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Category Archives: Asides
A resolution worth making — and keeping
Here’s a resolution for 2012 that’s worth making: write some real letters — you know, the ones written with pens on paper. Suki Bishop thinks they should be love letters, and picks out three stirring examples.
A great love letter isn’t perfect. It’s messy. It’s often bumbling and feverish and grammatically inept. But it’s everything the emoticon is not—specific, personal, unique.
Since, like the rest of us, you’re probably out of practice in this kind of thing, here are three tips from great writers—and lovers—of the past to help you write a love letter that transcends cliché.
1. Get personal. What does it mean to see your beloved? It means paying attention to the things that are unique to him or her. Make your beloved feel seen by describing specific habits, moments, objects, and/or physical attributes that only a lover would see, as Katherine Mansfield described to John Middleton Murry in 1917:
“When you came to tea this afternoon you took a brioche broke it in half & padded the inside doughy bit with two fingers. You always do that with a bun or a roll or a piece of bread—It is your way—your head a little on one side the while… [E]very inch of you is so precious to me. Your soft shoulders—your creamy warm skin, your ears, cold like shells are cold—your long legs and your feet that I love to clasp with my feet—[..] just below that bone that sticks out at the back of your neck you have a little mole [. . .] I could not bear that it should be touched even by a cold wind if I were the Lord.”
2. Command your beloved. While we might hate people telling us what to do, a command from a lover can convey a sense of confidence and urgency, as Virginia Woolf’s command to Vita Sackville-West in 1927:
“Look here Vita—throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads—They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.”
3. Be playful…like Mozart, when he wrote to Constanze Mozart in 1789. Mozart wasn’t afraid to appear foolish. His sense of abandon conveys a love that is stronger than ego or pride.
“Dearest little wife, if only I had a letter from you! If I were to tell you all the things I do with your dear portrait, I think you would often laugh. For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say, ‘Good day, Stanzerl!—Good-day, little rascal, […], little turned-up nose, little bagatelle, Schluck and Druck,’ and when I put it away again, I let it slip in very slowly [… ] then just at the last, quickly, ‘Good night, little mouse, sleep well.’”
These great writers teach us not only about expressing love but also about patience, longing, and restraint.
Hotel room: December morning
Christmas tree
Tolkien: the unlikely revolutionary
I’ve never seen the point of Hobbits et al, so hadn’t really thought about J.R. Tolkien until (a) I was asked to buy a copy of the first volume of The Lord of the Rings for someone as a Christmas present and (b) I came on this piece by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. What captivated me were its opening paragraphs.
At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. “Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict on his teacher. Tolkien, he reported, would write long lists of words on the blackboard, obscuring them with his body as he droned on, then would absent-mindedly erase them without turning around. “I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.”
It is still one of the finest jests of the modern muses that this fogged-in English don was going home nights to work on perhaps the most popular adventure story ever written, thereby inventing one of the most successful commercial formulas that publishing possesses, and establishing the foundation of the modern fantasy industry.
Assertion
George Orwell likened advertising to “the rattling of a stick in a swill bucket”. Perhaps that was because the advertising is his day was so crass — like this ad which probably dates from late Victorian times. But here’s a terrible thought: maybe this looked cool and clever to those at whom it was aimed. And maybe our own oh-so-cool-and-clever advertising will look just as pathetic and dated to our great grandchildren.
Shopaholicism
I hate shopping (one reason why I am ambivalent about Christmas), and am constantly amazed by people who apparently love doing it. Here are some examples: the people queueing for our local park-and-ride bus heading into the post-Xmas ‘sales’. Weird.
Santa’s Landing Lights
It’s Christmas Eve and I’ve finally come to rest. What shopping isn’t done now will have to remain undone. In a few minutes I will light a fire and settle down to read through a pile of New Yorkers that have been piling up through December. But the radio’s on and the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College down the road has just begun and, without warning, it plunges me into reflective mood.
I remember, for example, the first Christmas Carol and I spent in Cambridge — in 1968. We’d come as graduate students and had heard of the King’s Service, of course, so we resolved to attend. But something like two hundred other souls had had the same idea before us, so after an hour queuing in the freezing East Anglian wind we thought better of it and repaired to the warmth of the Copper Kettle cafe on the other side of King’s Parade. To the end of her life, Carol remained fascinated by the service, sometimes managing to get a ticket through a friend who was a Fellow of King’s but more often settling down to listen to the radio broadcast at this time every Christmas Eve. And, of course, this is when I always think of her, and wish she had lived to see our first grandson, who is blissfully oblivious to all this adult angst.
Another memory: of a Christmas Eve in the 1950s. We’re living in Donegal, in a small but cosy house that was then in the country and now is on the outskirts of the town. The house is decorated, fairly sparsely. The fairy lights on the tree were being temperamental — as they always were. My mother is in the kitchen, baking. Then suddenly a crash and an anguished cry. We rush into the kitchen and there is the christmas cake in bits on the tiled floor. And Ma in tears.
My father worked in the Post Office, and this was the busiest time of his year. On Christmas Eve after the sorting office closed he would take some of his colleagues to the pub and then come home for tea — served in the dining room rather than in the kitchen, with a proper tablecloth and stuff. This year, he’s later than usual, and when he arrives he’s holding a large hinged case made of polished wood. Upon opening it we find that it’s a gramophone. Well, almost: it’s actually a turntable. It needs an amplifier and speakers, but Da didn’t know that when he bought it. But we discover by experimentation that we can connect it up to our Bush radio — which enables us to hear what’s on the vinyl discs — provided nobody breathes too loudly.
I still remember the first vinyl discs we owned: recordings of This Old House, How Much Is That Doggy in the Window and Bing Crosby singing A White Christmas. (Ours was not an intellectual household.) But the frustrations engendered by that first turntable had an unexpected outcome: they kindled an interest in electronics which eventually saw me becoming an electrical engineer. And to building my own stereo rig when I was a student.
I’ve often thought that the reason I dislike Christmas go back to childhood. I associate the season with feelings of disappointment, of hopes and dreams unfulfilled, of our mundane domestic reality not conforming to some media-borne ideal (the most dramatic realisation of which was in the fantastic opening scenes of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander). It may also have had something to do with the fact that, even as children, an alternative version existed. My maternal grandparents were prosperous, lived in an expansive style with a large family and generally seemed unconcerned by the things that worried my parents (who had to live on my father’s modest salary). Some years we spent Christmas with them, which meant travelling to Mayo, where they lived.
Because of Da’s work commitments, that meant that we always travelled late on Christmas Eve. So one of my abiding memories of this day is of snuggling down under a rug in the back of the car with my siblings (and the family dog), speeding through a dark, silent, deserted countryside and looking out for farmhouses as we went. Why? Because in the window of every house there would be a single lighted candle. My mother (a devout Catholic) explained the custom in terms of ‘the star of Bethlehem’: our fellow-countrymen were signifying the impending birth of Christ. But to us the candles seemed to serve a far more useful purpose: as landing lights for Santa.
Photograph by Irish Typepad
If Car Companies Were Run Like Tech Companies
Lovely spoof by David Pogue.
LAS VEGAS, Jan. 9 — Here at the annual Consumer Electronic Automotive Show, the largest trade show in the world, the carheads have again made their annual pilgrimage to see what new breakthrough vehicles will be finding their way into American garages in the new year.
Axxle, the Cupertino, Calif., automaker, is again notable by its absence. But even though its perfectionist founder, Steve Hubs, recently died, the company’s impact was everywhere at the show.
When Axxle announced its sleek, simple-to-drive iCar last year, automotive blogs like Gizmoto and Engearjet savaged it for its lack of a windshield, doors, roof and body. “Only the fanboys would want to drive a flat glass surfboard,” went a typical remark.
Once the iCar went on sale, however, it rapidly became the fastest-selling new vehicle in history. And at this year’s show, imitators are everywhere. Many are based on Andrive, a design offered by the mobile billboard giant Gogle (whose unofficial motto is, “Don’t be civil”). Andrive is regarded as a less polished but free chassis that closely resembles the iCar.
A workflow for remote collaboration
I use Dropbox a lot, but so far haven’t really exploited its potential for remote collaboration. So I was intrigued to find this illustration on Quentin’s blog outlining a workflow designed by Rick Lecoat at Shark Attack Design. Once you’ve seen it, it looks obvious. But then that’s the defining characteristic of most great ideas.