Sutherland, summer solstice playlist, maxton hall, and more

Seven thin(g/k)s I explored this week

Dear reader,

I’m in the middle of a move, which is equal parts tiring and exciting. So books this week have been extra helpful in keeping my sanity in check. It’s wild to me that we’re fast approaching July. Wildddddd. To celebrate the summer solstice, I spruced up my reading space with some floral arrangements; here’s a favorite little nook.

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

1. A morning of reading Nietzsche somehow morphed into an evening of bingeing Maxton Hall on Prime Video in its original German, and all I can say is the contrast between highbrow philosophy and a young-adult-enemies-to-lovers plot somehow worked seamlessly in my tired brain and was the perfect little antidote to feeling meh and blah this week.

2. My summer playlist hath arrived, courtesy of Cillian Murphy and his production company. 21 songs curated by Cill. Love.

3. Interested in research techniques? Well, here we go:

   “Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive, rotate crops, take a weekly Sabbath, go to bed at the same time, exercise so hard you can’t think during it, talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old, take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries), step outside of the empire of the English language regularly, look for vocabulary from other fields, love the basic, keep your antennae tuned, and seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., use guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt).” — John Durham Peters

4. RIP Donald Sutherland. You were a great Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. And excellent in Italian Job. “[H]e once asked his mother if he was good-looking, only to be told, ‘No, but your face has a lot of character.’ He recounted how he was once rejected for a film role by a producer who said: ‘This part calls for a guy-next-door type. You don’t look like you’ve lived next door to anyone.’” His presence certainly shined.

5. Been enjoying this book on Russian lit. The author explores, through the lens of Russian canon, the importance of realist fiction, and in doing so, reminds us that “novels teach complexity,” whereas ideologies tout simplicity.

6. Generation Anxiety

7. I’ve got this book — Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud—on my radar. I have no idea how, but it popped up online when I was recipe-testing mini pavlovas.

Cheers to the weekend, and to the beauty of incongruent pairings somehow serendipitously made congruent.

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See you soon! (Paid subs, see you Sunday!)

Ever lovingly,

A