A stream of consciousness by Laurence Hughes

I’ve just finished reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It’s short so was a perfect holiday read.

I enjoyed the ride as the mystery of Gatsby’s identity was revealed. Although it transpired he was no angel, I sympathised with his aspirations to make the most of himself. I felt sorry for him as he pushed against the tide, and others either exploited his generosity or (in the case of the “old money” set personified by Tom Buchanan) blocked him from moving in their circles.

The last passage is pretty thought-provoking:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

From what I can gather it alludes to the futility of constantly “reaching” in the face of opposition and at the expense of the good opportunities and life you could already have. It’s a path that can lead you to bad morals and values and end in unhapiness. It has special meaning in the context of the American Dream but I think there’s a general theme. Live in the present; learn to value what you have.

I loved Jason Pargin’s I’m starting to worry about this black box of doom.

It’s one of those stories that captures the zeitgeist amazingly well (a bit like The Social Network did back at the time). In this case it captures the tendency for folks online to blow things out of proportion; to catastrophise and to think the worst.

The black box has a boogie-man physical form in the book, but it soon becomes clear that it’s a clever metaphor for perhaps the real source of anxiety and division in the modern culture.

I loved the charcacters, the dialogue and the dark comedy. I especially enjoyed Ether’s vain attempts to make Abbot realise that everything isn’t really terrible and is arguably – arguably! – the best we’ve ever had it.

I 100% recommend this book.

Had a great local night out there. After meeting Gillian and Aarti for some lovely food at Lobo, Clair joined us at the local Tramway theatre for the show.

I’ve previously read and enjoyed a couple of Haruki Marukami’s books and from what I’ve learned about his interests I generally like the cut of his jib. So it was great to hear that there’d be a Murakami theatre production on our doorstep, and intriguing to see how they’d pull off the weird, dreamy nature of his stories. As it happens our neighbour Matt is the artistic director of Vanishing Point and he’d already mentioned in passing that they’d been collaborating with Japanese organisation KAAT, so I’d been looking out for this one.

The show didn’t disappoint. The performances (joint Japanese and UK performers, each speaking in their own language), shapeshifting set design and lighting were fantastic. In particular we loved the creative ways they presented the ryokan and onsen (hot springs bath) scenes, which took me and Clair back to our 2016 trip to Kyoto. The theme of losing your identity was interesting too.

At the end we all hung out in the concourse where there were some tasty plates on offer from Sushi Riot.

Shout out to Gillian who got us our tickets for show. We loved it.

I purchased Scott’s course back in 2021 and immediately liked it, but hadn’t found the space to complete it until now. Anyway, I’m glad I have as it’s well structured and full of insights and practical tips. I’ll use this post to summarise my main takeaways.

I loved books like Tim Brown’s Flexible Typesetting, Jason Santa Maria’s On Web Typography and Richard’s own Web Typography. And I’ve used lots of their tips in my work. But I’ll be honest: they’re esoteric, complicated, hard to remember, changing rapidly with browser support… and the advice varies from one expert to the other. So I’m very grateful that Richard has provided this reusable stylesheet of great typographic defaults, making it easier to handle all the complexities of good web typography.