Yesterday, I received a very special, very moving and ultimately life-changing e-mail.
October, 2009:
Avatar: Let’s Pretend, But Better
On December 18th, James Cameron’s new film Avatar will hit film theatres worldwide.
You’d think the whole world would be in a lather. And it was, until the first trailer came out.
I Have Special You Like, Yes?
(Originally in Fevered Mutterings v3).
This is a story about marketing.
I’m sat in a cafe outside the Hotel Epidavros near Omonia Square, Athens, on a gently roasting July day. I’m drinking Greek coffee, carefully. If you’re not Greek this is how you drink Greek coffee, because they don’t filter the grounds out.
The cafe proprieter looks like a friendlier Tony Soprano (you can see him up there). He’s biting a thumbnail and watching me with interest, possibly because I’m obviously not Greek and it’s always funny seeing foreigners spluttering and choking after a mouthful of coffee grounds.
Function Beats Form?
It’s one of York’s loveliest listed buildings (Grade II*).
It was first constructed in 1568.
Many of its rooms are high-ceilinged and impressively wrought with stucco (and gusto and brio).
Its busy history includes being the headquarters of 64 Group, Bomber Command.
It is a jewel in the University’s crown, a stunningly handsome piece of architecture, glowing with charisma.
It would be an amazing venue for seminars or lectures. Coffer-filling tourists would wedge solid at the gates if it was converted into something a little more historically reconstructive. It draws the eye and pulls at the heart.
And it’s currently being used for office-space.
Them Be The Days, Me Hearties
Writing is a serious business. We writers have a moral and spiritual obligation to our peers and our readers to strive for the utmost sobriety of tone and to stick to the facts clinically and empirically without unnecessary rhetoric digression or lack of intellectual focus and rigour.
So I’m told.
Anyway, if you’re a student and you’ve just started a course filled with seminars…which you may very well have just done, since it’s Freshers Week here in York…here’s a fun thing you can do that will add spark, zest and zither (is that the word?) to your discussions.
Go Home Again: 4 Ways To Love Where You Are
One of the best points of any journey?
The second day back home.
It’s like this. Being wise, you’ve taken an extra three or four days off work for a post-holiday holiday, just enough time to battle jet-lag and sort through the mail. The first day is all about sleeping – and on the second day, in the same exhausted, nervous fog you get after drinking too much coffee, you lurch into town…
…and rediscover it. By going away, you’ve unfamiliarized yourself with your own home. You can truly see it again. Because familiarity makes the world – disappear. When you know exactly where you are and where you’re going, your thoughts will turn to fresher topics and your eyes shift to cruise-control. Starved of stimulus, your awareness withers and you start to pine for novelty with a leaden, blunted heart.
So here are four ways you can fall in love with your surroundings all over again.
Green Meant Busy: Amber Means Clever
Giving Me What For
What lonely planet?
It’s a chilly Saturday morning, and you’re hard at work enjoying the idea of a quiet, customer/writing-deadline-free day ahead. In no hurry, you get coffee and breakfast (a nicely gloopy banana smoothie) ready and sit down to catch up on all those blog posts that have been piling up on your RSS feed over several busy weeks.
Right around the point where you realise than you’ve been so tardy at reading other people’s blogs that some have actually had children in the meantime that have grown up and themselves had children – about the same time you realize your 30-litre caraffe of coffee is empty, something catches your eye. A familiar name.
