A dispatch from unstructured time
I wish I read more. As I have got older and busier I spend less time with books. The draw of work or a doomscroll often wins; I often find myself switching between intense and purposeful concentration and mindless consumption. That can leave little space for the enjoyment of other things. Too often I am in the mindset of extracting value rather than taking enjoyment. This can be the enemy of reflection and curiosity. From time to time, however, I manage to relax.
Holidays provide a moment for this. So, I thought this month, if this note finds you with a little more time than usual, on a beach or a plane, I recommend five things that can be enjoyed on their own terms. Two books, two things to watch and one piece of music.
Scavengers Reign is a cartoon. Each episode is about 25 minutes. Twelve episodes were made and it wasn’t picked up for a second season. There is a plot; superficially it is about crashing on an alien planet. But the central character is really the ecology of this strange world, which is rendered beautifully. I have never seen anything quite like it. You can watch it on Netflix in the UK.
The Left Hand of Darkness is a novel by Ursula K Le Guin. Le Guin is a favourite of mine; she wrote mainly genre fiction: science fiction and fantasy. The book is about an ambassador who visits a world called Gethen, whose people have no permanent sexual differentiation. The greatness of the book is the ambassador’s slowly shifting perspective, unfolding over hundreds of pages as he is immersed in Gethenian culture. This makes it a hard thing to adapt for the cinema; there have been two failed attempts.
Four Tet’s latest record is, by design, difficult to find. Since 2017 Kieran Hebden – producer and DJ since the nineties, whose music spans jazz, house and sample-heavy electronics – has run a hugely popular Spotify playlist. He wanted to slip unreleased tracks of his own into it without them becoming findable elsewhere. His solution was to title them in strings of glyphs borrowed from half a dozen alphabets. They are fully public but unsearchable. There is now an album of them: 37 minutes of warm and upbeat music. The algorithm always wins, so you can now find it directly by searching ‘wingdings’. It comes up as a series of squiggles.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a less niche recommendation; it won six awards at the Oscars earlier this year. I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. This is partly because one of my most frustrating experiences in the cinema was watching Inherent Vice; like that film One Battle After Another is an adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel. It is a silly, dramatic, imaginative and hilarious film. It also achieves the trick of speaking about the current moment artfully, without being preachy or partisan.
I send The King Must Die by Mary Renault to everyone who becomes a client of mine. The business is named for it. It is worth reading this summer because the big cultural event of the year is Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Both are set in the Mediterranean Bronze Age. Both use scholarship to inform the telling of the story. Both portray realism in their stories; neither shows the gods as characters. The central difference is that Nolan decides to insert modern morality into his telling while Renault tries to reflect a stranger and less familiar pre-Christian mindset in her hero.
If there is a thread through all of these, it is that all of them are best experienced on their own terms. None will give you insights about your financial life; I approached each of them without a purpose. All have lingered in my mind. That may be the point. A financial plan is an exercise in purpose, and what it produces, in the end, is time. It can tell you whether and when you can afford a life less focused on achieving and earning. It cannot tell you what to do with a Monday afternoon in August.