Five Bullets 10.18.24
“Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
Good Morning and Happy Friday!
It’s a cool but sunny morning here in New York City and fall is in full swing. I caught a beautiful sunset last night from Domino Park. It’s always the cloudy/overcast fall and winter days that have the most dramatic sunsets!
What does Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven have to do with today’s newsletter? Apart from the fact that it’s October, and that Edgar Allen Poe lived in New York City, this week we’ve got some old New York ghost stories and an article about decoding birdsong. Was Poe’s raven communicating to him or merely mimicking speech?
I’m sort of in-between projects after completing my post on High-Rise last Friday so I took some time to update my Substack page. If you’re new here or have an interest in posts I’ve written on books, music, movies, history, and more, check out the Welcome Page.
This week’s bullets:
Creativity: I enjoy listening to writers and other creative people talk art, music, movies, writing and, well, being creative. These conversations spark my own creative energies and get the ideas moving along. This week I listened to Austin Kleon’s chat with critics Stephanie Zacharek and Dwight Garner about comfort movies and commonplace notebooks.
Music: Happy 77th birthday to Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. Check out Weir’s documentary The Other One. Fela Kuti would’ve celebrated his 86th birthday this week. Ted Goia’s essay on How Nigeria literally went to war against one musician—and lost was eye-opening.
NYC: Each Halloween season, historical podcast The Bowery Boys share the city’s ghost stories and urban legends. Podcast hosts Greg and Tom have some silly fun in the spirit of the season but the stories are always interesting. This month’s episode focuses on Ghost Stories of the Five Boroughs.
Podcasts: Speaking of spooky podcasts, I seem to tune into audio and horror dramas as the weather gets cooler, returning to old favorites like The White Vault. The writing in this show always hooks me; I wonder if the production team had the entire saga, with it’s extensive mythology, planned out from the beginning.
Science: How Scientists Started to Decode Birdsong. “Animals have prominent speaking roles in many of our oldest stories.” I’m fascinated by research which helps us better understand our world and the creatures we share it with. In past newsletters, I’ve covered how scientists are using computers and machine-learning to understand animal communication, including elephants. In this article, Rivka Galchen takes a look at how scientists are analyzing bird sounds. Are the birds ‘speaking’ to one another? Do they have a language similar to humans? “Birds in general are turning out to have intellectual abilities far greater than most people had imagined.”
That’s all for this week. I really enjoy getting this weekly list together. It gives me a reason to explore my interests, learn more, and share it with you.
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