Drifting Along: May 26 - June 1

My kids' school year is wrapping up, and with things at work slowing down in anticipation of the summer I feel like I've mostly just gone with the flow this past week. For the first time in a long time, I didn't finish a book during the week and most of my reading has been sporadic; my goal is to finish most of what I've started over the next two weeks. I go away to Maine for a work conference in a week, and it will be the perfect time to wrap some of the titles I've let sit for a while now. The book on World War I poets will be the first in line.

I've thought about Craig Mod's work a lot after discovering him on a podcast, and I'm really looking forward to getting his new book about taking long walks along ancient pilgrimage routes in Japan. He spoke about looking for meaning, writing, and making books, and I found him at seemingly the perfect time. He was exactly what I needed this week. The videos of the podcast are below.

Books

• The Wedding People by Alison Espach (started): The next read for my book club, and it's one my wife has recommended to me for a while now. In the early pages, it's a nice companion piece to Hilderbrand's Hotel Nantucket, though it's decidedly darker spin on the woman-with-troubles-in-a-fancy-hotel genre. The central plot line is built around the collision of two women in the hotel: one who thought she reserved the entire hotel for her million-dollar wedding and another who managed to get the best room in the place for a single night so she can kill herself there. I don't know how thoroughly this will go on to subvert the narrative tropes it seems set up to do, but I'm hopeful that this will be a part of the proceedings.
  
• Miracles and Wonder by Elaine Pagels (continued): I'm trying to limit my reading of this to a chapter or two a week for now. I'd like to give it the proper attention it deserves, and these days that means an hour or so every day or so. It remains fascinating.
  
• The Shining by Stephen King (continued): I've already dreamt about the book, and I'm only 25% or so into it. That feels ominous.
  
  I'm having a hard time separating the very real fear I felt watching the Kubrick film as a kid from the growing sense of ominous doom in the novel. Is the movie and my memory of it doing a lot of the heavy lifting for King so far? It might be, but either way I feel like I'm avoiding the book at times. It's working.

Articles & Episodes

• NIL deals have made it to middle school.
  
• A look at the NEET subset of incels: It's as if people have begun to compete to be the biggest possible victim...
  
• Adam Mastroianni's "28 slightly rude notes on writing

"The Wadsworth Constant says that you can safely skip the first 30% of anything you see online."

This is exactly the kind of thing that gets in my head and stops me from writing most of the time. File this right next to Elmore Leonard's advice to "try to leave out all the parts readers skip."

• "The Art of the Critic" by Nick Ripatrazone (The Metropolitan Review)

A great read on the state of and need for criticism, without engaging in the hand-wringing about Goodreads and Amazon reviews that tends to accompany such work.

"Criticism without flair is dull, and criticism without sensibility is useless."

• "Maybe We're The Monsters" - Taskmaster S19:E05: This season's cast is incredibly well balanced and they're equally entertaining. I usually have a favorite, and I still do. But it's rare for there not to be a weak link like this.
  
• Craig Mod on The Tim Ferris Podcast: Across two episodes lasting over four hours, Ferris interviews Craig Mod, whom I found fascinating. He leads walk and talks along various pilgrimage routes around the world - though mostly throughout Japan, it seems. On a typical walk when alone, he covers roughly 30 miles a day before sitting down to write 2,000 words and then he repeats this for up to 100 days in a row. When with a group, he and his co-leader, the apparently important Kevin Kelly, cover a great distance and then share a meal with the participants where they all agree to discuss a single topic of the group's choosing.
  
  I found that I could listen to Mod, who has a new book coming out that I quickly ordered, talk about anything, and he really helped temper my general distaste for Ferris, who started the talk about "optimizing your life" in certain quarters, who says things like "I want to double-click on that for a second," who thinks it's madness that Mod found success in Silicon Valley but moved elsewhere for happiness and fulfillment. I'll dip in and out of the podcast based on who the guests are, and these two are probably the best and most thoughtful of his episodes that I've heard.

Music

• Grateful Dead 04.12.1978 (Cameron Indoor Stadium, Durham, NC): I stumbled across this show on XM early in the week and then talked about with pretty much everyone I know who cares about such things - including a waiter named Fish we met at a great new restaurant by us on Saturday night – before I was told the show exists on vinyl and was on sale. That's all the urging I need.
  
  Jerry's vocals cut out in the first two or three songs, and I don't think the show gets much love as a result, but the band sounds great on this night – from a fleeting flirtation with being a power rock band on "Mama Tried" to a beautifully intricate intro on "Estimated Prophet." I'm a sucker for Cowboy Dead usually, but "Estimated" has really grown on me lately (as has "Samson and Delilah", which feels to me like the other side of the Estimated coin).