Castles in the Sky 35
Thirteen Perspective Changing Experiences from July 2023
Castle in the Sky is a metaphor for experiencing a new idea so powerful that it changes the way you see the world. My name is Charlie and my mission in life is to explore these experiences and empower others to find and embrace them.
I’m sharing thirteen things in the 35th edition of the monthly newsletter. First up is a review of the new things I wrote in July 2023 followed by twelve recent Castles in the Sky: experiences, thoughts, and media that changed or deepened my perspective on something.
Four new pieces of writing in July
New Monthly Newsletter Format
Personal Update: I joined a board of trustees.
Mix of the Month: Skinshape Playlist
Good Essay: Oh God by Yehudis Milchtein
Good Essay (and Music): Seeing Him Again on Facetime by Jordan Ali
Good Essay: Escaping Bullshit by Taylor Foreman
Good Essay: Elegant Violence by Latham Turner
Review of Beasts by John Crowley
Review of Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse
Review of The Bear Season 2
Thoughts of River of Doubt by Candice Millerd
Crowd Work - Favorite Comments and Messages from July 2023
1/13. Four new pieces of writing in July.
Below I share a summary for each one with a few comments:
July 17: Beautiful and Ordinary was a day-in-the-life memoir about a really great Saturday I had a few weeks ago. A lot of people liked it, and send emails or comments along these lines:
July 18: In Why Write Memoirs, I review All the Wrong Moves by Sasha Chapin, a book that was hilarious, moving, and relatable as a personal narrative, but also simply by existing makes a compelling case that we should be reading and writing more memoirs.
July 26: Pure Research is a Bet on Progress is something I’ve wanted to write for a long time where I make the argument that “learning for learning’s sake” is not only rewarding and enriching in and of itself, but is an immense signal of hope for the future.
July 31: In Sandcastles and Wanderlust I contrast my desire to be an established, steady “pillar of my community” with my drive to be a globetrotting adventurer, all against the backdrop of a simple family trip to the beach.
2/13. New Monthly Newsletter Format
It’s Sunday morning and I’m settling in on the couch for a post-after-breakfast-walk episode of Bluey with my daughter. I have been delaying writing issue #35 because I want to get the format “right.” Reviewing it for the fifth or sixth time, I realize that I could borrow a page from Erik Hoel’s Desiderata series, and convert this monthly newsletter into a simple numbered list of the things I think worth including. This would also align more closely with the description of what I write about. Meaning that, alongside a list of what I published in the previous month, I could also share a list of that month’s castles in the sky: things I did, witnessed, and thought about that changed or deepened my perspective on something.
3/13. Personal Update: I joined a board of trustees.
A long time ago I heard a man described as “a pillar of his community.” I don’t remember where I heard it but wish I’d made a mental note because it’s been an incredibly sticky idea for me over at least the last decade. Whenever I do a structured goal-setting exercise with questions like, “what do you hope is in your eulogy” and “how do you hope your loved ones think of you,” I always use the phrase pillar of my community. To me, it means that you are prominent and of service over a long time horizon. It means committing to doing something for others and continuing to do it over a long time horizon.
I’m happy to report I’ve found one way to be of service. My daughter goes to a daycare associated with a small church and a very small private school. I love the people who run the school. Their values–kindness, education, and inclusion, among others–line up with my family’s. So when I found out they needed a treasurer for their board of trustees, I was more than happy to throw my hat in the ring. As of July, I got the job.
Treasurer is a one-year commitment and the last few treasurers then became the president for the following year. I have an MBA and master’s degree in applied economics. Plus through my job, I’ve helped over 800 people in the Houston area start or grow small businesses. So I’m pretty conversant with financial statements. But this is my first time serving as the treasurer for a nonprofit or school. I am excited about the opportunity to be of service and to learn how a nonprofit board like this operates. And I’m sure that somewhere along the way I will have a “perspective-changing experience” that will be valuable to share on Castles in the Sky.
4/13. Mix of the Month: Skinshape Playlist
I am a knowledge worker, which means I spend a lot of time at my computer, which means I listen to a lot of music. I probably listen to 2-3 different hour-long mixes every day. I save the ones that are good, and some get really heavy rotation.
This month’s mix was this playlist by Skinshape. It’s super chill, with good vibes for a long road trip or for hanging out by a pool (or for validating spreadsheets while in your office, thinking about a long road trip or hanging out by a pool). His singing reminds me of Foals and he manages to do a lot of different stuff while staying in the same consistent area.
5/13. Good Essay: Oh God by Yehudis Milchtein
When I finished this essay I commented, “This is amazing. I raced through it. I held my breath. Absolutely flawless.” It’s a short essay about Yehudis’s childhood that’s beautiful and thought-provoking, and even a little disturbing. Link
6/13. Good Essay (and Music): Seeing Him Again on Facetime by Jordan Ali
It’s really hard to capture what it feels like to be in love, and I really enjoyed this short essay by Jordan because you can feel it. It’d be good enough as an essay but what he is doing is so cool and interesting. Jordan is a trained composer and he arranged and composed his own short musical piece to accompany the essay. Please read it, listen to the music, and leave an affirming comment if you liked it so he will do more of these short essays accompanied by music. Link
7/13. Good Essay: Escaping Bullshit
This essay is a roller coaster ride. Taylor does a masterful job of taking ideas, notions, and experiences that are familiar, breaking them down to make them small and relatable, but then weaving them back into a metaphysical web. It’s hard to explain, but reading Taylor’s Substack almost feels like, shamanic? Like, there are certain thinkers and storytellers who, when they share something with me, I feel like they are seeing something more than I am–something profound and real but a little mystical. Taylor is one of those writers and this essay is a great example of how he’s able to do this. Link
8/13. Good Essay: Elegant Violence
Another writer who has this “shamanic” quality is Latham Turner.
Latham makes a great point in this essay where he tells the story of his training in martial arts, and what that means for him now that he has a son who is also learning to fight. One conversation I have with surprising frequency is about aggression in men. I feel that too often, people write off aggression as a universally negative, or vestigial quality. I don’t think that aggression is something you can completely avoid in yourself or in others. So rather than ignore it, it’s better to embrace and cultivate it so that you can keep it at bay and use it only when appropriate. I think Latham makes a similar but much more nuanced, elegant point with this essay. He doesn’t seem to be saying that aggression is necessary because it’s a useful blunt object (like I do), but that practicing and experiencing aggression is an important way to get to know oneself. Link
(Going to sandwich in my own personal update here since it’s relevant–I recently started taking a boxing class. I thought it would be a fun way to get in shape. I’ll report back when I’ve been doing it for a while.)
9/13. Review of Beasts by John Crowley.
One of the biggest joys in my life is finding a weird comment deep in the internet where some stranger makes an extremely cogent argument that someone I've not heard of is one of the greatest undiscovered artistic geniuses of all time.
A few months ago, I started reading a book called Little Big by John Crowley. My Dad had recommended it to me like 10 years ago and I started it two or three times but didn't "get it." I gave it a shot again two days ago. This time I got it. It's amazing. Incredible. And so different. “Who is this guy?” I thought to myself. I started googling the book and John Crowly to find out more.
I found a post on Reddit that starts like this. Not many people are talking about this book or John Crowley, but when they do it's always like this! (Note the bottom paragraph, where they compare him to Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolkien.)
And I got to Goodreads, where Little Big is John Crowley's most reviewed book at 10k reviews. This is how the top-rated review for it starts:
I was elated to discover he’d written a lot more, and he’s still writing. Among the synopses for his books was an ambitious reimagining of all of Western history, a world where animals become humans, an immortal crow who watches humanity for thousands of years, and other absolutely wild premises. Then I did something kind of weird and stopped reading Little, Big because I decided that I wanted to read his entire oeuvre from front to back.
So far, I’m two books in. The first book was The Deep, and it was just OK. There’s a certain type of sci-fi and fantasy writing from like the 70s where it’s not very descriptive, and I have trouble figuring out what exactly is going on, or imagining what is happening. The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin was like this for me the first couple of times I tried to read it. The Deep was like this. It’s OK. If you stumble upon a used copy at a used bookstore, I’d read it, but I wouldn’t order it to read.
His second book, Beasts, was excellent. The premise is that it’s the future and mankind has developed a few new species of hybrid human-animals. It sounds a little hokey, but it’s so well done. I feel like a lot of stories that try this premise are like, “look at these weird creatures and what they can do,” but the reason Beasts excels is because it very covertly asks, “what do these weird creatures say about us?”
When I read his depiction of the leos, the hybrid half-human half-lions that are some of the main protagonists, I was just like, “Of course! Of course that’s what half-human half-lions would be like! And of course that’s what our conflicts would be about how to treat them!” If you’re into sci-fi, it’s a fun, quick read that is nonetheless extremely thought-provoking.
(Afterthought: There are a ton of people on the internet who love anthropomorphic animal fiction. I’m frankly shocked this book doesn’t have a cult following, especially because early on there’s a sex scene between a human and a leo. This is not a reason to not read the book. It’s tasteful, not graphic, and advances a really important plotline. Nonetheless, it seems like the kind of thing that people who fixate on anthropomorphic animals would have found and made popular a long time ago.)
10/13. Review of Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse
In our lives, I believe we all have mantras and refrains, themes that we come back to again and again. Watching the most recent Spiderman movie was the intersection of two ideas I return to a lot.
The first is that I love going to see matinees alone on a weekday. In my ideal life, my schedule would be so dialed in that I could see a matinee alone on a weekday once a week.
The second is that I love finding art in a medium where I’m like, “wow, this is perfect for this medium–no other medium could do this justice.”
In July, I had a slow week and went to go see Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse at a matinee one weekday. It was transcendently good. And I say this as someone who is so over the multiverse trope. I think the problem with a lot of multiverse movies is that they're boring because they don't understand what's interesting about the idea of a multiverse. We don't want to just see different characters in different iterations for two hours. We want stakes. The intrigue of a multiverse comes from the question, "how would I navigate this? What does it mean for me?" So we need someone's personal story of finding meaning amidst all those universes. This is where the new Spiderman is a dramatic success.
But beyond that, it does stuff with animation that just takes your breath away. This is what I mean in the second idea I come back to over and over: finding something done in a medium where no other medium could do it justice. You could not make this movie as good if it wasn’t animated. The basic premise of the main villain would be nearly impossible to film in a live-action movie Plus, there are certain scenes that would be filler in most movies that are works of art because of the way they are animated. (Specifically, look for the scenes where Gwen argues with her Dad.)
If you have a chance to see it in theaters before other summer blockbusters completely crowd it out, I highly recommend it. It is the freshest, best, most innovative movie I have seen in a long time.
11/13. Review of The Bear Season 2
The Bear is the best show on television right now. Every character is so fleshed out: there is no contrived conflict. The show is just like life, where most of the biggest obstacles and challenges the characters have come from within themselves, and from their desire to take care of themselves and their loved ones and also find meaning along the way.
Episode 7 of Season 2 was perhaps the greatest episode of television I’ve ever seen anywhere. There’s one character, Richie, who is the most combative and ornery character on the show. From the start of the show, he is angry and frustrated and his life is perennially on the rocks. Episode 7 is all Richie and it is beautiful, realistic, uplifting, and rare.
I’ve known a lot of people who struggled with mental health problems, addiction, loss, and other unfortunate events and circumstances. Nobody would blame any of these people for becoming sad or angry or resentful. But as understandable as those feelings are, over long periods of time, they can become so corrosive that a person collapses in on themself. We all know a story of a person consumed in this way, but what is much less common is stories where people triumph over this impulse.
And that is why Episode 7 of The Bear is my favorite episode of any TV show ever. It is a realistic story of triumph, of someone who is able to really get out of their own way. You have to watch all of Seasons 1 and 2 to really feel it, but they are also great.
(Side note: I think this show is the best argument yet for why streaming platforms should not be dropping whole seasons at once. It was binged in a day or so by everyone who saw it, so the hype cycle only lasted two weeks–which is truly a tragedy.)
12/13. Thoughts of River of Doubt by Candice Millard
This was a really excellent audiobook. I’ve been walking and jogging a lot lately so I finished it in less than a week. I found out about it from this Twitter thread by my friend Brigitte Kratz (who I highly recommend you follow on Twitter).
The book is exceptional. It’s about Teddy Roosevelt’s last hurrah, a riverboat journey down an unmapped tributary of the Amazon. It also introduced me to a really compelling historical figure, Cândido Rondon.
But ironically, the most interesting thing I realized during listening to this book was that I’d never heard Teddy Roosevelt’s voice. From the way he acted and how he’s talked about, I always assumed he had a super deep voice, but apparently–as you can hear for yourself here–that’s not the case.
In light of the recent popularity of RFK Jr., who struggles with a voice disorder called dysphonia, finding out Teddy Roosevelt had a super high voice made me start thinking about how much things outside of someone’s control affect what others think of them. I’m going to think about this some more, and think about why I always thought Roosevelt would have had a deep, booming, commanding voice, and confront any prejudices that may be there.
In the meantime, I highly recommend listening to the audiobook for River of Doubt.
13/13. Crowd Work. My Favorite Comments and Shoutouts from July 2023
I could reasonably just call this the “Rick Lewis Section” and a lot of writers would know what I meant. He left some awesome feedback on Why Write Memoirs that I left above. But in the interest of spreading the love around, here are my other favorite comments and messages from July 2023.
From Why Write Memoirs, Diane McM and Silvio Castelletti both added great ripples to the essay:
From Pure Research is a Bet on Progress, Jane-Anne’s Substack wrote a comment that was a pretty well-contained essay in itself.
From Sandcastles and Wanderlust, Richard made a pretty compelling argument I’m still turning over. I’ve barely run one 5k, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t watch like ten YouTube videos about going from couch potato to ultramarathoner after reading this comment.
Thanks for reading!
I have grown most through organic shares, so please feel free to share Castles in the Sky with someone you think it would resonate with.
...great recs Charlie and good catch up...appreciate all the share...and the bear f'n rules...
Weird to see someone with my last name. It’s quite rare