Five Bullets 12.13.24

Birds, Brains, Books & more.

Dec 13, 2024

selective focus photography of red cardinal on tree — Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash

Good Morning and Happy Friday.

This morning is a sunny and cold morning here in New York City after a few mild days of rain.

This Monday, December 16th, is the anniversary of the date Herman Melville entered into Moby-Dick as he wrote the novel:

That for six thousand years - and no one knows how many millions of ages before - the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings - that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapor - this is surely a noteworthy thing.

This stopped me in my tracks the first time I read it. Though the date was changed from 1850 to 1851, Melville included himself in the novel, bringing us right back to the exact moment he was writing chapter 85 of his masterpiece. Melville was 31 years old.1

I hope to include this interesting point and more in a post on Moby-Dick, but I wanted to mention it just in case I haven’t completed it by Monday.

This week’s bullets:

Books: I’m taking a break from any difficult or dense reads by indulging in an easy-to-read thriller, Brad Meltzer’s The Inner Circle which dives into the legend of George Washington’s Culper spy ring. The plot is kind of simple and corny, but Meltzer keeps me turning the pages. Thrillers were some of the first books I really enjoyed as a kid and I like to return to them every now and again. This time, I’m noting the structure and plot beats to get a better understanding of what makes a good (or bad) thriller.

Birds: Beginning tomorrow, volunteer, amateur and expert birdwatchers will participate in the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count, the nation’s longest community science bird project. Ornithologist Frank M. Chapman started the tradition in an effort to count birds instead of hunting them, a popular holiday pastime back then. The data collected helps researchers study bird population and make conservation decisions. If you’re in the New York City area, bring your binoculars, and count birds at a city park!

Movies: Theater of Thought. Werner Herzog explores the “mystery of our brains” in his latest documentary, posing questions to experts on consciousness, thoughts, simulation theory, telepathy, neuro-technology and more. Herzog’s work always gets to the ‘ecstatic truths’ of the human experience and I’m interested to see what he does with a subject so perplexing as our own brains.
Music: What’s In My Bag with Louis Cole. Musician, composer and killer drummer Louis Cole visits Hollywood’s Amoeba Records and shows us the albums he’s checking out. I love learning what my favorite musicians are listening to because it gives insight into what’s influencing their music and why it sounds the way it does.

TV: Dune: Prophecy. This week, I’m checking out HBO’s prequel series which takes place about 10,000 years before the birth of Paul Atreides, the protagonist in Frank Herbert’s science-fiction classic. The series tries to capture the aesthetic of Denis Villeneuve’s movies while picking up at the beginning of the Bene Gesserit story. I’ll have to watch more to say if its any good, but it’s definitely got me interested in reading more of Herbert’s novels.

Five Bullets 12.13.24

Birds, Brains, Books & more.

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