Godin, Friday, Sea, War, Men
Seth Godin Explains Marketing
Cal Flyn | Five Books | 24th June 2019
Interview. Interesting throughout. “Good marketing is the act of changing things for the better by telling true stories to the right people. Good marketers make promises and keep them. Good marketing is responsible for the culture we live in and the lives we live. Sometimes I hang out with babies. These are little kids who can’t walk or talk. Amazingly, every one of them is a great marketer. Every one of them knows how to get their parents to love them, to hear them and to help them grow up” (2,400 words)
A Letter To Robinson Crusoe
Jamaica Kincaid | Book Post | 22nd June 2019
The relationship as seen from Friday’s point of view. “Dear Mr. Crusoe, Please stay home. There’s no need for this ruse of going on a trading journey, in which, more often than not, the goods you are trading are people like me, Friday. There’s no need to leave your nice bed and your nice wife and your nice children, and hop on a ship that is going to be wrecked, and everyone gets lost at sea except not-so-nice you. Stay home and work things out. Your soul, a property you value very much, will be better off for it” (1,400 words)
The Way To The Sea
Caroline Crampton | Granta | 12th June 2019
Perhaps you need to be a sailor to find romance in the mud flats of the Thames Estuary, as Joseph Conrad did after twenty years at sea. “His estuary is a modern industrial space and a ghostly wasteland peopled by the shades of those who sailed here in years past: Vikings, Romans, early Britons. His imagination delighted in populating this bare landscape with possible pasts and futures. With the eyes of an immigrant and a sailor, unencumbered by English preconceptions of landscape, he saw beauty” (2,640 words)
Do Generals Matter?
Cathal Nolan | War On The Rocks | 24th June 2019
Historians and strategists study famous generals and their battles, as though individual genius were the key to victory in war. Not so. “Victory goes more often to those who resist the allure of battle. More wars are won by digging in and enduring, by grinding rather than by genius, by hanging on after initial defeat to recover and fight the slow war that defeats the short-war delusion of aggressors. Defensive strategy, acceptance of attrition, has won far more often than reliance on operational brilliance” (2,600 words)
Feeling Like A Man
Daniel Kaufman | Electric Agora | 20th June 2019
Can one feel like a man or a woman? It is hard to see how, save by identifying with sexist stereotypes. “I am a man, but if you asked me what it feels like to be one, I couldn’t answer; while I am a man, there is no sense in which I feel like one. There are things that only males can feel — I know what it feels like to have an enlarged prostate – but to feel something that only males can feel is not the same as feeling male. One doesn’t feel male or female — just as one is a mammal, but one doesn’t feel like a mammal” (1,100 words)
Video: Visual Sounds Of The Amazon. Andy Thomas renders animal noises from the Amazon rainforest as dazzling shapes and colours (4m 27s)
Audio: Hopeless In New Hope | Aria Code. Renée Fleming talks to Rhiannon Giddens about the haunting folk aria, The Trees On The Mountains, from Susannah, by Carlisle Floyd (30m 58s)
Afterthought:
“Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else”
— Brian Eno