Friends, I need to take a week off from these essays due to several deadlines and stressors, not to mention the Thanksgiving holiday.
(I skipped turkey this year for lamb, a bunch of sides, and for a vegan guest I did a variation on Yotam Ottolenghi’s butternut squash lasagna pie.)
But since next week’s essay will be the monthly long piece for supporters, regarding a recent writing residency in Las Vegas that went weird – which means no standard Sunday supplement next weekend – here are a dozen-plus things I’ve loved recently:
Shirley Hazzard’s last novel The Great Fire. Hazzard is in the news due to a new biography. I love her work generally – Transit of Venus, Greene on Capri (a must for us Graham Greene completists), but hadn’t gotten around to this one. The style took me some getting used to, but it’s a terrific historical novel set in post-WWII Southeast Asia with a love story at the core.
A new online map that displays the span of the entire known cosmos, using data previously only accessible to scientists.
Any of the Fred Again.. Actual Life albums to listen to as plane music. Might just replace Richard Hawley or Washed Out, or my favorite medieval choral playlist, as what I load when I’m waiting for a flight.
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. This novel’s not due out until next year, but I was sent an advance copy for a blurb and was happy to give one – a subdued, well written debut about a young Pakistani woman figuring herself out through playing squash. It’s a sport I haven’t tried, but the book was very persuasive, bery good.
This article on why so many concert tickets purchased recently go unused.
Listening to Johnny Ace while cooking Thanksgiving. Listening to the new Sault album while drinking cocktails.
An article by Adam Mastroianni about how when people imagine how things could be different, they almost always imagine how things could be better.
The nonfiction masterpiece Dispatches by Michael Herr. Currently reading this for the first time, based on a local bookseller’s recommendation, and wow, wow, wow.
If you want an old black-and-white movie to watch this weekend, how about 1946’s The Blue Dahlia with Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd. I watched it for the first time last week, a Raymond Chandler-written noir, sharp and stylish.
Some collected tweets from stock photo models on the times their images have been used in regrettable ways.
The news that by 2100, the Lagos-Abidjan stretch in West Africa is projected to be “the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth.”
An album I just rediscovered of Elizabeth Watts singing Bach, from 2011:
If Thanksgiving was/is a thing for you, happy holidays. I am a very lucky person to live in a home where somebody else made a pair of beautiful pies, so I’m probably eating pie while you read this.
What the what
“Meditations in an Emergency,” published Saturdays by writer Rosecrans Baldwin, is a weekly mini-essay about something he finds beautiful, with a longer piece once a month for paying subscribers, written in the woods.
Also for paying subscribers: a Sunday supplement, three weeks a month, with three-plus ideas of things to love, no paid placements 💀
Rosecrans is the author most recently of Everything Now (2022 California Book Award), now available in paperback from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
Books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.