Category: Longform
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At the Olympic Park Again
Cycled down to the Olympic Park today. Took a few photos.
I’m writing a story at the moment – a novel, part of which will form the dissertation for my MA – which is set during the London Olympics. Nine years ago. Nine years! Anyway, the ArcelorMittal Orbit will probably play a role.
OffMail
I just got an invite/reminder email about a service called OnMail. I must have signed up to be notified when it became available. Could have been months ago: they apologise for it taking so long.
They should apologise for being bad for the email infrastructure that binds the world together.
I’m exaggerating, but only a bit. Email remains the most important thing on the internet aside from the web. Whenever you sign up for a service, or order something online, you expect to get an email confirmation.1
Without reliable email, a lot of things would fall apart.
A while back I wrote about Hey, the new email service from Basecamp. There, I was bothered by it not being based on the standard, open protocols that underlie email, at least to the extent that you can’t get your Hey email using a third-party, standard client.
OnMail seems both visually and functionally similar to Hey, and it’s got exactly the same problem.
This trend is bad for email, bad for people who use email. It should be possible to give us the kind of powerful, automated controls over our inboxes that these services offer, without stopping us from using the apps we prefer. It is possible to do that, as companies like SaneBox show.
I do not like this trend.
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Oddly, I had this expectation confounded just today, when Birkbeck’s submissions system didn’t send me any confirmations about the pieces that I submitted for assessment. ↩︎
This Is England, 2006 - ★★★★
A gritty, realist tale of British skinheads in Thatcher times. We get the good skins — into ska, soul, and having Black friends. And then the bad ones — into ska, soul, racism, and joining the National Front.
But it’s mainly about a young boy whose dad died in the Falklands.
It’s good. Kate from Line of Duty (Vicky McLure) is in it, too. Disappointing that the Clash song of the same name is not used, but since that was released in 1985 and the film is set in 1983, it wouldn’t have made sense.
Heartburn by Nora Ephron (Books 2021, 5)
When I wrote about watching When Harry Met Sally… last year, I said that ‘Nora Ephron may be my favourite screenwriter after Aaron Sorkin, where dialogue is concerned.’ The dialogue in this novel isn’t so sparkling, but the narration is.
It’s a fictionalisation of the breakdown of her marriage to the journalist Carl Bernstein, and it’s amazing how funny she makes it, considering how painful the experience clearly was.
Seems to be her only novel, which is kind of a shame.
The strangest thing is that the woman Bernstein had an affair with is the daughter of prime minister Jim Callaghan.
Far more interestingly, though, is that, according to Wikipedia, Ephron was one of the few people who knew the identity of Deep Throat.
None of which has anything to do with the book, which you should just read.
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, 2020 - ★★★★
A great story about a competition we all grew up with, and then stopped caring about because it was endlessly uncool, and then started taking an interest in again because it was so daft and fun.
Maybe that's just me.
Anyway, this film (made with the cooperation of the European Broadcasting Union, which is the body behind Eurovision) pokes fun at the competition in all the right ways, and does it with love and a big heart.
North Star
I wrote recently about not enjoying or finishing Claire North’s 84K. In her latest blog post she lists her (improbably large) back catalogue, with notes. On 84k:
My most miserable novel ever.…The word “dystopian” has been applied to it a lot, and I’d say that’s fair.
However, she also tells us about her forthcoming Notes from The Burning Age, which sounds amazing:
To make up for just how monumentally dystopian 84K is, Notes from the Burning Age is a look at the distant future of the earth… in which we’ve got it right. We sorted our shit out, we built an environmentalist utopia of clean energy, social justice, respect for all and so on. And we did all of it partly because we really learned to love and value this beautiful, glorious planet, as well as each other, and partly because the spirits of the earth awoke, provoked by our blundering destruction, and nearly stomped us into tiny tiny bits.If you think that’s the pitch, you will be potentially surprised to know that’s just the first 50 pages, and the book is actually a cat-and-mouse espionage thriller.
She really has written an astonishing number of books, under three different names. I’ll be sure to try some of the others.
Bookshops are Back
Sometimes you don’t even realise what you’ve been missing. Or how much you’ve been missing it. I went to our local bookshop, the lovely Pages of Hackney, to pick up a book that I had ordered and that had to come from the US.1
They’ve stayed in business through this mad year, and I’ve ordered several books from them in that time. If a book’s not in stock they can usually get it in in a couple of days. I just had to walk up the road and collect them at the door.
No going in, though. Apart from collecting an order, all I could do was look in the window.
So it was fantastic to be able to go into the shop and browse. I’d almost forgotten what that’s like.
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The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick. I don’t know why it had to cross the ocean. ↩︎
Good Vibrations, 2012 - ★★★★
Great fun story of Terri Hooley, who ran the eponymous record shop and label in Belfast.
Great music, and an appearance by John Peel; or at least an actor doing his voice very badly.
Palm Springs, 2020 - ★★★★½
Brilliant time loop film (oh, spoilers, fuck off), let down only slightly by the ending. I’d have rolled credits when it goes black.
Not that the ending they did have is bad; just that it’s the weakest part of what is a totally great film.