Slack elastic
hello,
Not long now to Interesting. There are still some tickets left. Come on, it’ll be a lovely evening. Honest.
(And don’t forget. You’d be mad not to UNSUBSCRIBE.)
And on with the things.
Books I can definitely recommend. All of Anne Ward’s but especially the new one, I❤️EK. And Richard King’s new one about Arthur Russell. I especially loved the photo of a single letter-headed page saying just: “Dear Arthur, call me up. Love Jill”. I DJ’d at an Open Decks thing the other week and started with a 12inch of Go Bang! I bought randomly for 50p at a Derby discount record store about 40 years ago. Ears still prick up.
A lovely piece from That’s Not My Age. May marks “…the unofficial start of the pottering season.”
“A potterer should aim to languorously drift from one location to the next – perhaps in a kaftan, kimono, housecoat or other suitably loose, capaciously floaty garment. Slack elastic, baggy bottoms and general dishevelment matter not to the seasoned potterer: comfort is key. Optimal pottering footwear includes slippers, mules and knackered old garden shoes with the heels trodden down. Shuffling is good, as is scuffing, meandering and dawdling. Hum tunelessly, whistle under your breath, have a good scratch – potter like nobody’s watching.”
In 1994 I proposed an alternative set of internet jargon in The Idler magazine. I suggested ‘pottering’ would be a better term than ‘surfing’.
Another reason for the Rule of 3; power-law distributions in poetry. (from Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths)
"The poet Dean Young once remarked that whenever he’s listening to a poem in numbered sections, his heart sinks if the reader announces the start of section four: if there are more than three parts, all bets are off, and Young needs to hunker down for an earful. It turns out that Young’s dismay is, in fact, perfectly Bayesian. An analysis of poems shows that, unlike movie running times, poems follow something closer to a power-law than a normal distribution: most poems are short, but some are epics. So when it comes to poetry, make sure you’ve got a comfortable seat. Something normally distributed that’s gone on seemingly too long is bound to end shortly; but the longer something in a power-law distribution has gone on, the longer you can expect it to keep going.”.
Wherever there’s a rule there’s someone getting round it. I wonder how often the way of getting round it involves the use of a second boy. (from Fitzrovia, the Other Side of Oxford Street by Ann Basu)
"Hewetson claimed to be ‘Britain’s first motorist’ and to have made Britain’s first car import in 1894 after meeting Benz officials at a German trade show where he had gone to discuss the purchase of coffee. However, modern research has shown he was being ‘economical with the truth’ by a year or so! But he was certainly driving his little Benz ‘Velo’ when the law compelled motorists to drive at 4mph with a man walking in front – he got round this by having a boy ride ahead on a bicycle to detect police presence, whereupon a second boy jumped off and walked ahead with a strip of red ribbon on a pencil to serve as a warning ‘red flag’"
A good definition, from Jenny Offill’s Weather.
"In some Zen monasteries, gossip is defined as talking about anything not directly in one’s gaze."
I'll give you back your day.
russell
(There are 986 of you. 986 was the year that Bluetooth died.)