This is an old edition of Meanwhile from an inferior, more simian newsletter platform that has unhelpfully severed all the hyperlinks. It’s included here in the archive simply for sake of completion.
A long way down: the nightmare of JG Ballard's towering vision.
“It was seemingly sterile non-places – malls and freeways, airport terminals and windswept plazas – that Ballard found so compelling. Liberated from the baggage of history and expectation, these were places where people could be at their most free. … His favourite building in London was the Hilton hotel at Heathrow airport, a clinical 1992 shed designed by modernist architect Michael Manser, which Ballard described as a cross between a brain surgery hospital and a space station – 'I am always supremely happy sitting in its vast atrium, where one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being. Within this remarkable building one feels no emotions and could never fall in love, or need to.’”
An app that deletes your writing if you pause for too long.
"It took me three tries to complete the early draft of one paragraph while using Flowstate. The first time, I lost my text a few minutes in, not because I hesitated but because I kept excising text after writing it, unaware that the program didn’t recognize 'delete' as a true keystroke. On my next attempt, I was interrupted 76 words in by the knocking of a FedEx carrier, losing my work to an unavoidable distraction. Only on my third attempt did I make it through the paragraph. Left with 200 clumsy words cobbled from the fragments of my earlier, vanished efforts, I still had the feeling that my princess was in another castle."
Illustrator Chloe Cushman reviews the Apple Pencil.
"It didn’t feel like drawing with a pencil. It felt a lot like drawing on an iPad, which is sort of like drawing on a sheet of glass with a piece of plastic while having bright light beamed into your eyes. … You know what is really great for sketching? A pencil and a piece of paper. It’s effortlessly portable, boasts a lag-time of 0%, and if you spring for the whole HB range, the shading possibilities are virtually limitless."
In the latest issue of The Happy Reader.
"For the actor Ethan Hawke, literature has always been both an inspiration and a motif. In our special interview, also taking in music, fame and family, the Brooklyn-based father of four reveals the books that have made him who he is. Meanwhile in Sweden, The Saga of Gösta Berling by the Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf has for over a century held a special place in the national psyche as well as abroad. In this issue, her wicked novel sends us off on an expedition through Swedish life, nature, food and much more."
The custodian of forgotten books.
"In recent years, many publishers have come to the same realisation —that the graveyard of literary history includes many works worth resurrecting. 'It’s a pretty striking change in the last decade or so,' Edwin Frank, the editor of the Classics series from New York Review Books, told me. Frank believes that publishers have the power to change the canon, but only if they’re truly open to lesser-known titles. 'Those books are there to search you out,' he said. “They can exist to change your mind about what a book can be.' Paradoxically, the new interest in neglected books can be seen as a reaction to the decline of book culture. Books used to be a centrepiece of both education and entertainment, but television and the Internet have challenged that role. Frank believes that among book lovers, 'there’s a kind of sitting and looking—a kind of assessing the culture' going on. We’ve become more aware of what could be lost forever."
That is all.