She flied away. Just a regular day.
hello
We’ve done it people. January is over. Only February to go.
Before we start, if any of you would be happy to promote Interesting on your socials, your LinkedIn or your bus I’d be very grateful. Tickets. About. And please let me know if you’d like to come and talk.
Five things:
I liked this from Geetanjali Shree in today’s Observer:
“I have serious critics saying that my language is not Hindi because it is so eclectic and doesn't always fulfil the expectations of correct grammar usage. I coin a lot of words, and I've often quite happily changed the gender of certain words - somewhere I turned "moon", which is male, female, because I like the moon. I'm proud of that eclecticism. I think there's something limited in [the critics'] way of seeing, their notion of purity. I'm absolutely against purity. My language is completely impure.”
Need to remember that when I get too arsey about word usement.
I’ve been doing a lot with video recently (like and subscribe!) and this very month I’m experimenting with Morning Talking - what would Morning Pages look like if you used a camera instead of a pen? Sort of. It was partly inspired by this from Joe Moran:
“Art and shyness both draw on l’esprit de l’escalier, that conversation we carry on in our heads after the other person has gone.”
That thing of ‘the conversation we have with people who aren’t there’ seemed, often, to me to be the joy and power of blogging. It was ‘the threat of an audience’. And I’m think there’s something like that going on with TikTok too.
I have just finished Vanessa Berry’s Calendar. It is wonderful - “a year through 365 objects, collecting the everyday, familiar, curious, and unusual”. There’s a story in the background, hinted at in some of the entries
“Caramel Wafer Wrapper The message on the edge of the shiny red and gold wrapper gives me pause every time: ‘more than 6,000,000 of these biscuits made and sold every week’. Hundreds of people must be reading this statistic at this very second, which means at least some must be sitting at a kitchen table like I am, feeling numb from something difficult they are going through. The taste of the wafer is sweet comfort to me as I flatten out the wrapper, smoothing out its creases. The wrappers are too shiny and smart to discard. I use them as bookmarks, and when I sort my books they flutter out, like golden tickets.”
But some of it is just wonderful bits of miscellanea
“G. G. Berry had been a junior librarian at the Bodleian Library at the turn of the twentieth century. No relative of mine, despite the name, and by the few accounts of him in the public record he was a humble man with a deep love of paradoxes. When he met people, he handed them a card. On one side was printed: ‘The statement on the other side of the card is true.’ On the other: ‘The statement on the other side of the card is false.’ This endless loop was how he hoped to be remembered.”
You’ve probably seen this, but just in case not, Stephen Spencer turns his daughter’s stories into songs. Brilliantly. Regular Rabbit is the best. She flied away. Just a regular day.
I’ve just realised that this bit of Olivia Lang sums up my fashion goals:
“Morris dressed like an elegant tramp in rumpled corduroy, with a dandyish red kerchief knotted around his neck, a pipe-smoking caricature of what he was: a socialist baronet.”
SELF PROMOTIONAL NEWS
Presentation Club 4 happens on Wednesday. Join us!
I’ll give you back your day.
russell
(There are 1019 of you. Icelandic explorer Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir died in 1019. According to the Vinland sagas she and her husband led an expedition to North America where their son Snorri Thorfinnsson was born, the first known European birth in the Americas.)