Bloody hell, I actually wrote something.
Read where to get lunch when you work near Bermondsey Street (which I don’t, any more)
Essential work-lunch reading
Breaking the monotony
I started following the Creative Independent on Instagram recently because their newsletter is a good useful resource when you’re in a creative rut, and their feed is full of really nice, helpful little quotes like this one.
The weird specifity of American signs
Spotted in Orlando, Florida, in May 2019.
Turn everything off
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
How Disconnection Boosts Your Creativity – Austin Kleon
Neck as long as an arm
I’m re-reading Heartburn by Nora Ephron because if any sentence can shove you out of writer’s block and into a room where you have no option to create something just as good as the thing you’ve just read, it’s her casual description of the “other woman” on page 2.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge
What three words describe your writing process?
Er… panic, panic, hope.
And what is a crucial aspect of your creative process?
Mmm… panic. And hope.
And what would you say to anyone in a creative rut?
Um, read. And walk around. And call someone that you can complain about your rut to.
Well, yes.
From This Is The Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett
As he doubtless expected
Contrary to multiple acquaintances’ declarations that I would encounter “some real weirdos” on the train, the first person I met on board my first sleeper car after boarding the train in Penn Station was a man in a sparkly cardigan and leather pants who breezily identified himself as “a prophet,” which is perhaps the world’s second-oldest profession. And forgive me if I find nothing “weird” about being gainfully employed under a supervisor with the kind of multinational name recognition God has.
As he doubtless expected, the prophet and I were in opposite Viewliner roomettes — private compartments Amtrak describes as “designed for one or two passengers,” although a roomette is both narrower and shorter than a standard porta potty.
There Is No Reason To Cross America By Train — But I Did It Anyway – New York Times
High turnover
When they bring lunch back to their desks, they know not to buy green bananas.
Inside The Two Years That Shook Facebook – Wired
No training required
I never went to an art school. I failed the art courses that I did take in school. I just looked at a lot of things. And that’s how I learnt about art, by looking at it.
Jean-Michel Basquiat