Great storytelling, maybe you should write a book or something? (joke)
Replace the train with a bus and you have a fairly similar depiction of the 6 months I spent working at a tech company the summer before last. I'm not ashamed to say that I used to hate every minute of it, and kept it as fuel for the fire that led to my current situation of working from wherever I want to indefinitely,
The number 8 bus, which went from city to it's edge where I worked, was also the only bus that stopped outside the hospital, which meant that everyday I was packed in tight with the cities most sickly and sweaty, coughing and spluttering all over a poorly ventilated bus with fogged up windows and an aggressively poor driver behind the wheel.
Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.
Love the approach of this article - I could feel every bit of it as if I had lived it myself. And it's inspired a great deal of gratitude for the fact that I didn't have to get up and venture out of my house this morning, and that I'm sitting at home, at my desk, coffee machine within reach, smalltalk with coworkers a memory of the past, writing a comment on an article with no boss walking behind my desk asking me for an update on how the EMEA data processing is coming along.
So thank you for that. I'll be riding that buzz all day.
Great article as always Tom, looking forward to the next.
Love this "novelization" approach of a mundane subject... Totally in tune with your "embrace the ordinary" ethos... It's funny how people (and writers themselves) often think that a good novel must talk about extraordinary lives and extraordinary things. The most famous living French author must be Houellebecq and he talks about stuff so mundane it even makes the "regular" mundane fun... And yet he's a great author. Lesson in there, as they say on Twitter. I can think of many other incredible authors who've done just the same... John Fante's Ask the dust for instance. Willy Vlautin, that I discovered thanks to you; Denis Johnson, etc. Even one of the most famous French novelists, Flaubert, often talked about simple persons and their mundane lives; after all, Madame Bovary is the story of an idle petit-bourgeois woman in the suburbs of Nantes - who does nothing all day. Flaubert is also famously known for having wanted to write a novel about "the nothing". What a goal, right ?
It's funny, but a few years back I was working in Paris and my morning commute would consist of walking for a few minutes to my subway station, hop in the packed wagon, travel for two stations than take a connection to another line, travel for 30 more minutes to the outskirts of the city and then walk again for 10 minutes to my job. You'd think this was such a mundane trip I'd forget about it all? Well, those trips are amongst my most vivid memories of this period. Maybe it's the repetition, I don't know. But if I remember it this well, there's no denying my brain deemed it something constituant. What's even more funny is that I was usually too fresh out of bed in the morning and too tired in the evening to do anything "productive" during this commute (motivation Twitter about to crucify me). So everyday I had about 2 hours of void, something like a pression/decompression chamber that marked out the boundaries of the day. And I feel like a majority of people are experiencing the same reality in the big cities. There's a great novel to be written that could speak to all of these people. But it's hard. You can be an average writer and write about fantasy kingdoms, dragons and sorcerers. You can be average and write a raunchy cliché story about a shop assisstant falling in love with a millionaire playboy. But to write well on these everyday subjects takes talent, creativity, a sensibility and an attention to the hidden meanings in details most do not have. When I've read this newsletter I thought you, out of all writers, had what it takes to do it.
Thanks again for these lovely weekly free newsletters, and count me in for the beer-tap squad.
Great writing Thomas. You're talking about something that is often on my mind. Should art reflect the norms of the day? As a visual artist/cartoonist, and more importantly as a 'traditionalist', I have a certain perspective. If I were to draw a museum, for example, would I draw a beautiful 19th century masterpiece, or some soulless modern glass & concrete box? I think it's possible to be an artist of 'the ordinary' without immersing people in yet more of the ugliness that has been foisted upon us all. I know I sound terribly black & white - and I do think I'd like to feature elements of modernity in my work and stories, but only to pillory it.
Thomas, only you could turn a morning commute into a Dickens-ish novel. I could picture the American perceived English dreariness but mixed with an artfulness of what we also perceive to be the ubiquitous 'charming English countryside'. Reminded me of the old Police tune Synchronicity II. Well written, Sir.
Great storytelling, maybe you should write a book or something? (joke)
Replace the train with a bus and you have a fairly similar depiction of the 6 months I spent working at a tech company the summer before last. I'm not ashamed to say that I used to hate every minute of it, and kept it as fuel for the fire that led to my current situation of working from wherever I want to indefinitely,
The number 8 bus, which went from city to it's edge where I worked, was also the only bus that stopped outside the hospital, which meant that everyday I was packed in tight with the cities most sickly and sweaty, coughing and spluttering all over a poorly ventilated bus with fogged up windows and an aggressively poor driver behind the wheel.
Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.
Love the approach of this article - I could feel every bit of it as if I had lived it myself. And it's inspired a great deal of gratitude for the fact that I didn't have to get up and venture out of my house this morning, and that I'm sitting at home, at my desk, coffee machine within reach, smalltalk with coworkers a memory of the past, writing a comment on an article with no boss walking behind my desk asking me for an update on how the EMEA data processing is coming along.
So thank you for that. I'll be riding that buzz all day.
Great article as always Tom, looking forward to the next.
Love this "novelization" approach of a mundane subject... Totally in tune with your "embrace the ordinary" ethos... It's funny how people (and writers themselves) often think that a good novel must talk about extraordinary lives and extraordinary things. The most famous living French author must be Houellebecq and he talks about stuff so mundane it even makes the "regular" mundane fun... And yet he's a great author. Lesson in there, as they say on Twitter. I can think of many other incredible authors who've done just the same... John Fante's Ask the dust for instance. Willy Vlautin, that I discovered thanks to you; Denis Johnson, etc. Even one of the most famous French novelists, Flaubert, often talked about simple persons and their mundane lives; after all, Madame Bovary is the story of an idle petit-bourgeois woman in the suburbs of Nantes - who does nothing all day. Flaubert is also famously known for having wanted to write a novel about "the nothing". What a goal, right ?
It's funny, but a few years back I was working in Paris and my morning commute would consist of walking for a few minutes to my subway station, hop in the packed wagon, travel for two stations than take a connection to another line, travel for 30 more minutes to the outskirts of the city and then walk again for 10 minutes to my job. You'd think this was such a mundane trip I'd forget about it all? Well, those trips are amongst my most vivid memories of this period. Maybe it's the repetition, I don't know. But if I remember it this well, there's no denying my brain deemed it something constituant. What's even more funny is that I was usually too fresh out of bed in the morning and too tired in the evening to do anything "productive" during this commute (motivation Twitter about to crucify me). So everyday I had about 2 hours of void, something like a pression/decompression chamber that marked out the boundaries of the day. And I feel like a majority of people are experiencing the same reality in the big cities. There's a great novel to be written that could speak to all of these people. But it's hard. You can be an average writer and write about fantasy kingdoms, dragons and sorcerers. You can be average and write a raunchy cliché story about a shop assisstant falling in love with a millionaire playboy. But to write well on these everyday subjects takes talent, creativity, a sensibility and an attention to the hidden meanings in details most do not have. When I've read this newsletter I thought you, out of all writers, had what it takes to do it.
Thanks again for these lovely weekly free newsletters, and count me in for the beer-tap squad.
Great writing Thomas. You're talking about something that is often on my mind. Should art reflect the norms of the day? As a visual artist/cartoonist, and more importantly as a 'traditionalist', I have a certain perspective. If I were to draw a museum, for example, would I draw a beautiful 19th century masterpiece, or some soulless modern glass & concrete box? I think it's possible to be an artist of 'the ordinary' without immersing people in yet more of the ugliness that has been foisted upon us all. I know I sound terribly black & white - and I do think I'd like to feature elements of modernity in my work and stories, but only to pillory it.
Thomas, only you could turn a morning commute into a Dickens-ish novel. I could picture the American perceived English dreariness but mixed with an artfulness of what we also perceive to be the ubiquitous 'charming English countryside'. Reminded me of the old Police tune Synchronicity II. Well written, Sir.