Ian Janssen
@ianfjanssen
Delaware but Iowa born Dad to Best Son Archivist Fishing/art/literature/poetry/music/hiking Incompetent agnostic/small-s socialist/sober Has a cat named Toolbox Makes excellent cheesecake "God has no other hands than ours." Dorothee Soelle
The algorithm is trying hard to sell me some overpriced chore jacket whose primary advantage appears to be holding lots of books and well that does sort of hit …
My most patriotic photo (from the 2020 election). Seems a lifetime ago.
Your Bluesky dad reporting for fish procurement duty and asking why you’re not up yet. At Slaughter Beach, Delaware.
Might get Brackish Life crazy and go out to St Augustine at wee o'clock in the morning tomorrow to catfish in the shadow of the nuclear plant. This has been a very New Castle County sentence.
Listening to this on a grey afternoon. I picked this up years ago, I don’t think that it’s available anymore. Lush and gorgeous for summer. Includes both orchestral works and orchestral arrangements of piano works. This afternoon now needs some tea.
My plans stymied by the weather, I put on some Sam Cooke and made some pancakes. Could be worse.
Oldest in regular everyday usage: dinette set from the late 1950s or early 1960s that came out of my grandparents’ house. Still in really solid shape. Oldest not in usage: 7th century Byzantine coin a dear friend gave me years ago and which right now I can’t seem to locate (!).
Who knew Mos Eisley for corporations and fraud was on I-95 and had lots of chickens?
In 1874, within a notebook she was compiling with research for her novel Daniel Deronda, George Eliot noted down this Talmudic quotation, and damn if that isn’t a beautiful but difficult approach to life and humanity. Would we all find it possible to regard all other people in such regard.
My son is an awesome and forgiving fireside and road trip companion. I rarely post photos of him, so I'm burying these here. It was an OK trip, I was grateful for the time with my son, but would do it very differently if again.
Camping with my son in the Great Smokey Mountains National Park on the North Carolina/Tennessee border. Back in a few days …
Apparently the historian Carlo Ginzburg died. During my divorce, I read his "The Cheese and the Worms" and "The Night Battles" and found them accessible and fascinating, especially as an archivist and someone with an anthropology degree. I mean, come on, Italian heretics and witchcraft of yore!
Book mail day … I’m particularly interested in Mannin's American Journey. Largely a forgotten book, I was shocked to see it reprinted. Mannin was a British socialist writer who took a cross-country bus trip in the US in the 1960s, making observations about American society and its problems.
A&W root beer. I remember going to the A&W drive-in restaurant in Davenport, Iowa as a kid. The waitress would attach a tray to your car window and put your food on it, with the root beer served in iced mugs. This would have been around 1978-1980 or so. Still can taste that root beer in those mugs.
Without stating your age, post a movie that released when you turned 18.
The bipolar depression and fatigue remain intense, but I actually made it into work, yay me …
It me, shamelessly posting cat and book content for likes on a Caturday night.
Books, we should talk. You’re cool, but you keep introducing me to yet more books that I haven’t read. I have a job and a family, man, it’s exhausting. I’m only flesh and blood. JK, keep doing more of this.
Really enjoying Clare Carlisle’s meditation on writing and philosophy in Transcendence for Beginners. Included her biography of Kierkegaard in the photo to show I am super fan #1 of her work, for tonight anyways. This book reminds me I need to read (any) Spinoza and (more) philosophy in general.
Now listening on this Friday evening. How do we feel about piano quartets, classical listeners of Bluesky? Yea or nay? Mahler, Brahms, Schumann, etc.?
Some of you know I have a bipolar 1 diagnosis, I'm reasonably open about this in the interest of awareness and acceptance. This week, I'm struggling with it, a real downswing, heavy fatigue. I'm taking a needed sick day, and I encourage those of you who need the same to do the same, because ...
My brother Heath should have turned 51 today. Four days from now, ten years will separate us from his brutal killing. Many things should have been different, then and since then. Rest easy, brother, I miss you.
Just a whimsical 1970s bottle opener from my grandparents’ house, because sometimes you need a little whimsical artifact.