w/e 15 July 2018
Four days starting work on a new client project, one morning doing a play reading, and two days sitting in the shade of the beach hut reading. Could be worse.
The play reading was with some friends (? colleagues? fellow actors?), reading the first draft of an adaptation of a classic play that we spent a week exploring last year. It was fun, each reading a part, all discovering the piece as we went through it, and the writers hearing it all aloud for the first time.
This week I re-read issues 1-11 of the comic Optic Nerve. I don’t think I’d read any of them since they came out and I still enjoyed them. The stories are pretty similar, with very open endings, and their protagonists usually lovelorn misanthropes in 1990s northern California. I imagine I have a higher-than-usual tolerance for such things.
Aside from Adrian Tomine’s stories and his art, which became more precise and simple over time, I really enjoyed the pre-internet-ness of it all, with most of the issues having come out in the 1990s. It wasn’t only that the stories were internet-free (no agonising over social media, for example), but the entire thing felt slow, objects from a different world. Each issue contains letters from readers (generally hilariously terrible in one way or another) all of which were actual letters; there’s only a PO box address for correspondence. That fact and the leisurely, and erratic, pace at which the comics were released was quite refreshing. Slow artefacts from a world in which we didn’t hope for instant feedback on work we shared with the world.
I didn’t read much Ask MeFi this week, but…
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How can I learn to write concisely with more clarity?
Full of great advice, inspired by the questioner’s previous question in which they asked why, when asking questions over email, respondents often answer a different question. -
What the hell is this thing?
“Can you help me figure out what this mystery object is that’s in all our conference rooms?” As yet unanswered.
That’s all. Good luck.