Friday Fixations
What I'm into right now
Happy Friday, my fellow suffering beings. Each week, I share two things I’m digging right now (books, TV shows, movies, music, and the like) plus one online video of nearly zero cultural merit.
Caddo Lake, on Max. I’m still trying to figure what, if anything, this movie is about. Maybe it’s about the nature of time? Or family? Regardless of whether it successfully makes a point, it is deftly told, with unstoppable headlong momentum and clever narrative reveals. Also, the acting is good—although I barely recognized any of the actors. Check it out and hit me up in the comments.
The Overstory, by Richard Powers. I have no doubt about what points this novel, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is trying to make. Powers somehow manages to spin a riveting yarn about… trees. Well, more broadly, it’s about our relationship to nature. And the writing is, in itself, a force of nature. (Full disclosure: I read this book several years ago. My friend Sebene gave it to me. For the previous decade, I had pretty much only been reading dharma books. But after this, I switched over to novels.) Anyway, I mention it here now because: a. The book is awesome and you should read it, and b. It gives me an excuse to point out that for the last three Fridays, we’ve been running a series on the podcast about the psychological and physiological benefits of exposure to nature. The final episode dropped today. Listen or watch.
Anytime Key and Peele pop up in my feed, I smile.
One last thing… This coming Monday, December 9th, I’ll be doing a live Meditation Party in NYC with Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren. It’s a benefit for the New York Insight Meditation Center. Tickets available here.
Subscribers can comment on this and all my other posts. You can also chat with me, my staff, pod guests, and one another—about podcast episodes + whatever else I feel like discussing. Plus: podcast cheatsheets (with time-stamped highlights + full transcripts), live-streamed meditation sessions, and live video AMAs. Join the party.
I highly recommend Overstory. Richard Powers is a phenomenal writer who brings crucial issues up (in this case the importance and astonishing connectedness of trees and our place in nature) by weaving a truly intricate set of tales together under one cover. I have just started Playground, his recent book about the oceans and nature - I had to put it down after page 5 because I'm so uber busy right now orchestrating a move across the country, and with his books, they are page turners that for me I just can't put down once I start. Once we get out West I'll crack it open and tell my husband 'see you in a few days'....
The Overstory is one of my favorite books.