📚 Reading Stack for February 31st, 2024
a pulitzer gem, a foster wallace, a tibetan meditator, an overrated history book
The Case of the Missing Leap
The calendar showed February 30th1 and the warm AM sky was raging bluely. That was the morning I learned that in 2100, the leap year will be skipped. Just as it was skipped in 1700, 1800, and 1900. Strange. But still not enough to get me out of bed and up at my computer.
Then, what I expected to be a snoozy two minute Google about leap year origins escalated into what I can only describe as a bizarre-ish, semi-extraordinary saga worthy of a movie, or at least an HBO series, but will have to settle for what has now become this horribly long newsletter.
As the story goes, February typically has 28 days because of the Romans. Classic.
ENTER: Twin brothers Remus and Romulus—the first king of Rome.
Born in the city of Alba Longa, the infant twins were left to die on the bank of the river Tiber. Some lore: The god Tiberinus, Father of the River, saved the twins and gave them to a she-wolf for suckling. They were found in a cave by a shepherd and grew up tending flocks, unaware of their royal lineage.2
At this point, Rome did not even exist. Alba was the spot. Somehow these two young fellas discovered that they were grandchildren of a king and gained a sizable political following. They joined arms with Gramps Numitor and restored him as King throne of Alba.
If antiquity is good for anything, it’s stereotypes. Apparently it’s not just today’s 17 year olds who march to their own rhythms, because Remy and Romy had the bent too. The teenagers decided that it was about time start their own city. On one of the two nearby hills. When they couldn’t agree, Romulus, like Bellerophon slaying the Chimera, like the true Netflixian small-h anti-hero he was, took a knife to his brother Remus’ throat. Poor Remy.
Exeunt: Remus
Then, because why not, he named his preferred hill after himself: ROME.
What this means is that Rome was kinda sorta actually mas o menos built in a day.
Now that Romulus was king, and he had firmly etched the neural pattern in his adolescent brain that he could do, mas o menos whatever the he wanted, Romy decided it was about time to change time.
The calendar was staring at our pubescent fratricidal king the wrong way, like the old lady whose millet-wagon takes up all the good cobblestone. Romans were superstitious. They believed even-numbers were unlucky, and Romulus decided to axe to any month with even numbered days. This decision, as you might expect, caused some issues.
And Romy-o wasn’t finished.
Despite Romulus’ fear of even numbers he, like Elon Musk, had an affinity for the character X. To our boy king, X (10) months sounded about right. He decreed 1 year equal to 10 months and 304 days. The months were: Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis3, September, October, November and December.
ENTER: Numa Pompillius
Continuing with the trend of Roman kings doing whatever they want, Romulus’ successor, Numa Pompilius, decided that adding two months might be a fun twist. At least then it would match the 12 cycles of the moon. And so, Numa Pompillius ordained what we know as: January and February.
ENTER: Julius Caesar
The Caesar-calendar story is equally juicy and deserves it’s own spin-off, but that is best left to Shakespeare.
The TLDR: Julius Caesar—also doing whatever he pleased—decided to make the year 46BC a cozy 445 days long. After dragging his empire through that confusing slog of a debacle, Caesar said enough was enough. The Romulan lunar calendar had to go. And thus, in 45BC, the 12 month 365 day solar calendar that we know and fuss over, was born.
None of this does much to explain why the leap year in 2100 will be skipped, but it does show how fickle, inconstant, and silly time really is: an artifice that is the maze of civilization, and gives me a consistent, latent, imperturbable, ferociously modern sense of fear and urgency.
Now I’ve borrowed enough of your day, so here’s what I gathered about the mystery of the missing Leaps.
TLDR 2.0: It takes Earth 365.242190 days to orbit the Sun, and that extra 1/4 ( roughly six hours) of a day needs to be accounted for somehow. Hence, every fourth year, we gain a day. But .24 of a day is actually a little less than 6 hours, and our little round up from .242 to .25 also needs to be accounted for, meaning that every hundredth year, little Febrero does not leap. Has very little bounce. Quite inert. Credit cardian hops.
What a mess.
But you know what aren’t a mess? These👇
Book #6 - A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
I’m not one to automatically love a Pulitzer winner4 but, in A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan accomplishes some feats I have rarely seen in literary fiction. Not only is it a sort of panoramic view of the music business, it is hilariously edgy raw and sincere and amusing. The form of Egan’s novel is mesmerizing: it’s something of a narrative circle. It does not follow one character’s linear story, but rather a series of interleaved vignettes roaming around the story’s focal points: Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in settings as varying as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Kenya.
It’s a book about the way music both roots us in time and urges us to change along with it, and about the way that all of our fates weave in and out of one another—sloppily, ruggedly, sometimes even angrily, like the Low E of punk rock. I highly recommend it. We’ll also discuss it on Good Scribes Only in a couple weeks.
Book #7 - The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
There’s a big debate around posthumous novels. Famously, Franz Kafka’s works were never meant to see the public. Can we blame his friends for publishing them anyway? David Foster Wallace is best known for his towering success, Infinite Jest. Sadly, he did not live to complete its successor, The Pale King. Wallace’s wife and friends, however, decided that it was too fearless, timely, compelling and, above all, hilarious not to publish.
The story follows a newly arrived (fictional) trainee named David Wallace, and a handful of IRS at the Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois. As Wallace immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to working in the IRS. David Wallace has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are toying with removing humans from the service and using mahchines to do the same work. At bottom, the story grapples with questions of boredom, of meaning, of the value of effort in world where work is less important, and of society’s addiction to entertainment. Through characters imagined in the realistically quirky way that was unique to him, Foster Wallace suggests a new idea of heroism that is ridiculous, wonderful, and worthy of contemplation. Like Dante nouveau, only by boring through the hell-hole of boredom does one become a hero.
The fact that this book was only 25% complete and still so clearly a work of near genius is a testament to the daring literary force that was David Foster Wallace. We’ll talk Pale King on Good Scribes Only in a couple weeks.
Book #8 - Training the Mind by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
A few years ago, my brother recommended Trungpa Rinpoche’s strongest work, Meditation in Action, to me. That’s a book I would recommend to anyone interested in Non-dual philosophy, meditation, yoga, and/or mindfulness. While that is one of my favorite works of eastern philosophy, and one i’ve reread a few times now, I am less attached to this subsequent collection of teachings by the Chogyam. Perhaps I need to take a lesson from Rinpoche and not be so hungry for novelty; I keep hoping that the next Rinpoche will strike me in the same way that Meditation in Action did. It’s a similar sort of desire that Foster Wallace writes about in Pale King. My millennial/Gen-z obsession with what’s new, next, different.
The book is comprised of 59 maxims5 that have been used for almost a thousand years by the Tibetan Buddhists:
“Don't be swayed by external circumstances,"
"Be grateful to everyone"
"Always maintain only a joyful mind"
Each chapter contains Trungpa Rinpoche’s commentary in which he, in vintage Rinpoche manner, emphasizes meeting life’s ordinary situations with intelligence, compassion, and kindness.
Book #9 - Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
In the 1920s, the richest group in the world, per capita, were the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. This is that story.
This book wasn’t a mess, but I do think it is quite overrated, and I happen to love this narrative style of historical non-fiction. I’m aware this goes against the hype cycle, and perhaps I wasn’t reading close enough, but I didn’t find it gripping. It isn’t the story; the subject matter—a train of murders against the Osage Tribe for their head rights—is tragic. But I found the telling of it a bit slow and scant. Perhaps I was, unfairly, hoping it would compare to SC Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon. Regardless, I couldn’t help but feel confused about the hype. Was it the murder-mystery-ness, exciting in the way people love True Crime? The wild success of the Osage? The current political climate? I’m not going to say you shouldn’t read it or see the movie with Martin Scorcese and Leonardo DiCaprio; the beginning of the FBI and the devastation done unto this native american tribe are both provocative and important. But, I likely won’t be rushing to re-read this one.
📚 Years ago,
In my early twenties I committed to a life of books, and that choice led me to view reading as a privilege and a practice. It occurred to me that no matter how much time I dedicate to reading, I won’t come close to getting through all the great writing out there. The realization freed me up to explore books of all kinds, not just the greats. Now, even as reading time grows more scarce, I pickup whatever sounds compelling, and write as much as I can manage.
Books are magic. Learning is magic. And my biggest wish is that you treat your mind with the books it deserves.
Ok friends. Go forth spend a few extra minutes this week with a good ole book. And please let me know if you have any particularly good books for me to read.
Cheers,
—J
Next Month
Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
Inward by Yung Pueblo
Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
The Son by Philipp Meyer
TBD
February 30th, sometimes known as: March 1st
As you might be aware, Quintilis was changed to Julius and Sextilis was changed to Augustus.
Listen to our episode on Celestial Bodies for some of that…
“The maxims are designed to awaken the heart. They foster the abandonment of what little personal territory our ego’s love to occupy. And they encourage us to relate to others and in an understanding that meets the world exactly how it is.”