Maus, Gilded Age, reading slumps, worries, and more

Seven links to worthwhile thin(g/k)s

Hello dear reader,

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. Downton Abbey fans, rejoice. Julian Fellowes brings us a new HBO debut, The Gilded Age, which aired on Monday, January 24. It exposes the ‘old money’ world on the brink of modernity, and sings the following alluring tune: “For a New Yorker, anything is possible.” Pair it with Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, and you have yourself an enchanting, mesmerizing look at various foils ripe for discussion — old generation versus new; city versus rural life; societal traditions versus nonconforming, defying ideas.

2. How to alleviate reading slumps

3. A worthwhile gift — show children what you love, show children who you are:

   “There was a man who would come every week to sculpt in front of the kids. The director said, ‘I don’t want you to teach sculpting, I want you to do what you do and love it in front of the children.’ During that year, clay was never used more imaginatively, before or after…. A great gift of any adult to a child, it seems to me, is to love what you do in front of the child. I mean, if you love to bicycle, if you love to repair things, do that in front of the children. Let them catch the attitude that that’s fun. Because you know, attitudes are caught, not taught.” — Fred Rogers

   Because you don’t want the situation songwriter Bill Callahan shared in this interview: “I never understood her [Bill’s mother] . . . . And I didn’t ever feel like she was being honest or expressing her feelings my whole life. As she was getting older, I begged her: Show your children who you are, because we want to know before you die. She couldn’t do it. So now she’s still just an unfinished person for me. . . . We only have this time, each of us, 70 or 80 years, if we’re lucky. What’s the point of hiding?”

4. Jordan Peterson lecture at Oxford Union: Imitation of the Divine

   • What should we be lifting up our eyes to?

   • “When you look at the night sky, and that sense of awe grips you and calls something out of you to respond to your encounter with the infinite, with mortality, with finitude and limitation, all of that in relationship to the infinite, that sense of awe is also the calling forth of something out of you that can respond to the challenge of that infinite. That’s the microcosm within. It’s a reflection of the structure of the cosmos itself. That’s the divine ideal. And we either imitate that or fail to imitate that or pursue the opposite path. Given our technological power and our capacity for wholesale atrocity, it’s time we woke up and realized that.”

5. The case for writing longhand: “I can’t see the structure; I can’t see the big picture, but I can feel my way through the little parts,” [New York Times Magazine staff writer Sam Anderson] said. “Then, when I have enough little pieces, I can think about the larger shape.” And here’s a short video on when one might consider writing versus typing.

6. A Tennessee school board banned author Art Spiegelman’s comic book, Maus. His response by way of a bookmark he emailed to CNBC: “Keep your nose in a book – and keep other people’s noses out of which books you choose to stick your nose into!”

7. George Saunders’ “On Worry: Friend or Foe?”

Until next week!

Warmly,

Ani

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