#28 / Out of Dodge
It’s happening! We are actually going out of town.
We’ll be spending most of the next week in a cabin in northern Minnesota, near where the Boundary Waters area begins, doing some hiking and birdwatching and maybe some kayaking, and a whole lot of chilling out.
I don’t have a whole lot more to say about it, because, well, that’s kind of why I’m going on vacation, and also because we need to leave pretty soon and we haven’t finished packing yet!
Definitely expect some woodsy pictures next time, though. And I do have a few other items to share…
Writing
I have been fascinated with the story of Julia Domna since I first read it, on Wikipedia, having landed randomly on her page. Woman of Syrian royalty marries Roman general and future emperor. After he dies, their two sons inherit joint rule, only they hate each other, and the older one is a sociopath. The elder son, Caracalla, murders the younger son and issues a damnatio memoriae, so that Julia cannot even grieve for him. Eventually Caracalla is assassinated himself, and Julia commits suicide. I couldn’t think of anything more tragic, and it just hooked me.
But for a long time, I lost track of the story. Somehow it came back to me a couple years ago, and I started reading about Julia again. I noticed that Ancient Encyclopedia didn’t have an entry for her, so I decided to write one. I got about 95% done and then stopped working on it (not an uncommon tale). In the last couple weeks, though, I’ve been feeling so good that it has translated into finishing off several older projects that I had left undone. And this was one of them.
The article was just published this week, so check it out!
https://member.ancient.eu/Julia_Domna/Reading
Zach Lowe — Bam Adebayo is the fiercest, best NBA player you don’t know
When I need to hear a feel-good story for a change, the sports world is one of the most reliable places to go. That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about it; yeah, it’s still real life, but it’s also kind of not. Maybe it’s not super important in the grand scheme that Bam Adebayo is so good at basketball and also a quality person who deserves all his good fortune, but it also matters. And it’s just fun to read about him (Zach Lowe is a big part of that).
Russell Berman — A Throwback Way to Win a Pandemic Election
I forgot to mention last week that the commitment I chose for doing election turnout is letter-writing. I wanted to make sure that this was an effective tactic, and I found this article on the origins of the strategy. TLDR: Not a ton of evidence yet, but it appears to work.
Mood
Big Country — “All Fall Together“
I’ve been listening to this album pretty much all week. It’s their debut album, released in Scotland in 1983, which time and place makes me almost certain to like it, as that’s one of my favorite musical eras, and all my favorite bands seem to come from Scotland.
I’ve been building a playlist called Britpunk for the last two-plus years, and I recently shared it with some friends, mostly to show off, but also to solicit some additions, and Big Country was one of the recommendations. The sound is a little bit more rock than punk, but the “punk” part of my playlist is meant to be broad. They do some really cool stuff like tuning their guitars in a way that makes them sound like bagpipes, fiddles, and other more folk-y instruments; this could have gotten gimmicky very easily, but they don’t overdo it. It balances out the anthemic songs with a sort of earthiness and reverence for the past.
This track I picked is awesome, and not my favorite one on the album, but I mean, this was maybe a little too on the nose:
We will all fall together
A black sky in the rain
And you can laugh and I will sing
We’ve changed forever
Survivors set out on a trail
In the search for salvation
Looking for remnants of sense
In the end of a nation
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Thanks for reading. Please take care, and write back if you can!
Love,
Aaron