Friends! Hello! I have been silent, I know. Forgive me: I have been writing a book. I still am writing a book, but now I am also writing a newsletter to you, and here it is, with my warm embraces. Oh, how I would enjoy hearing from you. Don’t be a stranger now!
- The latest letter from me to you:
“My dear friend, what have you been doing since last we spoke? Me, I’ve mainly been walking.”
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- This week’s selection from the archives:
I have been noodling away and adding new (old) columns to the archive. I’m highlighting these two now, but the others are there for your browsing purposes, all the time.
- Because Vernon Kruger remains a hero for our times:
- Because I have had some bad business calls since this one, and it’s good to remind yourself that it has been worse.
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- I’m reading:
- Circe by Madeline Miller
What a joy of a book. It’s a wonder if you know and love The Odyssey; it’s a wonder even if you don’t. You read it and find yourself thinking, “Ah, so that’s what the gods were like!” You also read it and feel, really feel, what it is to be a woman and to be strong and enduring in the way that women are strong and enduring. You also read it and think, “Oh what a wonderful life this is, full of reading and love and beauty, and how lucky we are to live in it.”
- The Expectation Effect by David Robson
A fascinating holiday-read of a book with genuinely life-altering insights into how what we think not merely affects our reality but in measurable, scientifically verifiable ways, creates it. It is extraordinarily valuable and has changed how I go about my life.
- The Great Romantic: Cricket and the golden age of Neville Cardus by Duncan Hamilton
A delightful, soothing, drowsy summer’s afternoon of a book, a book about the great lyrical cricket columnist, who as good as invented the genre of sports writing you read for the writing not for the score, and who elevates the playing of a game to an art and demonstrates that both are the same thing. And more than that: a glorious evocation of a time when the world wasn’t gentler or less pressing – you would have to be very determinedly ahistorical to imagine that of the 1930s – but when there was still space in public discourse for the gentle graces and consolations that soothe the human heart.
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- I’m watching:
- Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hameguchi, 2022). A long movie based on a Murakami short story built around a Chekov play: it’s beautiful and slow and wrenching and confounding. It’s a movie about movies and a movie about theatre and a movie about the difficulty of living and surviving and about the life-saving value of learning how to do things carefully and well. Take three hours for yourself and don’t let yourself get distracted.
- A Peter Bogdanovich mini-festival:
Peter Bogdanovich was an actor and director and a devoted film historian and lover of Old Hollywood and I have been aware of him for a long time but I have never fully understood his legend. He died recently and I wanted to understand so I have gone back to the beginning, starting with his fabulous first three films:
The Last Picture Show, the first and the best of coming-of-age films, set in a dust-blown monochromatic rural Texas town, based on Larry McMurtry’s novel, with an enigmatically compelling young Jeff Bridges and a luminous young Cybill Shepherd in their first films.
What’s Up Doc? In which he channels the 1930s screwball comedies of Howard Hawks and not only makes Barbra Streisand funny and sexy and dazzling, but also actually manages to make the wretched Ryan O’Neal likeable and fun to watch. It’s terrific.
Paper Moon, a Depression-era tale of grifters and con-men that is funny and heartbreaking and miraculously unsentimental, and in which he makes Ryan O’Neal even more compelling than in What’s Up Doc?, and gifts the world a supernaturally gifted performance from the 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal.
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- I’m listening to:
- A podcast called The Plot Thickens, and particularly the series about the life and career of Peter Bogdanovich.
This in turn led me to Karina Longworth’s series on Peter’s first wife, the creative collaborator and art director Polly Platt, who helped make his fabulous first three movies and then, once he blew up his life and career by splitting with her, went on to collaborate with James L. Brooks on Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News and launch the career of Wes Anderson.
What a story. What a pair of stories.
- I am listening to the Great Courses series on “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music”, all 41 hours of it, and a recent episode introduced me to something I am quite sure you know but I did not: Bach’s Cantata 140 (“Sleepers Wake!”). All of it, all of it, but oh, in particular as the fourth movement begins with its warm viola (the instrument that holds the strings to my heart) how can you not feel amazed and grateful to be living?
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- What is making me happy:
When I was young my father had a long-playing record that was in effect two long medleys of songs. The first side contained the marching songs that British soldiers sang in the First World War, and side two was the same for the Second World War. It was the familiar soundtrack to my young days, and I find myself singing snatches of it now, especially when I am walking or when I am maudlin. I have always heard it clearly in my head but I never thought I would hear it real life again. Last week I found a copy of it.
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- This week I discovered:
Marie Stopes, better known today for her adventures in family planning, started her career as a paleobotanist. She was very interested in establishing that Antarctica had not always been ice-covered and down south, and that in fact it had once been a part of the supercontinent of Gondwanaland, way up on the equator, attached to India and Australia and South America and South Africa. If that was the case, then there would be fossil evidence in the rocks of Antarctica of fossilized glossopteris, an index species for Gondwanaland.
In 1904 she met Robert Falcon Scott at a dinner-dance, and told him about glossopteris, and tried to persuade him to take her with him on his next journey to Antarctica so that she could look for some glossopteris. Scott said no, but he would keep his eyes open for her.
In 1912 Scott and his companions died in their tent on the Beardmore Glacier, defeated by their long haul back from the South Pole. There was nothing left to eat in the tent, and they had long since dumped their tools and personal possessions in order to shed weight, but close by his body were 16 kilograms of sandstone rocks, gathered on the way back. The rocks contained the first glossopteris fossils found in Antarctica.
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With love, as always, and perhaps even more so
Darrel