Week 23 in Review (2022)

I slowly feel myself developing a groove for writing. The Grand Canyon took millions of years to erode into it's current level of grandness. Drip, drip, drip. Every sentence I write or copy (Thanks Stanley Fish) is a miniscule mark in the stone of my progress as a writer.

Here are ten things I read, thought about, or interacted with this week:

1. While watching Everything is Copy, I paused during the part where Nora was going through her second divorce, went online, and purchased the book she wrote from the experience. Heartburn is now on the floor next to my bed, waiting its turn.
2. Louie Zong wrote an entire album based on The Wind in the Willows, a very early example of anthropomorphic animals in young adult fiction. I was charmed by this album a few months ago when it came out, but now I'm reading the book so, once finished, I can relisten to the musical interpretation with it fresh in my imagination (and then follow it up with another classic I've never read, Watership Down.
3. "summer of 1983" is a YouTube playlist (my main form of musical consumption) that I was absolutely certain had to be the score to an independent movie based off of a gay romance of the title year. But no, it's just a damn fine playlist that feels as precisely planned as if it had been a real film, one you could have heard about from Cannes.
4. Last Christmas, I was gifted a book of poetry by Ogden Nash, a strange little man who wrote light verse in the middle of the 20th century. It went on my shelf because, upon flipping through it, it seemed a bit weird and offputting (uneven lines, odd rhyming conventions, every poem rambling on and on about money or laziness). But thank god! I gave it another chance and subsequently discovered that his poems are full of clever, astute witticisms about society and human nature. He would be excellent on Twitter, same as Mark Twain would have been.
5. I looked up reflexology charts to make breaking a bad skin-picking habit more fun by adding some multicolored magical thinking to it.
6. I learned, in reverse order, that "Rich Girl" by Gwen Stefani is based off of "Rich Girl" by Louchie Lou & Michie One which in turn is based off the song "Rich Man", sung by Zero Mostel in the original run of Fiddler on the Roof.
7. My biology class professor teaches concepts and then reinforces them with YouTube videos to watch at home. I'm now back into watching the Crash Course series, which overall is wonderful. They're still making videos more than a decade after being founded, and their content is yet another high-quality, free, and entertaining source of education.
8. RGSS.
9. The animator vewn posted a short film about cute cats and guns and militarism. This was my first run in with her art, and it's somewhere in between Rocko's Modern Life and Home Movies.
10. A short film about the craft of making traditional soy sauce, which, similar to Jiro, makes me respect Japanese craftsmen and their overall attitudes towards the work that they do.

Thanks for being interested and reading!

—Tim