Durham artist V. Cullum Roger’s web site supporting research for his book on 225 Years of newspaper and magazine parodies.
Fewer podcasts, more quiet
I remember way back in the ’90s, meeting with a great nutritionist who was also a great therapist. At the time I listened to lots of Audible.com books and shows. She advised me at the time to reduce that input. “You like to mull things over,” she said. [1]
When podcasts came along, I gorged myself and have done for many years. I listened to them doing the dishes, working outside, walking, puttering around the house, etc. The margins of my day needed to be filled with something, put to use, and listening to podcasts helped me feel I was doing something productive with that otherwise unused time.
However, I have more than once over the past years heard a whisper underneath all the noise: Get rid of them. Go quiet.
This usually led to me pruning my feeds, reducing the number of podcasts in my queue, and so on. But, like stubborn belly fat, the episodes continued to accumulate over time and never went away.
But I heard that whisper more frequently of late. I decided my word of the year would be SPACE: more spaciousness in my schedule and more spaciousness in my head. So I decided to take more drastic action on my aural inputs.
In Castro, I deleted all the podcasts in my “later” queue and reduced the number of active podcasts in my current queue to about 25. I’m in no hurry to work through them.
I unsubscribed from many podcasts; I still keep a few that I really like because I do enjoy listening to something while I wash the dishes or vacuum. I select not just what I listen to, but when and where I listen. [2]
If I really want to hear something, it’s easy to find that specific episode and download it. And Castro makes it easy for me to upload audio files and listen to them easily.
I am finding myself in the quiet a little more, and I don’t miss the chatter. I have also not been plagued with the FOMO, a devil imp if ever there was one.
[1] The irony of my overconsuming junk food for the body and junk food for the mind is not lost on me.
[2] As I also do to control my eating.
While following up on a movie about the Mercury Theatre’s “voodoo Macbeth” production, found this fantastic Wikipedia page with tons of pictures and even a film clip from the original production.
Poirot 2
Follow-up to my 2023-01-29 diary post on Hercule Poirot.
From reading Poirot’s Wikipedia page, I discovered that the stories do document that he is Catholic, and a few nods are made to it in a few of the episodes in the early years.
I was also pleased, on watching David Suchet’s “Being Poirot” that he also highlighted the end of the Murder on the Orient Express, which I found so moving.
I’ve been icing my ankle in the evenings after Liz goes to bed, so I’ve taken the opportunity to catch up on the Poirot episodes via Britbox. I’m not watching them all, but there are a few – “Chocolate Box” is one – that are nicely done, even if they destroy certain elements of the original story. I’m surprised at how many of these old episodes I remember from their first runs.
Seeing them in a batch like this, Christie’s devices become noticeable: an older character is revealed to be the unknown parent of a younger character, the murder always happens earlier than the timeline suggests.
It is fun to see the bits of business inserted for the actors to do to flesh out their characters. My favorite bit: Hastings is washing dishes, Poirot is drying them. As they speculate about the case, Hastings absent-mindedly hands over a washed saucer to Poirot, who examines it, and passes it back to Hastings for further cleaning. The same saucer is washed and passed back through the entire scene and this absolutely delighted me.
It’s also fun to see young actors like Christopher Eccleston and Damien Lewis in their very young and slim incarnations.
I’m working my way through the seasons, watching the few stories that really interest me, and then finishing with Curtain, which I’ve never read nor seen.
Diary
- Inbox: 19. I have hopes to dispose of them today
- Resting and icing the ankle, giving it all the care I should have been giving it the last 2 weeks
- TV: I’ve been reading some Hercule Poirot short stories, and rediscovered the David Suchet Poirot series on BritBox. I watched the very first story, and then skipped to a much later story from almost 12 years later, Murder on the Orient Express. 📺 Too rushed in places (they simply wait for Poirot to go back to sleep?), but the textures are darker and involve more moral questioning from the Poirot character himself. It’s a movie about choices, and where one draws the line of right and wrong, justice and injustice. The confident certainty from the early season cozy mysteries is there but cracks are showing in the foundation. Suchet’s detective is more exhausted, depressed, and lonely; the world gets more evil and no better, despite his efforts to set things right. I was astonished at Poirot holding his rosary beads and praying before bed; but it makes perfect sense for him to be a Catholic, and for his core beliefs–in God and justice (and also Poirot)–to be challenged by this case. The final scene of Poirot walking away from the police, having made a choice that has clearly broken him, was heartbreaking and a moment that Christie could never have imagined. Suchet’s performance creates a new Poirot, and it makes me want to see all the later, darker stories before going back to the cozies.
In addition to small errands, today’s main event is picking our green burial plot at Bluestem Conservation Cemetery. We’re thinking a site for both of us in the prarie grass, underneath the wide sky.
Now reading Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie 📚 I felt the need for some light and easy short stories, and these scratch that itch.
via Serial Reader
Stopped reading The Gigging Life: Lessons Learned on the Literary Road by Matt Love 📚 Some interesting stories, but the pamphlet as a whole did not grab me. While his gigging never made him rich, the experiences did enrich his life and he got a book out of it. Nothing is wasted!
The only commitment today is a Chili Cook-off in the Common Dining Room. We just put the white chicken chili on to simmer. Time spent not eating or cleaning up is devoted to catching up on emails, and then attacking a growing list of postponed tasks in Remember the Milk and a spreading pile of papers on my desk. I’ve been reading productivity pr0n for 40 years and I still haven’t cracked the code of Just Do It.