Hello, Yellow Brick Road
Colorful Activism, British Insomnia Remedies, and Where I Get My News
I plunged into my first editing project this week for the first time in forever. Honestly, it was hard to slog through for a while, even though it was just a proofread; I chalk it up to initial rustiness and maybe a touch of PTSD from my old job. But it didn’t take long for me to get back in my editing groove. I think I did okay.
This Week’s Artwork
We got through a peck of apples this past week, making apple crisp, apple butter, and a very simple galette with store-bought pie crust (above). The latter wasn’t pretty, but it was glorious nonetheless.
What’s for Sale
Things are picking up on eBay. Yeah, we have books. We also have vintage-inspired postcards and like-new coasters bearing the visages of criminal rock stars.
The Overcoat and the Nose, Nikolai Gogol (Penguin 60s edition)
The Moomins and the Great Flood, Tove Jansson
E.B. White on Dogs, E.B. White
Baseball: Our Game, John Thorn (Penguin 60s edition)
The ‘Bucket List: What Catches My Attention Lately
Protesting by color. I’ve always liked yellow; I have nothing against it. But I’ve never been one to wear it, largely because I’ve always been a big girl and I don’t want to go out in public dressed like a giant brown-faced rubber duck.
Despite that, I bought my first yellow shirt this week. It’s a No Kings thing, apparently, and I’m happy to participate somehow. Solidarity and all that. Hoping to make it to my town’s No Kings gathering this weekend; I might be able to make it for the last afternoon hour or so after our usual Saturday shenanigans and the suburban zinefest earlier in the day.
At the very least, I will wear yellow Saturday, wherever I end up.
100 years of the BBC Shipping Forecast. I learned about this U.K. institution a few years ago when The New York Times Magazine ran a recommendation of the twice-daily BBC broadcast (thrice daily on weekends) as an insomnia remedy. The writer would listen to hourslong YouTube compilations of the generally short maritime forecasts.
Although each individual transmission has traditionally been short — limited to 380 words at most, and often not more than a minute or two of speech — when heard in hourlong compilations, the Shipping Forecast is poetic and hypnotic, a free-form ode to the seas. The forecast presents a kind of audio tour: The announcer begins in Viking, a sea area near the Orkney archipelago, before directing the listener’s attention around the British Isles, intoning rhythmic phrases like “Wight, Portland, Biscay,” “good, occasionally poor, becoming very poor at times in Plymouth” or “low Southeast Iceland, 1,000, losing its identity by the same time.” What linguistic splendor resides in these descriptions — what possibilities!
The forecast marks its 100th anniversary of existence this year. There are certainly more modern ways for mariners to get their weather information, but Brits still have a soft spot for the bulletin:
The Shipping Forecast has also entered popular culture, inspiring countless songs, novels, films, TV shows and works of art. One of the most memorable is the sonnet The Shipping Forecast by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in his 1979 collection Field Work, which captures how beauty and routine intersect. It was memorably read out on national poetry day in 2016 on Radio 4’s Today Programme by King Charles, then Prince of Wales.
It is, as Aaron Schacter of the radio program The World notes, “an acquired taste.” At the very least, I can vouch for the forecast’s prowess as a cure for a sleepless night.
RIP, Diane Keaton: artist. There’s no shortage of news coverage about the acclaimed actress. Her passing last weekend left me heartbroken; I went through a bit of a Woody Allen phase in college (in the ’80s, well before all the Soon Yi grossness) and watched movies like “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” multiple times, and I was smitten with “Reds” when it came out. I found her far more relatable in her quirkiness, insecurities, and style than any other Hollywood actress.
But even though I knew vaguely about her photography, I only recently learned about her longtime collage hobby, which she picked up from her mother.
Oh, she would have magazines, like McCall’s, and I could cut things out of them. And I started to watch what she did with those pictures. And then I started to do it. I was just really engaged by imagery. By looking at imagery, like looking at all kinds of things, like what I’m looking at right now, which is this wall that I put together that’s just a big mass of pictures that I showed up there, and talk about just a big mess.
I find her even more relatable now. Next up: tracking down her “Heaven” documentary about the afterlife, just in time for the eve of All Souls’ Day.
New Moomins film ahead! It’s good to see the Moomins universe getting more exposure here in the states after decades of fandom in Scandinavia and Japan. Now it looks like Moomintroll, Little My, and the rest of Moominvalley will end up on the big screen in a film adaptation led by “Steven Universe” creator Rebecca Sugar.
It would be the first “Moomins” film produced in the U.S. Annapurna Animation, the studio that took over production of the wonderful “Nimona” when Disney shelved it — reportedly over its LGBTQ+ themes — will team up with Sugar on the production.
My news media diet. I’ve been thinking about how to recalibrate my news consumption, particularly given the horrific changes in ownership and direction of legacy institutions like the Washington Post and CBS News. I’ve trimmed a few subscriptions from my budget and continue to rethink which publications and websites I turn to for news.
Mark Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune managing editor, has a thoughtful report card in the latest issue of his newsletter “Stop the Presses” that’s worth a look.
If you don’t follow Mark — one of my favorite former colleagues — on Substack, you should. He has been outspoken with his no-holds-barred criticism of today’s flaccid news media, and “Stop the Presses” is a must-read if you care about the state of journalism.
Meanwhile, here’s where I go these days for news and commentary:
NPR and WBEZ (including the Chicago Sun-Times)
I’m starting to seriously consider going twice weekly with this weird little missive. There’s a lot I want to write about, and slapping together even this weird little Friday quilt has me enjoying words again. (My love for words dried up into dust in recent years as I polished verbiage into the literary equivalent of wallpaper for a living.)
Can I pull it off? It might depend on how much freelancing editing work I can conjure up. Stay tuned.