Debussy, six feet apart, paper dictionaries, philosophy in literature, and more

Seven links to worthwhile thin(g/k)s

Dispatch from West Los Angeles, CA

Hello dear reader,

We are easing into May next week, as my slowly blooming orchid next to my desk gently reminds me each time I steal a glance toward my window and the outside world.

A few personal updates: getting my second jab on Saturday, touching base with a friend in London by way of Zoom this weekend (and hopefully soon, by way of an in-person hug), and going on a hike in the LA mountains. I hope your weekend is everything you need it to be.

Here are seven links to bits of the world I have been exploring this week, shared with the hope that you will find them to be an inspiring springboard for deeper thinking.

1. The River Ran Red, directed and produced by J. Michael Hagopian, 2009.

   Tomorrow is a heavy day.

   Tomorrow, I am reminded that I am honor-bound to the 1.5 million Armenians who in 1915 were massacred by the Ottoman Turkish government during the Armenian Genocide—the systematic mass killing of three-fourths of the population of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, an ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Ottomans and to this day denied by Turkey.

   I am honor-bound to the Armenians who survived the genocide and preserved their heritage despite the pain.

   I am honor-bound to the beautiful Armenian culture, its language and faith spanning thousands of years, its stunning and resilient ability to blossom, rooted or unrooted, nurtured or forsaken, rich soil or desert soil, no matter.

   Tomorrow, it is my hope that President Joe Biden honors his promise to hold Turkey accountable to an eventual reckoning with the past.

2. New YouTube video: Tackling philosophy in literature.

   Please give it a listen/watch, and like/subscribe/comment on it if time and disposition allow :)

3. The crude beauty of physical dictionaries: Late at night this past week, I was watching an episode of Frasier, an American sitcom, and there was a scene where Martin Crane grabs open a dictionary and emphatically states aloud the definition of a word the characters moments ago were bickering about. I thought to myself, ‘My goodness, I haven’t opened a dictionary since early high school—maybe even middle school—days, and I don’t see one on the bookshelves of our apartment. With chance at play, I came across this tribute to paper dictionaries written by Alan Jacobs. He writes:

   Surely every user of dictionaries or encyclopedias can recall many serendipitous discoveries: as we flip through pages in search of some particular chunk of information, our eyes are snagged by some oddity, some word or phrase or person or place, unlooked-for but all the more irresistible for that. On my way to “serendipity” I trip over “solleret,” and discover that those weird, broad metal shoes that I’ve seen on the feet of armored knights have a name. But this sort of thing never happens to me when I look up a word in an online dictionary. The great blessing of Google is its uncanny skill in finding what you’re looking for; the curse is that it so rarely finds any of those lovely odd things you’re not looking for. For that pleasure, it seems, we need books.”

   “[I]t turns out that, when it comes to dictionaries anyway, it’s hypertext that narrows and impoverishes. The simple fact that I cannot pick up a dictionary and turn to the precise page I wish, or, even if I could do that, focus my eyes only on the one definition I was looking for — the very crudity, as it were, of the technology is what enriches me and opens my world to possibilities.”

4. Healthy pandemic habits by Ada Palmer (whose blog I recently subscribed to feed my love for history).

5. Kindle read: I have been blazing through Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of the Soviet/post-Soviet sphere. It’s titled Secondhand Time, and it reminds us how distant and cold history, political science, and economics can be in the midst of raw human stories and reflections. More on this in book notes and a video soon.

6. A home recording of Debussy’s “Bruyères” by way of Víkingur Ólafsson.

7. Six feet apart please.

Until next week, lovelies.

With warmth,

Ani

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Readers’ Circle

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