Ahoy,
Another month gone by and it doesn’t even seem like time passed. It’s been a year since we all really locked down and I just got my Pfizer vaccine and I feel great. The trees are budding down here in Brooklyn and things are looking brighter. That’s a view from my window, up there. Not much but it’s a start.
I’ve spoken to so many who have gone through so much this year. My wife lost her father to Covid-19, a few others we know have lost loved ones. We lost our mental health, our sense of scale, our joys. A friend just told me that she felt like she was doing everything by rote, day by day, a bad song on repeat.
We’re a strange species. We crave the new, the different, the exciting. We imagine the plans we’ll make, the japes we’ll get up to, the fun we’ll have and when the time comes we’ll be dissapointed. If this year has taught me anything it’s the value of staying home, the value of quiet, the strange Taoist quality of life that is the same every day. This is also a year of mourning, of rememberence, of tears. So maybe before we scratch that strange itch that makes us want to explore the world, we have to come to terms with the thing that keeps us centered.
Spring is coming. Summer will be here soon. An end is near.
Stay safe and sane, friends.
Best,
JB
Let me know if you need anything. If you need anything - even if you just want to talk - email me, Telegram me @johnbiggs, or Signal me at +16468270591.
News
Do you have an entrepreneur in your life? I’d love for them to review Get Funded. I’m happy to send a PDF or hardcopy in exchange for an amazing review. I don’t think the book got enough attention when it came out in the middle of the pandemic and I’d love to restart it a little. Let me know!
And, with that, I present the great reads.
Roman Lives: A Selection of Eight Roman Lives
by Plutarch
I’m a sucker recently for classic Greek and Roman literature. I know its quite fashionable to be into the Stoics or whatever, but reading the trials and tribulations of ancient people, even strained through the seive of time, is refreshing.
This book explores the lives of a few select Romans from Plutarch’s longer tome of Lives. These little profiles are important in that they show how the ancients handled the problems of their day and how, in many ways, their problems were our problems.
Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson
by Annye C. Anderson
I spent a lot of this year learning Jazz and Blues guitar. I knew how to play guitar, but I never knew how to really use the entire fretboard and, while I still suck, it’s been a great experience. I love this book because it’s written by Annye C. Anderson, Robert Johnson’s step-sister. Johnson, one of the preeminent blues guitarists, died at 28 and Anderson tells his story in a fresh way. Gone are the deals with the devil and the sparse history, replaced instead by the real story of a real person. It’s a tough read but if you love blues or Robert Johnson it’s definitely worth it.
by Andrea Camilleri
Not to be confused with the movie about fish sex, the Shape of Water is a slim little mystery by a Sicilian master. I picked this up in a Little Library in Encinitas last week (yes, we traveled) and read it in a few days. It’s like a hardboiled mystery set in Italy and the plot, the characters, and the murder are all top notch.
As always, I welcome recommendations. Just email me at john@biggs.cc.