Circles - Loose Ends
Circular recommendations
The Infinity of Lists is a curated collection of curious lists.
Hello again from Infinity of Lists HQ!
Today I’m trying out a slightly different format, and circling back to the Circles list to pick out some related recommendations/extra spicy items that didn’t quite make the cut the first time around1. I’m calling this ‘Loose Ends’. We’ll see if that sticks.
So in this grab bag of a list, we’ve got, among other things, aviation pioneers, alien communication, throwbacks to my youth, and desperate attempts to get people on the same wavelength at a party.
So without further ado, onto the CONTENT…
Books
Great Circle - Maggie Shipstead
A twin-timeline novel, with one strand following Marian, an early 20th-century aviator who disappears while trying to fly the ‘Great Circle’ around the world, while the other follows Hadley, an actress cast to play the part of Marian in a 21st-century biopic. Suitably epic and affecting, with a real sense of adventure to the Marian chapters in particular. And when you’re finished, you can weigh up what form of transport you would use to circumnavigate the globe on your own journey, and who would play you in a movie of the same. Emily Blunt on a jetpack, anyone?
The Perfect Golden Circle - Benjamin Myers
An odd, outsider pair of friends plot and carry out a series of crop circles in the sticky heat of a Wiltshire summer in 1989. It’s folksy, lyrical and a little bit philosophical. What’s most fun is trying to picture the design of each of their crop circles, and then doodling your own while you’re watching an episode of Only Connect and already stumped on the first question.
Hilma af Klint Paintings for the Future - Tracey Bashkoff (editor)
A beautiful study of the visionary Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, whose occult-inspired works are now recognised for their groundbreaking abstractions. Her painting The Ten Largest featured in the original Circles list. Take a sumptuous, lazy flick through these pages. Look deep in those vibrant images—and what do you see? An inscrutable language? An alien organism? An overgrown butternut squash that you’re inevitably going to leave half of in the fridge and forget to cook before it goes mouldy?
Film
Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve)
A tricksy, disorientating slice of sci-fi that is based on a Ted Chiang short story. Full of arresting images and with a visually striking, hallucinatory atmosphere. Aliens have arrived on Earth, but what is their goal now that they are here? Circles form a pretty key plot point—but I won’t say any more than that. It’s not the time, or the place. *wink*
The Hudsucker Proxy (dir. Coen Brothers)
This early Coen Brothers oddity is about a naive business school graduate who is installed as the president of a manufacturing company in an elaborate stock-related scam. It is somewhere between an homage and a satire of screwball comedy, and is most memorable for its distinctive look, with the visual design incorporating all manner of circles—from tower clocks to glaring spotlights, and most prominently in the hula hoop design that sits at the heart of the movie. Yes, a hula hoop. You know, for kids.
Music
Circles - Mac Miller
‘I just end up right at the start of the line—drawin’ circles’.
Track one, side one from his posthumous album of the same name. A mellow murmur of a song, of making mistakes, going around in circles, time ticking on, and taking it day by day, as best you can, for as long as you can.
The Noose - A Perfect Circle
‘With your halo slipping down.’
17-year-old me would have insisted on including this on the original list, and pointed out that look, it’s practically even a triple circle, because a noose is a circle too, and there’s a halo, and do you even get the amount of angst that is going on here!? But current me thought that vibe was maybe a bit of a downer2. There’s plenty of drama in there, though, I can’t deny him that, and Maynard James Keenan’s voice still sounds like it’s being beamed in from some otherworldly space.
Games
Mission Red Planet
A tight, tense, occasionally hilarious area control game of sending rockets full of astronauts up to try and take over different regions on Mars, with a cool circular board and cute astronaut pieces. Look at their little flags! And their tiny backpacks! And when you accidentally blow up your own rocket, it’s both tense and hilarious at the same time. Which tends to happen rather a lot.
Wavelength
A party game of giving clues that guide the other players to a point along a spectrum. What clue would go exactly in the middle between hot and cold? What clue would fit two-thirds between hairy and hairless? Each round ends with a gameshow-style big reveal of the scoring section on the circle in the middle. Very effective at inspiring deep, stupid, and deeply stupid conversations. An app version is also available if you fancy a quick game down the pub, in the shed, or on the toilet.
And that’s your lot for this list. A new one will be forthcoming before long, I dearly promise. As ever, let me know if you have any recommendations of your own. And share these with anyone you think might enjoy them.
Okay, maybe not that spicy, but you’ve got to build a bit of anticipation, right?
You tell me.