Dear friends,
The urge to newsletter has hit me again. Perhaps it is the arrival of September, which always makes me itchy with the desire to start new projects, or maybe I am just inventing reasons not to be working on my new book proposal. Either way, here I am, in your inbox once more, with a baker's dozen of recommendations. I'm also doing my last (for now) in person book event for A Body Made of Glass at the Liverpool Literary Festival on Saturday 5th October — do come if you are able. Now, links:
- Why, thirty years in, are we still holding that there is necessarily a qualitative difference between "writing" and "writing on the internet"? There is good and bad in both categories. This thoughtful essay should carry a dedication to everyone who has ever been told by a commissioning editor that their idea "sounds like more of a blog than an article..."
- A Spark of Darkness, a two-part Hitchcock-inspired radio drama about a naval electrician turned detective investigating his apprentice's supposedly accidental death, is magnificently good. It is written by David K. Barnes and directed/sound designed by Andy Goddard, both of whom previously worked on the best fiction podcast to come out of the 2010s, Wooden Overcoats.
- The Brazilian city of Linhares has recognised the legal rights of the waves at the mouth of the Doce River that enters the South Atlantic Ocean at the coast there. A bill stating that "waves have the right to continue breaking perfectly at the mouth of the Doce River" has been made into law — a response to a 2015 environmental disaster when a dam collapsed and ten million gallons of sludge from an iron mine entered the stream. The "legal personhood for natural phenomena" movement is gaining traction around the world and I find it philosophically fascinating. I'm looking forward to Robert Macfarlane's upcoming book, Is A River Alive?* for this reason.
- When Virginia and Leonard Woolf's flat at 52 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury was bombed in October 1940, they and their portable possessions had already moved out to another property. But the murals and decorative panels created by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were still on the walls, as you can see in these photographs.
- Spell your name with aerial photographs of the Earth: this generator allows you to type in some letters and it will then search NASA's "Landsat" image database for features that match the shapes. On the website, you can then hover over each separate image and it will tell you what and where it is. Here's my first name, made up of images of Antarctica, Kentucky, Utah, Oregon, Indonesia, New York, Bolivia and Tibet:
- The G.K. Chesterton poem "Ballade of Capital" from 1911:
I own the scheme is very neat,
I do not think it very nice
That we should own the blooming street
With all the people poor as mice.
I have old views: that loaded dice
Are “wrong”, and even Tit-for-tat
“Heathen”, that virtue is not vice —
And lots of little things like that.
- I very much enjoyed Ed Pratt's series of daily short videos about travelling from the source of the Thames to the sea without leaving the river. Here's his first instalment, in which he wades along in the ankle deep marsh that passes for a stream near Kemble in the Cotswolds. Readers of my first book, The Way to the Sea, will remember that I did a bit of this wading myself at the start of the first chapter. Don't worry, though, he gets in a kayak once he reaches Cricklade.
- This 2012 BBC documentary Sex and Sensibility: The Allure of Art Nouveau joined a lot of dots in my personal (sparse) knowledge of art history. I now know, for instance, what connects the work of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and Gustav Klimt. And there's also some lovely footage of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art, which was largely destroyed by two fires in 2014 and 2018 and still remains a membrane-wrapped ruin stuck in insurance claim limbo.
- From that documentary, I learned of the existence of Klimt's Beethovenfries, a room-sized artwork from 1902. It was painted to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the composer's death. The work was apparently inspired by Wagner’s transcription of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for piano and voice — the documentary presenter listens to this as he looks at it — and tells the story of "man’s quest for happiness". I can't wait to go to Vienna and see it for myself. Until then, I will thinking about this panel featuring a giant ape aka the god Typhoeus, one of the deadliest creatures in all of Greek mythology:
- One for the people who, like me, have spent many patient hours explaining why bad web design choices are bad — shouldiuseacarousel.com. This part especially resonated: "Carousels are effective at being able to tell people in Marketing/Senior Management that their latest idea is on the Home Page."
- The quest for ever-greater productivity is, by definition, never-ending. Only when we realise this can we escape the trap of the "productivity journey", as this writer discovers. "How many of these things we produce is not productivity. How you spend your life is."
- Do you have a lot of time to fill with keyboard taps? If so, I recommend this browser-based Pacman game.
- I do look at the Goodreads reviews of my books; maybe I shouldn't, but I do. They demand to be read. I find them absolutely mind-boggling and the entire platform inexplicable. I am not the only one.
This is the first of what might well become a series of link-sharing newsletters; I have been missing curating this kind of digital ephemera as I used to do when No Complaints first began back in 2014. Any (polite, kind) feedback or submissions for future inclusion are welcome via reply to this email.
I intend to send out a few different types of post on this newsletter as it becomes more active: personal essays, reading updates and book reviews, reflections on my own writing, and links round-ups like this one. If you would like to receive some but not all of these, you can adjust those settings in your account menu. I don't publish these posts on my website; this is a newsletter-only publication, so you will need to be subscribed to receive it.
I'm writing this in my free time, but if you would like to support my work, you have a few options. Forward this newsletter to a friend and encourage them to sign up. Subscribe to my podcast, Shedunnit, in your app of choice, or if you are already a listener, become a member of the Shedunnit Book Club. Buy my books — The Way to the Sea and A Body Made of Glass — or borrow them from your local library. Purchase a subscription for yourself or a friend to The Browser. And if you buy a book from a link to Blackwells in this newsletter (marked with a *) I will receive a small commission (the price stays the same for you). Thank you for reading.
Until next time,
Caroline
