Greetings!
This is unusual for me, but I can’t think of what to write for this introduction. It might be because although I’m in a library, where one might expect a bit of silence, or a lot of silence, there’s a bunch of inconsiderate oafs talking and laughing really loudly. Hang on while I move.
Ah, that’s better. Silence! Hello? You still here? Oh good.
Believe it or not, I find these Start the Week posts quite hard to write, because I don’t want them to become a sort of me-fest. I want them to be of value to readers. I am, of course, interpreting the word “value” somewhat loosely.
By the way, sorry that last week’s Start the Week was notable by its absence.
Today I’m looking at:
Pavarotti.
Tactile writing.
Prison writing.
A short nonfiction story: Time shift.
How to stop a conversation.
What I wrote last week.
What I’ll be writing this week.
Further reading.
Somehow, between now and 29th May, I have to read and write reviews about three books. One of them arrived a couple of days ago, and it’s a bit of a tome. Mind you, nothing like Robert Galbraith’s Strike stories. The last couple would make great doorstops. I’m still reading Troubled Blood, but I have to stop every so often because of work or other commitments, and then I have to start again. It’s really well-written.
The main reason I started it was that it was universally panned by people who (a) hadn’t actually read it and (b) don’t know the difference between a man who wears female clothing as a disguise, a transvestite and a transgender person. The great service performed by these people, and their kindred spirits, the ones who want to rewrite classic literature (including Shakespeare) is that they unwittingly suggest to the rest of us what books we should read. That is: the ones they want to ban, burn or rewrite. Long may they continue.
But enough of this persiflage! On with the newsletter.
Tactile writing
That’s what I call writing that is very sensory. I find it quite hard to do myself, and more often than not when I read other people’s efforts they seem rather laboured, not genuine. An exception is, I think, Nathan Slake’s writing. At the moment I’m enjoying reading a few of his interconnected stories. Try this one, for example:
Prison writing
I’ve been trawling through the American prison writing archives. The quality of the writing is variable, as you would expect, and the subject matter not always unequivocally pleasant. Here are a couple of pieces I found interesting:
Nessun Dorma
I love this rendition by the great Pavarotti. And judging from how he is at the end of it, he too was swept up in it.
A short nonfiction story: time-shift
Here’s a weird thing. We gave instructions for newspaper delivery. When we said, please put it through the letterbox, it was left in front of the front door. So we said, OK could you leave it in a recycling bin, and then it was put through the letterbox. So we said, OK, letterbox or recycling bin, both are fine, and then they left it on top of the outside gas meter. Thus whatever instruction we give is not followed until we’ve given a different instruction. It’s almost as if they are existing in a different timescape to the rest of us.
I read a science fiction story once in which an astronaut had come back to earth and experienced everything an hour later than everybody else. So you would ask him how he was and he would answer an hour later.
I think a similar thing is going on with our newspaper delivery.
How to stop a conversation
One of my favourite books, or rather sets of books, is the One Upmanship books by Stephen Potter, who I’ve written about before. In one of the chapters he suggests ways of stopping an expert in mid-flow, to somehow convey the impression that you have even better knowledge of the subject.
One technique he offers is to interject with “But not in the south”. I’ve tried it myself. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, just saying “But surely not in the south?” stops the speaker dead. They are bound to ask why, to which you will make a sweeping statement about the climate or time zones or other irrelevant nonsense, and in the process conveying the impression that the so-called expert has not gone deeply enough into the matter.
Well, a few weeks ago a group of us were having a discussion about The Buddha of Suburbia, when one of the group suddenly asserted, “It all comes back to Freud, of course.”
Of course! Who could doubt it? By the time you’ve parsed that, or wondered whether he meant Sigmund, Clement or Lucian, the moment has gone, along with the conversation it stopped dead in its tracks. I must try that myself some time.
What I wrote last week
I was going to list the articles I have written in the last couple of weeks, but you can see for yourself so I don’t see the point, so I won’t. Hope you don’t mind.
What’s coming up
Your guess is as good as mine. Exciting, isn’t it?
Oh, I will be writing a response to Rebecca’s scandalous letter in which she has accused me, in effect, of not being a lord as I claim to be, and of being a quack despite the fact that I did a First Aid course 25 years ago. Watch this space.
Also, some time today, Jody Sperling will be publishing a podcast of the discussion we had about writing and other things. Check out his TRBM ‘stack.
Further reading
Birgitte Raisine over at The Muse has written an interesting, ie thought-provoking, article arguing that human beings are an auto-immune disease. Birgitte writes a lot about AI, and the only thing I hold against her is that she was part of the team that worked on Google Assistant. You can turn it off, but it’s never really turned off because it’s always listening. It plays havoc with dictating articles into your phone:
Me: … and so we can say with some conviction -
GA: Conviction? Do you need a legal representative?
Me: Go away!
GA: You want to go away? Perhaps I can suggest some nice holiday resorts.
Me: Please shut up!
GA: I don’t understand. Please try saying it differently.
Me: *$&£$*!
Further reading
Here are a few referral links to newsletter directories. If you click through and sign up to these services, you’ll be sent links to other newsletters you might be interested in. And the people who run these services will promote this one too. So it’s a potential win-win-win situation.
I find this one especially useful for discovering newsletters and articles concerning leadership matters, which I’m quite interested in.
I very much like the variety served up. I receive one suggestion a day, and have subscribed to a few of them.
This has links to long reads. I haven’t really explored it yet, but it seems quite interesting. If you sign up using that link apparently I’ll get $4 credit towards an advertisement. I’ve no idea how much an advert costs though.
Finally…
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(Re: Google Assistant) LOL Terry! That sounds like a conversation I shoulda written into it but alas, it was not me. I worked on the Spanish language version. And French. I curated a lot of really good French poetry and other content. I also learned how to write jokes in Spanish. So there. You have nothing, zero, zilch to say to me about GA unless you're talking to it in Spanish or French :)
And if you really want to know the truth about how I stumbled into it... it was the fault of one amazing green tortilla soup. That's the reason I wound up on the GA creative writing team. And ultimately the reason why I write my Substack today. A green tortilla soup. I assume you'll ask me to write up a post about it next.
"... It doesn’t matter what the topic is, just saying “But surely not in the south?” stops the speaker dead." My question is, Terry, if YOU were the speaker and someone jumped in with, "But not in the south", would you accept that as a signal that you had tired your listeners and back off, or do you have a snappy comeback that would pacify the interrupter and allow you to keep going? I am putting it on the other foot here out of genuine interest. I was a workshop/seminar leader for 23 years and had no problem handling hecklers, myself, but i would love to know, hypothetically, what YOUR tactic would be. An interesting topic!