giacomo Leopardi - An incredibly kind gift from a Friend/Patron 

A recent gift from Nicholas Carlucci, thank you so much, and what a hell of a book. 

Giacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and was recognized by readers from Nietzsche to Beckett as one of the towering literary figures in Italian history. To many, he is the finest Italian poet after Dante. (Jonathan Galassi's translation of Leopardi's Canti was published by FSG in 2010.)

He was also a prodigious scholar of classical literature and philosophy, and a voracious reader in numerous ancient and modern languages. For most of his writing career, he kept an immense notebook, known as the Zibaldone, or "hodge-podge," as Harold Bloom has called it, in which Leopardi put down his original, wide-ranging, radically modern responses to his reading. His comments about religion, philosophy, language, history, anthropology, astronomy, literature, poetry, and love are unprecedented in their brilliance and suggestiveness, and the Zibaldone, which was only published at the turn of the twentieth century, has been recognized as one of the foundational books of modern culture. Its 4,500-plus pages have never been fully translated into English until now, when a team under the auspices of Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino of the Leopardi Centre in Birmingham, England, have spent years producing a lively, accurate version. This essential book will change our understanding of nineteenth-century culture. This is an extraordinary, epochal publication.

2. A comprehensive analysis of the Doomer

If I get a dog I'm naming him Doomer. 

3. The Azores - I'd like to go spend some years here

Like 30. 

4. Ann by The Stooges 

Heard this driving last night and realized I'd never given it much of a listen as a teenager, but man - You can hear The Doors influence, and it's an exceptional track the way it builds. There's nobody like The Stooges. 

5. Gravity's Rainbow Audiobook 

By no means a substitute for reading it, but I thought it was kind of funny and may help with some comprehension of this enormously perplexing but brilliant read. 

A Quote that resonated with me.

Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.

- Naguib Mahfouz

Missing Florida these days