Colour

Sometimes, B&W just doesn’t cut it!

Quote of the Day

“I’m very careful to only predict things which have already happened.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Great advice for anyone covering the tech industry.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Band | I Shall Be Released (The Last Waltz)

Link

Wonderful album.

Long Read of the Day

Jimmy Carter’s First Century.

He was 100 yesterday. James Fallows — a great journalist who had once been Carter’s speechwriter — had a nice essay on his blog looking back on his life, times and fate.

On October 1, 1924, James Earl Carter Jr. was born in the small southwestern Georgia town of Plains. It was a different world. Calvin Coolidge was in office, as the 30th US president. Electricity had not yet come to the rural South, which was still officially segregated and the scene of lynchings. Radio broadcasts were in their infancy. TV did not exist. The most popular US car was the Ford Model T.

Today, October 1, 2024, the 39th US president, Jimmy Carter, turns 100. He is by far the longest-tenured former president, having spent nearly 44 years in that role. In distant second place is Herbert Hoover, who lived for 31 years after he left office. Five others former presidents—John Adams, Hoover, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and the first George Bush—survived into their early 90s. Only Carter has made it this far.

Early last year, when Carter announced that he was entering hospice care, I wrote an appreciation of his time in and out of public office, for The Atlantic. I had worked for Carter as a speechwriter during his 1976 campaign and then as chief speechwriter for his first two years in office. With the magazine’s permission I quoted the story on this site when it first came out. Nineteen months later, on the occasion of Carter’s centennial, I do so again. I have updated two or three date references but otherwise have left this unchanged. I think it stands up…

It does. Carter — like Joe Biden — played a bad hand well. But the Iranian hostage crisis did for him, largely I think because an ambitious rescue effort failed when one of the helicopters crashed. He later used to say that he came within one broken helicopter of re-election!

Books, etc.

John Steinbeck’s tips on writing

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it — bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

From Steinbeck: A Life in Letters.

My commonplace booklet

I love fountain pens and whenever possible write with one. (I also collect them.) One day, some years ago, Victoria Smith, a talented artist friend, looked at my open notebook and became fascinated by the sheet of blotting paper lying in it and asked if should could have it. She later asked for some more of blotter sheets, and I readily but (puzzedly) complied. And then, one day, she sent me a note to say they had featured in an exhibition of her work! This was one of them.

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