My 15-minute city, reading lit out loud, labyrinth of time and life, and more

Seven links to worthwhile thin(g/k)s

Hello dear reader,

I hope this weekend gives you something to smile about. As Kurt Vonnegut once remarked, “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Smiling more this weekend and the soft ‘hm’ sound accompanying curiosity will be my visual and vocal murmur.

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. My 15-minute city: Upper West Side, New York.

   I am trying to grab flight tickets to be reunited with this splendor of a city soon, and this article served as a great propeller against the backdrop of yoyo-ing prices.

2. On reading literature out loud.

3. Loved this piece on biographer Robert D. Richardson and “excavating other people’s lives” in an attempt to seek out and build “scaffolding for the possibilities of self-transformation—his own and his readers’. His life’s work, you could say, was helping the dissatisfied see the scattered seeds of potential transformation.” There is a thread of defiance in his life’s trajectory, one that resembles the defiance I keep spotting in much of the writing by Albert Camus (foreshadowing/hint-hint, video review of Myth of Sisyphus dispatched soon). If you get to the end of the article, you might find yourself pleasantly pondering this Rumi quote:

   “The moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given, the door opens.”

4. Time and us: Jorge Luis Borges and the labyrinth of time.

   “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

   Speaking of labyrinths:

5. I’ve begun a music dump of sorts on Spotify, and will go ahead and share when my ‘writing playlist’ hits a playtime of 12 hours. Until then, though, here is Ludwig Goransson from Chris Nolan’s 2020 film, Tenet. The soundtrack definitely reminds me of the Nolan/Zimmer Inception soundtrack, and like all Nolan films, is yet another example convincing me Nolan’s signature directorial hand is treating everything like a maze. Anyone watch Tenet, by the way? Thoughts?

6. Precrastinators v. procrastinators.

7. Writing advice from Annie Dillard. (Contrast the admiration of reading for pleasure Dillard suggests here with the reading for usefulness Richardson in the link above explores on his end.)

   “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”

Until next week, lovelies.

With warmth,

Ani