Stay tuned for fashion goals
Hello
It’s 2022. Every year now sounds like a futurist from the 80s trying to pick a year that’s not 2000 or 2050.
I read a lot about archetypal plots when I did the PowerPoint book. Then mostly ignored them. This was brilliant though, from The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger:
“Here is the Hero’s Journey in one pithy sentence: Increasingly isolated protagonist stomps around prodding evil with pointy bits, eventually fatally prods baddie, gains glory and honor. Here is the Heroine’s Journey in one pithy sentence: Increasingly networked protagonist strides around with good friends, prodding them and others on to victory, together.”
Electricity metaphors don’t fit my uninformed idea of Ted Hughes. From The Skills by Mishal Husain:
“In a letter the poet Ted Hughes wrote to his son Nicholas, he said that the moments in which life takes us by surprise and where we are thrown into the front line are also where we come alive and have to call up our innermost resources. ‘The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated,’ he wrote. ‘And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. And that’s how we measure out our real respect for people – by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate – and enjoy.”
Remember the Ever Given? The boat with the strangely abstract name that got itself stuck in the Suez Canal? One upside of the whole kerfuffle was an enormous outbreak of writing about infrastructure. Like this piece by John Lanchester, which contains a remarkable paragraph:
“As shipping has grown more efficient, its labour force has shrunk. It has also become more fungible, less unionised and more international. Modern patterns of ownership and legislation have enabled this process. The Ever Given is typical: it was built by the Japanese company Imabari and is owned by a subsidiary of the same firm, Shoei Kisen Kaisha; both entities are wholly owned by the Higaki family. The shipping business is still dominated to a remarkable extent by family companies. But the cliché ‘tight-knit’ barely begins to describe the Higakis. The family members have business cards which carry two numbers: the first represents the cardholder’s father’s place in the family succession (the company founder was number 1), and the second indicates which number son the cardholder is. Here’s an account of the firm’s leadership from Nikkei Asia: ‘Managing director Mutsuya Higaki, the second son of Shoichi’s fourth son, has the code number 4-2, while 5-1 is the code for managing director Kiyoshi Higaki, the first son of the founder’s fifth son ... An Imabari general affairs manager said the code numbers are useful in “helping us to avoid confusion”.’ If you say so. The company president, Yukito Higaki, is 3-1.”
In Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman describes his relationship with Amos Tversky like this:
“We were sufficiently similar to understand each other easily, and sufficiently different to surprise each other.”
Isn’t that lovely? Describes all the best relationships in my life. Which reminds me: Happy Birthday Anne.
Bogdana pointed at “100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying”. It sits at the intersection of nudge and resolutions but is better and more humane than those things would suggest. WARNING: I like number 8 and might start doing it to some of you.
OUTRO: one of the highlights of my year, genuinely, was playing records at a do. Mostly for colleagues in their 20s. I was a bit intimidated, what could I play that wouldn’t annoy them? But it went OK and afterwards one of them said they enjoyed the ‘jazzy coffeeshop vibe”. I got a warm little buzz from that. If you need some coffeeshop vibing I did a mix the other day.
Bonus: fashion goals.
I really hope you have a tremendous 2022.
(There are 776 of you. One more subscriber gets us to the tremendously lucky number of 777. Wouldn’t that be a good omen for the year? “Banknotes with a serial number containing 777 tend to be valued by collectors and numismatists. The US Mint and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing sells uncirculated 777 $1 bills for this reason”.)