15 Comments

Thomas, excellent piece and spot on. What fiction would you recommend?

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Sep 19, 2020Liked by Thomas J Bevan

My mom taught me how to embrace the ordinary. A few years ago I lived in East Boston. My neighborhood had above ground power lines that I hated. I thought my street had too much concrete, too much trash littering the sidewalks, and too many fading and crumbling facades for it to be lovable. Then my mom came to visit. I expected her to disdain it like I had, but when she saw my street she was actually in awe over how beautiful it was - even and especially the hideous power lines! She gushed over my ugly street and I was shocked. But my mom is incapable of an inauthentic emotional expression so I looked again. All at once, I saw the charm and the loveliness of my very ordinary street. I felt like I gained a superpower that day.

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Sep 15, 2020Liked by Thomas J Bevan

Excellent piece here Thomas. I think almost everyone feels the nausea of the modern entertainment, where everything is caricatured and exacerbated to the maximum. Almost every Netflix original is the re-writing of an existing story with obscene layers of drama to satisfy the over-stimulated and desensitized average consumer. Kinda what a cupcake is to a Saint-Honoré (yeah, I'm French).

I was recently reading an article Umberto Eco wrote about Ian Fleming's style in the James Bond series. The question was roughly "Why have these books been so popular, when many other spy and cold wars pulps were not?". Eco has a very interesting theory that echoes (pun intended) with your article: Fleming lingers and put emphasis not on the unknown, but on the already known; the little things that will resonate with every reader. For instance, the attack on Fort Knox in Goldfinger takes only 5 or 6 pages, whereas the golf game with said Goldfinger at the beggining of the book lingers during 20 pages. Contrary to authors like Jules Verne, he does not describe the Moonraker rocket for more that a page. But he does spend almost 30 pages of the game of bridge between Bond and Hugo Drax, taking its time to describe the table, the veal cutlets served before, the specific champagne they're drinking an so on. He does not describe Dr No's underground facility but he describes at length the menu of the beach restaurant, the Jamaican countryside, the trip to the island in a little fishing boat, etc. Fleming knows none of his readers will identify with robbing Fort Knox, but he knows they will with the little acts they "could" be doing themselves and that make the story more "real" and tangible (almost "physical) . You don't particularly remember a Bond book because of the quality of the story; they are more often that not kitsch and conventional. You remember it because of the atmosphere he's managed to create. And this atmosphere almost always works through descriptions of mundane activities, unimpressive road trips and trivia interspersed with brief moments of bravado and action. In that sense, embracing the ordinary IS the way to create the extraordinaire.

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Sep 13, 2020Liked by Thomas J Bevan

Bravo, Thomas!

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Sep 9, 2020Liked by Thomas J Bevan

Fascinating. I prefer non-fiction books as well as develop them for clients in my business. I know there are historical fiction books. Are there (or could there be) fictional non-fiction titles? Would these books be fables? Capturing more details could help make ideas stick and improve the experience. One of my favorite books we developed was the book, The Friday Morning Club. Unfortunately, it was hardly a blip and its impact was insignificant but still a title I enjoyed developing it the most. I guess art sometimes is most appreciated by the creator. This lesson alone made it worth all the effort.

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Great article. I've grown to detest the catchall term "mindfulness", but I believe paying attention to the little details that make up an ordinary day is a terribly important habit to build. It makes the world a whole lot more beautiful. Days take on an elegant simplicity, coffee tastes better, other people become more interesting, the process of living simply improves.

I think lessons like those in the article are important even for the wildly ambitious, entrepreneur types among us, perhaps even more so, because for the most part the process of building a business consists of completing the same, relatively boring, repetitive tasks day after day, coupled with time spent creating and mapping out a vision (imagination -> reality), which in itself requires focus and being in the present moment, fully engaged.

There's a very human element in your writing, especially given your degree of erudition, which I greatly admire. Looking forward to the next one.

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Another great piece, Tom!

Unfortunately, I find the the escape rather enticing. I'm very future-orientated so I rarely find the mental space to embrace the ordinary. But when I do, the stillness that I feel is beyond words.

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