2025 Week 2: January 6-12

Back to work full time this week (and lots of football to watch) so the list is a little lighter this week. I'm heading into the busiest time of year at work, and my fear that I won't find some kind of fulfillment outside of my job is met by (and undoubtedly feeds) my growing desire to build something with my hands. I'm honing in on woodworking with hand tools, and I'm sharing essentially to speak it into existence. I have no skills whatsoever on this front, but I know I want to lose myself in a project of some kind. My media diet this week clearly reflects this drive, and I didn't fully realize the extent of my attention directed in this way until writing this paragraph.

In related news, I have now reached the age where I sit in a bar with friends and talk not of opening a bar of our own but of a shared shop space in which we can do woodworking. It's a humbling bit of mortality to realize my midlife-ness to clearly, but I suppose it's better than a sports car or a mistress... Anyway, I'm not alone in this desire, and I'm sure there's something to be said here about a shared drive to turn to something tangible, natural, difficult, and beautiful at this particular moment in time. It was good to get out with some friends again.

Which brings me to a request of any readers of this post: I'd like to read Wendell Berry, and I don't know where to start. PLEASE leave a comment or send an email to epcampbell@lifeinthemargins.com if you have a suggestion.

Books
The Count of Monte Cristo (continued, then bailed): I can't do it anymore. Pass the hashish...

Death at the Sign of the Rook, Kate Atkinson (finished): This mystery was a tight-rope act for Atkinson, and it's perfectly balanced between "cozy" and arch/meta-aware. By the time it turned into out-and-out farce, I was fully hooked. Now I want to go back to the earlier titles in the series, and I'm certainly open to suggestions if anyone has particular favorites from the Jackson Brodie series.

And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music, Joe Boyd (started): I'm a sucker for big books, and this one more or less jumped into my hands at my local bookshop. It's a producer's take on the history of music is certain regions around the world, and it opens with a suprisingly (to me) in-depth summary of the history of South African pop, using Paul Simon's Graceland as a springboard into the past. I knew none of the political history shared here when I was a kid in love with Simon's album, and I knew only slightly more when I toured South Africa with a choir just over 15 years ago now. We encountered incredible music there as well as the whiplash experience of going from Soweto to Pilansburg and hearing the racial and cultural history before us. Boyd's opening chapter brought all that back and highlighted how little I really understood back then (and, really, now, in truth). He has a playlist for the book on Apple Music if you pick it up and want to listen along.

Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living, Nick Offerman (started): I'm not one for celebrity memoirs, unless that celebrity is Dylan or Springsteen. But I listened to Offerman on a recent podcast as was inspired to dip a toe into his literary efforts. I want a bit more from this one on the fundamentals/philosophy front so far, but it's an undeniably enjoyable read. It's already passed the read-a-passage-aloud-to-my-wife test, and I'm looking forward to more.

Music
Cunningham Bird, Cunningham Bird: Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham cover the great Buckingham Nicks album from 1973. It's funny, but lyrics I never questioned coming from Lindsey Buckingham or Stevie Nicks sound a bit hollow coming from Andrew Bird. I want a little more of the darkness that always looms just out of sight in Bird's best work, but I have to say they do great job with "Don't Let Me Down Again".

Movies
Hugo (2011), Dir. Martin Scorcese: I saw it in the theater and loved it, but watching it with my son was even better. He finished reading Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret and he lit up when I told him there was a movie adaptation. He made popcorn in the popper that Santa brought, and he and I sat down to watch it this weekend – him rapt and I oddly weepy as I watched a boy in search of his father. Scorcese's love of early film is clear, but this time around I really focused on the drive to fix things, to have a project once again. (see Episodes below)

Games
NCAA Football 25: The running game is really coming together in the league I tend to focus on, while my team in the other league I play in is about to turn into a train wreck. Yin and yang. Such is life.

Episodes & Articles
Interview with Richard Price (The Guardian): "I don't like to write, I just don't. It's too much anxiety." Isn't it weird when you hear your thoughts coming out of someone else's mouth? I wouldn't have said "anxiety" so much as "self-criticism", but tomato/tomahto, I suppose. That being said, I can't wait to read Lazarus Man.

Going Home with Wendell Berry (The New Yorker): In my search for where to start with Berry's huge body of work (80 books !?) I came across Amanda Petrusich's interview with him from 2019. I'm not sure I have an answer as a result, but I'm almost nervous to read him now. A lot of what is said in here about the political fallout of the "rural" reminds me about the complexities of place in Boyd's look at South African music (see above), and that's completely fascinating and tracks with what I've been thinking about on the political front since Trump was first elected. Berry's focus on agrarianism is where I'm afraid he'll lose me, though, simply because it's so far removed from my experience. Still I'll give it a shot, in part because of lines like this: "You’re being fed in an essential way by the beauty of things you read and hear and look at," and the blunt and simple beauty of this exchange:

Have you read George Saunders?
No.

Handmade, S2: Ep 07-08: I had to stop myself from immediately watching Season 3. I remain convinced I can build furniture, now by hand, and utterly bewildered at my confidence.

On Being with Krista Tippett: Nick Offerman – Working with Wood and the Meaning of Life: A podcast recommended to me more generally this week by a couple of my buddies, but I went straight for the Offerman episode when I saw it listed. Within the first 15 minutes or so, I heard him espouse a philosophy centered around "maintaining the attitude of a student", and it struck a chord. It goes like this:

"No matter our age, if we always have a project to which we can apply ourselves, then we will wake up every day with an objective, something productive to get done. This allows us to go to bed at night in the peaceful knowledge that we have done some good, gained some achievement, however small.”

It sounded eerily like the "meaning of life" that my son discovered this week in Big Ideas for Curious Minds (another gift from Santa): "So the meaning of life is not something big or scary. It's just the feeling that you are making progress in solving the problems that most interest you – even if you haven't got it all sorted out just yet."

I'm hearing more and more resonances like this in my day to day existence, and I'm trying hard to listen to them...

Once in a while, you get shown the light
In the strangest of places if you look at it right