The Months-Long Kafkaesque Ordeal

Dear friends,

Thank you very much for the kind responses to last week's links newsletter. If you do ever want to talk to me, you can just reply to this email.

Here are thirteen more things this Thursday that I wanted to share with you:

1. From this podcast, The Female Bob Dylan, I learned more about Connie Converse — a highly talented singer-songerwriter who began performing in the 1950s but then cut all ties and disappeared in August 1974 never to be seen again. Her family respected her wishes that they not look for her. "Let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can't," she wrote in her farewell letters to loved ones. In 2009, an album of her home recordings, How Sad, How Lovely, was released. I love it: it reminds me of early 1970s music by Vashti Bunyan and Lal & Mike Waterson.
2. These portraits of people taken on a 400km walk around London are very arresting.
3. We recently started watching The Project, Peter Kosminsky's 2002 BBC drama that follows the fortunes of three young left-wing activists from Labour's 1992 election defeat through to Blair's re-election in 2001. So much to enjoy here, from the 1990s tech nostalgia (they do some dirty tricks journalism at conference involving pagers and fax machines!) to the appearance of not one but two actors who have played iconic roles in Pride & Prejudice adaptations (Crispin Bonham-Carter, Mr Bingley, 1995 and Matthew Macfadyen, Mr Darcy, 2005).
4. Is My Blue Your Blue? A tool for testing your perception of colour against everyone else's. Turns out, my blue is greener than 57 per cent of the sample population. Turquoise is blue, though, and that is a hill I am prepared to die on.
5. I was delighted to see Sam Leith write about the absolute horror show that is trying to clear copyright permissions to include quotations in a book. This is an under-discussed aspect of authorship, I believe. I don't think many readers know about the agony involved in including even six words of an in-copyright poem in a new book. Not only must you track down the rights holder in all relevant territories, but you, not the publisher, then have to pay whatever they demand (and if the estate is represented by a rapacious agency, it could be hundreds of pounds per word). The threshold for permission is not clear and the law is ill-defined. This has a chilling effect on publishers; they will always urge you to pay up for even the tiniest quotation to avoid litigation. I'm still recovering from the months-long Kafkaesque ordeal of trying to discover who I should pay for the Philippines audio rights to quote from Andrew Motion's biography of Philip Larkin. I hope anyone who has listened to A Body Made of Glass there appreciates the effort involved.
6. I love an obscure and highly specific book, and luckily archive.org is full of them. The Heraldry of Fish by Thomas Moule from 1842 scratches this itch perfectly. Sadly, it's not about fish with their own coats of arms, but rather the way the nobility incorporated fish into their symbology.
7. A perfect comic song about why we buy bath gift sets at Christmas for people we barely know.
8. Maps of where different crops grow in the US. My main takeaway: I'm shocked by how few places are doing potatoes compared to soybeans.
9. I found this essay by Thea Lim about self-worth, work and what the algorithms are doing to our ability to make anything free of the relentless capture of internet platforms mildly devastating. As an author/podcaster who is under pressure to beg people to read/listen to my stuff online all day, I feel very raw on this subject, but as Lim points out, even those who work in relatively "offline" fields or actively reject this stuff are still inside the matrix.

"And those ascetics who disavow all socials? They are still caught in the network. Acts of pure leisure—photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry—are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.

10. Software engineer Teresa Ibarra did an interesting analysis of the ~80,000 text messages she exchanged with her then boyfriend in 2015/6. You can see the development of their pet names for each other, how much they mentioned the word "love", and what their major stressors were.
11. A pencil is an instrument of optimism because 95 per cent of it is designed for writing, and only five per cent for erasing.
12. Archery is a thriving pastime in the Indian state of Meghalaya because the Shillong Daily Teer lottery is the only form of legal gambling. Betters guess how many arrows will be shot in the daily competition, much like picking numbers for any other lottery.
13. A handy list of ambiguous words, ranked by how many meanings they have. "Break" tops the list, with 75 definitions.

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. Thank you for reading.

Until next time,

Caroline