Greetings!
I have a few videos for you this week, and some links you might find interesting. I’ve started reading a few more books this week: How Words Get Good, A Little \History of Music and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo. It won the Booker Prize in 2019, which for me is an instant turn-off. However, I’ve started reading it and I can hardly bear to put it down. Parts are laugh out loud funny, especially the bits concerning Yazz, a teenaged girl, and her friends. I hope to report on this and other books in due course.
But enough of this persiflage! On with the newsletter.
Terry
An old tv advert for instant mash potato
I think you’ll enjoy this advert, which I believe is from the 70s.
Royal fly past
It was King Chas’s official bath day on Saturday, so 70 Royal Aircraft took part in a fly past. I’m thinking of having something similar myself.
Marylebone Station
Last week I had to go to the Midlands. I went via Marylebone Station, which is very old-fashioned, small and smart. The only thing is, it’s incredibly noisy. Not so much the announcements, but the trains. They’re diesel, and I had forgotten just how noisy (and smelly) they are. I’m an electricity kind of guy myself. We were in a ‘Quite carriage’ on the way, and it was as noisy as hell. So on the return journey we sat in a non-quiet carriage and it was much calmer. Anyway, here’s a short video I took in Marylebone Station. Stand by for unbridled excitement and thrills.
Escalator
The stations on the Elizabeth Line in London now have this video of people travelling on an escalator. It’s completely bonkers because the people on the escalator in the video wave to the people (us) actually on an escalator. I captured a bit of the sequence in this video, but will try and capture more soon.
The shape of a story
In this 17 minute video Kurt Vonnegut discusses and illustrates the shape of a story. It’s definitely worth watching.
Grenfell
The Grenfell disaster in London was awful beyond words. A fire started in the apartment block, and it spread like wildfire because the cladding used wasn’t fireproof. The fire department told the residents to stay put, though whether or not escape would have been possible I can’t say. In addition, some people went there afterwards in order to take selfies with the smouldering ruins of Grenfell in the background.
Of course, many people helped out and made donations, and hopefully there will be some positive changes in the future.
A few months ago now RenoQueen sent me an article she’d written about Grenfell, and I finally got around to reading it a few days ago. It’s powerful stuff. Here it is:
ICYMI
These are the articles I wrote or wrote and published or published in the last week:
Review of Blurb Your Enthusiasm (two reviews: the published one and the one I actually submitted)
Review of the technicians exhibition (two reviews: the published one and the one I submitted). This has been scheduled for 23 June 2023.
All that jazz, an article about how I was introduced to jazz music and why I love it. Not yet published, but will be scheduling it soon. Before that I hope to write about how the article came about and the editing process, for paying subscribers.
Review of Sentence models for creative writing. Submitted to a magazine yesterday. I hope to publish it here in due course.
There was also this guest post on the Inner Life Collaborative site the week before: Book reviews: honesty, objectivity.
Coming soon
Some insider tips, for paying subscribers, I hope.
My reply to Rebecca Holden’s recent letter.
Why I write. This is for the Soaring Twenties Social Club.
There may be a guest article on Thursday.
The review of the technicians exhibition will appear on Friday, as I’ve already mentioned.
I hope to publish another experiment in style next Sunday.
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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Loved the ad! The gorilla ad is another one of my faves.
Thank you for reading my Grenfell post and including it here. It was very kind of you. Better awareness will encourage people to use safer products in their homes. The sad part is it’s preventable if builders care enough to take a different approach.
Keep those videos coming. Always enjoy seeing old ads. That one is before my time.
Also, I'm not much a aeroplane/military person, but those flybys were pretty cool. We used to get some F-something fighter jet go overhead in Melbourne every March/April when the gran prix was on (we live quite close to Albert Park) is the noise is just staggering. It's not done a flyby the last two years, I assume for budget cuts or perhaps some other reason.
Thanks for the Kurt link. Saving that for listening to later.