On Saturday…. 🙂
A list of things that moved me this week.
What I’m listening to:
On Being Podcast: Eula Biss – Let’s Talk About Whiteness
What I’m reading:
White Debt by Eula Biss– This is the New York Times piece that inspired the above podcast.
The Bird Watcher, That Incident and His Feelings on the Woman’s Fate – by Sarah Maslin Nir, New York Times.
Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed by Cal Newport, The New Yorker
 The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich Â
Thanks to my friend Erin for inspiring this read. I met Erin while working at the Ranch in Wyoming and this book came up in a conversation we had last weekend about isolation in light of the pandemic, which led to a discussion about Wyoming. The book has been in my collection since 2012, but for whatever reason I hadn’t read it yet, maybe because I was too entrenched in living the Wyoming life to bother reading much about it. Perhaps that is all the more reason why I appreciated it so much now. It’s a fairly quick read, and a stunning one.
What I’m watching:
Hollywood – a Netflix original series following a group of aspiring actors/writers/directors in post WW2 Hollywood. The critic reviews haven’t been great, but I enjoyed it! If you like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I imagine you might like this one. I particularly loved the soundtrack and costumes. Jim Parsons, Patti LuPone, Dylan McDermott and Jeremy Pope were all cast standouts for me. While I do think all the storylines wrapped up a little too nicely, it was still highly entertaining and fun to watch.
Dead to Me – Also on Netflix, Dead to Me is a dark comedy starring Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini and it makes me laugh! It’s a murder mystery full of morbid and hilarious twists and turns and the two lead stars play off each other extremely well.
Quotes I’m pondering:
“If you can’t talk about something, you can’t think about something.” – Eula Biss (Again, from the On Being podcast).
“From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We gave only to look at the houses we build to see how we build *against* space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.” – Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces.
Artwork of the week:
