Things I Learned This Week

I'm coming for you Elizabeth and what remains of my day

The fourth week of school is complete, and this is what floated to the top.

• I’m taking Oceanography, plus I’m a science incompetent. So humor me because any bit of info I absorb feels like a triumph. That said, did you know the White Cliffs of Dover is where chalk comes from? Well, they aren’t mining those cliffs specifically, but it comes from places like that. Chalk is made up of mostly fossilized microscopic plankton, so if you looked at chalk under a microscope it would look like this! This feels like the time I realized why there is a dinosaur on the Sinclair logo. D’uh.

• Three novels down of nine, reading the complete novels of Kazuo Ishiguro for a lit seminar, and just finished Remains of the Day. Wow. What a heartbreaker. The book follows an English butler on a road trip looking back and regretting (sort of) his life decisions. Pulled this quote from the end. “For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?”

• Read Aqua Viva by the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector. I’ve never read any of her books, but I would have loved to have read this one when I was 19. The idealism in connecting in the now and having the luxury to riff on everything that matters. Those who know me know I am a vintage children’s book buff, so I was psyched to find out she had written some children’s books. Two are being released in the spring by New York Review Books, Almost True and The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit—already requested advanced copies from the publisher.

• I watched the Emmys with my sister, and they played classic television theme songs to walk the winners on and off. At one point, they played the theme song from Sanford and Son, one of my grandfather’s favorite TV shows. Of course, I had to pull it up on Spotify and Google all the things. I never knew the real name of the song was The Streetbeater, and Quincy Jones wrote it. It’s off his album You’ve Got It Bad Girl, and the whole thing is kind of a banger. Have a listen.

• A reader clued me into a book, Old in Art School, by Nell Painter. Already a renowned historian, she retired from Princeton University in her sixties and returned to school for her BFA and MFA in painting. I am only a few chapters in, and what an inspiration. She writes about her experience and struggles with finding the balance between pursuing art and the demands of a fully lived life, not to mention the roadblocks in the art world of being a Black woman. Devouring.

Quote of the week:

The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity. To see past the ordinary and the mundane and get to what might otherwise be invisible. — Rick Rubin

‘Til Tuesday kids.

Burgin

(I’m finishing college at 50+, follow along and read my story here.)