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I have been extensively holidaying the last couple of weeks. Sitting on trains, in squares and by lakes. That means lots of reading, so here are some bookmarked bits.
(1) From The Seaside by Madeline Bunting on why you're not holidaying in Skegness:
"...unlike Wordsworth in the Lake District or Thomas Hardy in Dorset, Tennyson’s legacy has not shaped a national affection for the Lincolnshire coast. The Isle of Wight has muscled in to claim him. For the heritage-led regeneration projects beloved of coastal resorts, Tennyson has not proved of much help in relaunching Mablethorpe or Skegness, unlike the way Margate has used J. M. W. Turner as the centrepiece of its cultural regeneration, with the building of the Turner Contemporary art gallery. The Lincolnshire coast has never been romanticised; cultural prestige accumulated on the dramatic Atlantic shorelines of Cornwall and West Scotland, which met the influential eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke’s criteria for the sublime as overpowering and awe-inspiring. In contrast Lincolnshire’s flat fields of potatoes and cabbages were too useful and mundane to offer a Romantic counterpoint to the industrial and urban. Appreciation has been in short supply, as with the low-lying shorelines of Essex and Lancashire."
(2) From All The Houses I've Ever Lived In by Kieran Yates:
"Psychologists put nostalgic objects in our homes into two categories: ‘personal’ objects and ‘linking’ objects. ‘Personal’ objects refer to sentimental items that take us back to an individual time and place – a mug from a honeymoon, or a keyring from a childhood trip to Alton Towers, say. When you think of the keyring, you think of the day that you bought it. This is distinguished from ‘linking’ objects, which tap into a cultural or ancestral memory and take us elsewhere. Think of it like this: a doily, a piece of lace used to protect furniture or humanise technology (and allegedly named after a seventeenth-century London draper and cloth merchant), is widely used across Jamaican homes and can be bought from Brixton market for £3.50 for a pack of five. When the doily is placed on a coffee table it doesn’t recall the innocuous rainy day in the market where it was bought but the wider connection to a time and place. Maybe it takes you to a childhood memory of a hot afternoon watching TVJ in Kingston. These ‘linking’ objects are tangible ways to make our abstract memories real, to write the poetry of imaginary homelands into our living rooms."
(3) From Dancing to the Drum Machine by Dan LeRoy on the way the instrument company Roland got its name. This is how to do naming:
"Kakehashi thought the first letter of a company’s name set the tone for its success. Opening a dictionary for ideas, he was struck by the name “Roland.” It had two syllables, which he thought was the ideal number for customers to remember. And the name was connected to a legendary figure: Roland was a Frankish military leader, whose fictionalized life became the subject of poems and songs throughout medieval Europe. “We would not be a company that followed trends,” Kakehashi insisted of Roland. “Rather, we would seek to discover and define new market sectors with creative products that gave musicians wonderful new avenues of expression.”"
(4) From The Phoenix Economy by Felix Salmon:
"When an American goes to Geneva or Stockholm and is shocked at restaurant prices, they’re seeing what happens in a more egalitarian society that pays its bottom-tier workers a living wage."
(5) From Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi:
"The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position. —AKAN PROVERB..."
Promotional gratitude
Enormous thanks to everyone who came to Interesting. I thought it was great, I hope you did too. So I've booked the Conway Hall for Interesting 2024, it'll be on the 15th of May. Tickets will be on sale soon and if you fancy doing a talk please drop me a line...
And that's it. I'll give you back your day.
russell
(There are 882 of you. In 882 King Alfred the Great sailed out to attack four Viking ships. Two of the ships are captured (before they surrender), and the other crews are killed. This is the first recorded instance of a reverse Viking.)