Charley B for Free 2024 Q4

Below is a note I sent to a small group of friends and family. If you happen to come across this, and anything resonates, I'd love to keep breaking it down. Enjoy:

Friends and family,

This is the 26th quarterly update on what I’ve been up to and thinking about lately. As always I would love to hear what’s happening in your world. The hope is to keep in better touch and figure out some fun things to do together.

The last few months have been all about establishing family life:

We should talk more about the good parts of having kids. Teddy is three months old--he is smiling, making noises, and generally becoming more fun. We love him. So far, the experience of being a dad has exceeded my expectations. And he doesn’t even do very much yet.

Before having kids, most of what I heard from friends, colleagues, etc was about the hard stuff — bad sleep, limited free time, etc. My theory on this is that it's less socially acceptable to talk about the joy. Sharing too much about your own happiness and warmth can sound like bragging, while complaining feels safer especially in small talk. That's a shame.

Leah and I are probably laughing more than we ever have. Borges knew something about the joys of later phases of life, writing in a later prologue to Fervor de Buenos Aires: "At the time, I was seeking out late afternoons, drab outskirts, and un-happiness; now I seek mornings, the center of town, peace." It's a good reflection of recent months. Fewer travels and restaurants. More early nights and time at home. And I am grateful for that.

At the same time, we are still very much making an effort to get out of the house, and including Teddy where we can. Please invite us to stuff.

Happy new year!

Love,Charley

————Below the line —————

Borges and Whitman

Borges - I've been exploring more of his poetry and finding it rings as true as his short stories. The translations matter. Here's the full book I've been flipping through that has spanish and english side by side which helps too.

• Simplicity - on acceptance and coming home
• Boast of Quietness - "sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them"

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself Part 6 - you won't believe where Whitman can take you a few lines after a kid asks "What is the grass?". Incredibly moving. I have been re-reading this for weeks while bouncing around Leaves of Grass.

Books

• Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect - probably the top rec from the last few months. Check out the audiobook. The producer of The Good Place breaks down what he learned about moral philosophy making the show. What I like about this is it’s funny. I laughed out loud. And makes what can be academic and dense content much simpler, approachable, and enjoyable. He hits on the big three schools of secular western moral philosophy: Aristotelian virtue ethics, consequentialism (outcomes are what matter a la Bentham), and deontology (follow rules a la Kant). And boils it all down to four questions that can be applied to a lot in life: 1) What am I doing? 2) Why am I doing it? 3) What else could I be doing? 4) Why would it be better? A cool pairing is this two min visual summary of aristotle virtue ethics. 
• Will Durant, The Pleasures of Philosophy - synthesizes schools of thought, the problems of utopia, and comparative views of religion in a section I'm still trying to get Leah to read. Read as much Durant as you can find it is awesome. "It may be that people are a little happier today than before; invention has multiplied their comforts and their powers, and wealth has given them a new range of travel and interest. But with this variety and vivacity of life has come a nervous discontent of soul"
• Susanna Clarke, Piranesi (fiction) - made me think about the virtues and shortcomings of empiricism. The book is like readable young adult fiction, Borges, and Plato’s allegory of the cave had a baby. Creative.
• John Dewey, Art as Experience - a theory of aesthetics. Generally I am valuing beauty much more as I get older. One takeaway I had is museums are not the best way to experience art. Recommended.
• Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull - tap into your own freedom. It's not easy. Hone it. Share it. Life is a gift. An odd little book good for one sitting.
• Espen Dahl, The Problem of Job and the Problem of Evil - not great, but including here because I'm looking for better reading on the problem of evil.
• Richard Parfit, Reasons and Persons - our identity is more fragile than we think, Parfit attempts to establish a comprehensive secular system of ethics, and admits that he falls short but figures out a lot along the way. This is a hard read. One takeaway for me is our identity is more fragile than we think; he argues identity is the continued stream of our consciousness. It made me less afraid of death.
• Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian - “There is no joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite”. Grateful to not live in the savage violence of the 19th century American West. A story of power, the nature of evil, and manifest destiny. One of those books you finish and stare at a wall for a bit. Glad I had Ricky and Chase to text.
• C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity - re-read of this one. Recommended to better understand Christian faith and aspirations. Pride is the trap game of the path to following Christ. C.S. Lewis is particularly compelling given he had previously been a devout atheist and has a great gift of prose.
• Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World (sits between non-fiction and fiction, not sure how to describe) - the line between genius and madness is thin. The world is connected in counterintuitive ways. Talented writer and well researched on the topics he's covering. He has a page or two covering the history of Haber-Bosch, something I've read about in more detail, and nails it.
• Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life - It’s basically Schopenhauer’s version of writing an article for The Atlantic. A short 100 page book taken from a longer work summarizing ideas about personality, property, and relations with others. One thing to break down is his view that reputation and views of others are overrated, while also holding the view that reputation helps smooth the retails to getting to work with other people and society. I guess it depends what your goals are. Again I view this as a tik tok-ification of what he really thinks but going full Schopenhauer is dense and more depressing.
• Roslyn Ross, An Objectivist Theory of Parenting - a worthwhile effort to share rational ideas about parenting and to talk about treating kids like adults, but way too into Ayn Rand, which kind of goes against my guiding parenting philosophy of “don’t screw them up”. The biggest gift of this book was nudging me to read Montessori, which I’ve been interested in anyways. We have almost as much to learn from kids as we have to teach them.
• Books I tried and failed (again) to read: Spinoza’s Ethics, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, among others.

TV and Movies

• Great British Bake Off - latest season is the best one yet. Sumaya, Gill, Dylan, Nelly... all great. Available on Netflix. They do a remarkable job casting. Our go to for vibe light, enjoyable tv time.
• Shrek - still holds up incredibly well. This is an ~ annual watch for us at this point.
• Gladiator - if you’re interested in Gladiator 2, forget it. Just re-watch Gladiator 1. Soaring characters, story, costumes, sets... Gladiator 2 spent the whole movie reminding us about iconic moments in the first movie
• The Godfather - finally saw it. Seems to me one of those ground breaking movies, that has since allowed other movies to go further. I'd rather watch Shrek.
• Nobody Wants This - the denouement of millennial humor and culture. So funny. Now we can cede the reigns to Gen Z.
• Love Island Season 1 - total brain rot with excellent British accents, if you need that kind of thing
• The Diplomat - great seasons 1 and 2, season 3 on the way if you want to get into a political drama. 

Music

• Tobe Nwigwe, Hood Hymns (album) - Tobe made his Charley B for Free debut a few years ago, and it’s been fun to follow his rise and ability to keep taking creative risks. Leah and I saw the first live performance of these songs in a show with the National Symphony Orchestra in September. Check out I’m Not God from that performance
  
• Saba, How to Impress God (song) - keep coming back to this song. “[God] is not impressed by your jewels, your cars, your clothes, or what it took you to get it”. My sense is the 21st century is going to see a rise in religion, and some rappers are early to this. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kendrick Lamar’s super bowl performance includes some aspect of Christian rap and radical Christian forgiveness towards Drake.
  
• Robert Earl Keen, Feeling Good Again (song, live at a NY studio) - “reached in my pocket found three 20s and a 10, it feels so good to be feeling good again”. Simple, warm, everybody can relate. This version gave me goosebumps. 
  
• Israel Kamakawiwo’ole (aka Iz), Somewhere Over the Rainbow (song) - just a great tune. Iz’s mom was born on Niihau, which is a totally interesting place and would be a digression to talk about. His vision for this song came in a dream and he recorded it in one take the next day. RIP.

Grab bag

• Curious about how power forms in times of transition? Get Merovingian pilled
  
• Matthew 23 - Work on yourself before judging others. A take down of the Pharisees. Still working my way through the Bible chronologically, taking a detour through the gospels while taking proverbs in bite sized chunks. Many great teachers throughout history come back to this point of understanding and improving yourself before judging others:
  
  • He who knows others is wise; He who knows himself is enlightened - Lao-tse, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 33
  • Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful; he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also... never cease chiseling your statue. - Plotinus, The Enneads
  • Let none find fault with others; let none see the omissions and commissions of others. But let one see one's own acts, done and undone. - The Buddha Dhammapada, Verse 50
• Favorite beer from this holiday season - PA-based brewery but looks like they have some decent distribution
• If you look at the moon and wonder about it, check this out. "Perhaps the next time you catch a glimpse of the Moon’s shiny surface beaming in the night sky, you’ll see it a little differently – not as a mundane fixture of the heavens, but as a fellow companion that gently affects our own existence." Long but remarkable for its content, thoughtfulness, and novel tools/formatting to teach about a topic
• Cool project where you can click on wikipedia pages about the locations you're around on google maps. Check it out for your city.
• Rest in peace Jimmy Carter. A courageous, and, it seems to be, deeply good person. His presidency is going to have a posthumous glow up.

Evergreen list of interests (new): home improvement, parenting, ancient codes of law, home lighting, gravel biking, photography, cities, geothermal energy, nuclear energy, religion, practical philosophy, cooking, food supply, ethnic restaurants, weight lifting, personal finance, land-value tax, hip hop, punk music, red dirt country, Borges, Whitman