#82: Going Live! Live!
Happy Friday!
In about 5 hours, we'll be driving down the M4 on our way to Wales for the recording this weekend of Series 2 of Foiled. It's already been a long journey, from the re-commissioning in December through the plotting, drafting, writing, editing and writers rooms, to the re-drafting, re-writing, re-editing of the past few weeks and basically I'm knackered.
So this is going to be nothing more than a thank you list of all the many people who have put so much energy into the rebirthing of Foiled.
In no particular order, then, huge thanks to Tom Price, Dave Cribb, Ed Easton, Tom Ward, Adam Hess, Dan Kiss, Clint Edwards, Jackson Davies and all the Granvilles.
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out enormously with beds to sleep in over the last 6 months: Tim, Ben and Annie, PW, Dan Erlacher, everyone at EWC, everyone at MVR, everyone at Arcot Street, SnaresBrooksy'sHere, Compton Road, Elsie Road, and the entirety of my brilliantly supportive family.
Pre-emptive thanks to all the fabulous actors, including David Oakes, Steph Siadatan, Tom Price again, Garnon Davies, Miles Jupp, Ralf Little and Dan Starkey. And of course eternal thanks to Beth Granville, writer, actress and networker extraordinaire, without whom this never would have happened and, even if it had, would have been total shite.
And to you - THANK YOU!
And now, the return of >> INPUT!
Six Books We Could and Should All Write by Anthony Madrid in The Paris Review. Fabulous.
"Every single thing I’m about to describe, you wouldn’t need any talent to produce it. You wouldn’t need any talent, and you wouldn’t need any understanding. All you’d have to do is stick with it."Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag by Varlam Shalamov also in The Paris Review. A fascinating supplement to any reading of Victor Frankl (see below).
"7. I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the sectarians (almost all of them), and most priests."Are we completely fucked because of climate change? by Jason Kottke. An edifying snippet from a review of a set of books.
"[A]ll fuckedness is relative. Climate catastrophe is not a binary win or lose, solution or no-solution, fucked or not-fucked situation. Just how fucked we/they will be ... most of all it depends on what we do right now, in our lifetimes."astonaut.io Hypnotic slices of lives that somehow raise the spirit.
"Today, you are an Astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100 miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this is what you see. You are people watching. These are fleeting moments. These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."
OUTPUT >>
As you may have noticed, this mailing list is the engine room of my blogging. Here's some you might have missed:
...COMING UP...
FOILED RECORDING. We're sold out on Saturday, but you can still book FREE tickets for Sunday 24 June. Birthdays wise.
Hopefully I'll make it to Orwell's graveside on Monday 25th - the anniversary of his birthday - for the always provoking #1984Symposium.
A blood test.
Now On: The Victor Frankl 5-a-day Book Club!
Membership Criteria: Read 5 pages a day of Man's Search for Meaning to complete the whole darn text in only 28 days. I'll be tootling through the text at just 5 pages a week, so you've got plenty of time to catch up.
Day 8, p45-51
Today's pages are some of the most touching in the whole book. Frankl begins by describing, almost lightheartedly, the 'cultural hibernation' that took place in the concentration camps. Two exceptions to the absence of interest in art and intellect were 'almost continuous' discussions of politics and religion:
'The depth and vigour of religious belief often surprised and moved a new arrival.'
This deepening of spiritual life is Frankl's explanation of why 'some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature' and Frankl himself experienced moments of transcendence that aided his survival.
Marching to work on the railways, beaten by callous guards and the icy winds, Frankl contemplated on the image of his wife. For the first time in his life, he saw the truth 'that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire'.
'The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.'
Separated on their capture by the Nazis, Frankl had no idea whether his wife was alive or dead. But that didn't matter to this moment of bliss.
'Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. ... Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance. ... [N]othing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved.'
In closing, Frankl accords his realisation with the Song of Solomon: 'Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.'
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Share your thoughts by replying to this email, or adding to the comments on my blog. We will continue next week...
Much love,
- dc
CREDITS
David Charles wrote this. When not writing this, David co-writes BBC Radio sitcom Foiled, does copywriting for The Bike Project and is almost always available for work. davidcharles.info // @dcisbusy
"In 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five spacecraft to orbit the Moon to take high-resolution photos to aid in finding a good landing spot for the Apollo missions. NASA released some photos to the public and they were extremely grainy and low resolution because they didn’t want the Soviet Union to know the capabilities of US spy satellites. Here’s a comparison to what the public saw at the time versus how the photos actually looked."
Via Kottke.org