Trying something new today - a weekly post where I round up quick notes and links to things I read, watched, played, listened to, or otherwise engaged with in the past week.

Some links or ideas might also get their own posts, if I find I have more to write or share about them. Or if I decide I feel like spreading stuff out over days and giving things their own spaces.

Reading

• I read Me (Moth) by Amber McBride, a young adult novel in verse about a teen named Moth who has lost her family in an accident. Features root magic, song lyrics, dancing and not dancing, angst, first love, a road trip, and a plot twist.

• I read Beyond the Mapped Stars by Rosalyn Eves, a young adult historical fiction novel about a Mormon girl who wants to be an astronomer, but growing up in a polygamist family in 1870s Monroe, Utah, she doesn’t see a path to follow to that future. Features a realistic and diverse portrayal of Utah and Western U.S. life in the late 1800s, a train robbery, emergency midwifery, a near altercation between Thomas Edison and Texas Jack, a ball in a luxury hotel, a solar eclipse viewed from Pike’s Peak, faith, science, and again, first love.

• I’m still working my way through Investigations of a Dog and other creatures, short fiction by Franz Kafka in new translations by Michael Hofmann. Grabbed this impulsively from a Jewish Fiction display at the Holladay Library, but it has led me to plans to really dig into Kafka and read as much as I can of his work. I haven’t read Kafka since I was a teenager but what I did read then was extremely influential on my thoughts and tastes in literature and art, and its weird that I have forgotten that. So, library displays can be important.

• I’ve been subscribing to more and more newsletters lately, and since getting on top of my email inbox I’ve been able to keep up with them. Sharing links just to the things that I most liked that I read in the past week.

  • “The Year in Vibes” and its prequel “TikTok and the Vibes Revival”, both by Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker.

  • “Love in a Time of Climate Change”, poem by Craig Santos Perez shared in the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day newsletter.

  • “A Father’s Work is Never Done”, poem by Nathan Hoks also shared in the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day newsletter. (My exact initial response was “WITAF did I just read?")

Listening

Been clicking around Bandcamp a lot lately and these are albums I found there this past week that I liked - none of them are particularly new except for the Deerhoof, but oh well.

Giver Taker by Anjimile

Intuition by Kendra Amalie

Devil Kids by Deerhoof

Playing

• Finished Wandersong on the Nintendo Switch this week.

• Also watched an interesting talk from the creator of the game, Greg Lobanov - “Wandersong: A Game About Feelings”

• Played A Short Hike today, again on the Nintendo Switch. Fun little game.

Watching

Didn’t really watch anything, other than occasionally getting sucked into whatever my kids were watching, shows I don’t want to enumerate here this week.

I guess there was this TikTok user I got sucked into after my friend sent me one of the “cozy nintendo” videos:

Fritz and Donnybrook (@oldtimehawkey)

(Holy shit look at all that tracking junk on the original URL I followed:

 httpx://www.tiktok.com/@oldtimehawkey?_d=secCgYIASAHKAESPgo8tRvCShfQTSFOXpWMVc2%2F  
 CGmW%2BQZyHW62eLaXG85iVDpdvrAWKLp8R4K%2F%2B%2Bf2nW3hBJSZ6T2  
 c1g46JCPwGgA%3D&checksum=daabe076b9bef9aef0b47d138cc0cc154a  
 1d2466edad06d107f2351c7d1ecfaf&language=en&preview_pb=0&sec _user_id=MS4wLjABAAAAC  
 -Nor83oLDUTwTcpnj8QNBCO03Tvyzt89oSOMKbri-   
 aJUkR0d8qfphh3zWf923A5&share_app_id=1233&share_item_id=7008 004354242301189&share_link_id=20C2FD9B-4755-45B1-96A8-   
 FF181077CAF9&source=h5_m&timestamp=1640668684&tt_from=copy&   
 u_code=daabba7b8fm9ce&user_id=6781623360004031493  
 &utm_campaign=client_share&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=copy&_r=1

)

Clicking

Wado Sanzo’s Dictionary of Color Combinations, web edition: https://sanzo-wada.dmbk.io