Meanwhile #214

Whatever you're saying is true for about as long as you're saying it

First up, this from

Austin Kleon

:

What I love most about newsletters is the letter part — the epistle, the missive, the bulletin, the dispatch! What’s going on — in the studio, in my life, in my mind — that’s worth sending out? Worth opening? Worth reading? Not only do I think newsletters should be letters, I’m starting to think that all writing gets better — and maybe even easier — when we simply try to sit down and write a letter.

And Nora Ephron writing about blogging in 2006, back when everyone was at it:

One of the most delicious things about the profoundly parasitical world of blogs is that you don't have to have anything much to say. Or you just have to have a little tiny thing to say. You just might want to say hello. I'm here. And by the way. On the other hand. Nevertheless. Did you see this? Whatever. A blog is sort of like an exhale. What you hope is that whatever you're saying is true for about as long as you're saying it. Even if it's not much.

Both sprung to mind when I stumbled upon

Receipt from the Bookshop

, a wonderful day-in-the-life¹ newsletter from bookshop owner

Katie Clapham

. As anyone who has ever worked in retail knows, there’s an awful lot of sitting around and thumb-twiddling to be done between customers. Katie has found the perfect way to fill those gaps:

Every week I send out my free post … live from my award-winning independent bookshop by the sea. I open the draft when I open the shop, detail the day’s customers and transactions, and then send it out to readers before I go home.

Katie could’ve blurted these moments onto X or Threads or elsewhere, but collating them into a newsletter gives them more meaning. What you end up with is a tapestry of the splendidly mundane, just people passing through the day, all adding up to something more; a vivid portrait of the bookshop. It’s not a long long read, but it does call for that extra bit of deliberate attention from the reader; a nice chunk of time dedicated to one voice. Give me this kind of blogging² over social media’s torrent of microaggression any day. Exhaling letters rather than coughing up grawlixes.

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Okay, other links now.

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“If collages and grids had a baby” - Zoe Norvell at INABC on multi-panel cover designs, aka bento books.

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Does screen time help or hinder creativity? It turns out ‘unfocus’ is a prerequisite for creativity … but in a world where distracted device-browsing has become default, how do we distinguish between helpful and unhelpful mind-idling?

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Olafur Eliasson artwork set to turn London’s Piccadilly Circus into a blur – the Icelandic-Danish artist’s latest work, Lifeworld, will take over famous advertising screens in October. 

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Google serving Ai-generated images of mushrooms could have ‘devastating consequences’. There’s an enormous gap in the market right now for a reliable search engine, because let’s face it, Google have simply given up. In no time at all, Ai has spread across the internet and beyond like rot, contaminating everything, reducing it all to homogenous, unreliable slop.³ Any company that makes a concerted effort to distance themselves from it is in such a strong position.

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Creativity is made, not generated. Procreate get it.⁴

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The less said about the slop smeared across the new Tears for Fears album, the better. But the universe has a way of balancing these things and has promptly delivered the new Wilco album, designed by an actual real life THREE YEAR-OLD with UNICORN STICKERS and it is of course PURE and BEAUTIFUL so stick that up your big chair.

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Alistair Hall calls for a long-overdue British design retrospective and asks, what would you include in the exhibition?

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One of my suggestions: these wonderful 30s/40s London Underground posters by Fougasse (aka Cyril Kenneth Bird), currently available as prints from the London Transport Museum shop.

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I’ve updated my Bookshop … shop with a selection of titles I have/love/use. These are affiliate links, but all sales support independent bookshops rather than You Know Who.

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That is all.

1. Or is it life-in-the-day? Both appear to be in use, but I’ve always preferred the former.

2. YES THIS IS BLOGGING

3. Reliable slop, that’s what we want! Slop you can set your watch by! Good clean slop!

4. Substack … do not. The very platform via which this wondrous missive is missived has introduced a “generate image” option in the editor. The rot is everywhere. I implore them to at least auto-populate the caption/alt-text with some kind of indelible disclaimer.