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Discovering Persephone
Okay, what I’m about to write about I originally learned of from this month’s Vanity Fair, so I’m obviously a little late too hear about them. Print media (as much as I love it!) cannot claim first-name-dropping status anymore. I wouldn’t even bother to bring it up if it weren’t that I am so delighted by everything about Persephone Books.
Persephone is a tiny, woman-founded & run publisher in London, specializing in bringing books that have fallen out of print back into (lovely) print. My eye was caught by not just Virginia Woolf, but also Leonard Woolf. They cover all their hardcovers in signature dusty blue, and use period-specific fabrics (most of them gloriously floral) as their endpapers. You get a free end-paper matching bookmark with each book.
If I had only heard about them in December I would have probably signed everyone up for six month book subscriptions for their gifts, even my poor little brothers. If you go their website you can read their remarkably specific and promising gift guide.
photo #1 from Persephone #2 from Urban Junkies tour guide #3 from RaggedRoses
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Ultra-Corporate + Good Magazine
Perhaps because my family of nine spent most evening dinners pitching business ideas to my investment-banking-dad who would act like the skeptical shareholder almost invariably, I am always up for a good old fashioned entrepreneurial contest. Add entrepreneurial to humanitarian concerns, and you’ve got something exciting to talk about. Pepsi + Good Magazine (who has distinguished already itself by screwing with your mind and offering to give away your subscription fee to your favorite charity, and has already paired with ultra-corporate Starbucks in previous offerings) are offering 20 million in grants for a good ideas to help others. And it’s user voted (which reminds me of another user-voted contest from my hometown, the astonishingly successful fledgling Art Prize).
I’m excited about this for a couple reasons. 1. I know a lot of people who have very good ideas and care about the world. 2. I’m all for mega-corporation dumping their money into popular grant-contests instead of superbowl ads. 3. This will be a place to send all those commenters over at the NY Time’s who have their own ideas of how to fix the world. 4. Possibly I would be concerned about the self-promotion-via-social-media aspect, if it weren’t for the fact that I found out about Haiti and continue to find out about Haiti via social media. The truth is I just don’t head to news websites as frequently as I head to Facebook or Twitter.
Here’s what the initial sign-up interface looks like, seductively easy, no?
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This American Life Logo
This American Life, a really wonderful radio show that I listen to more regularly than I call home (I’m not recommending that), has a new logo. They very nicely shared their rejected logos so we can all see their branding journey. I think the one framed with quote marks is very nice as well, though it reminds me of another logo, I just can’t remember what. If you go to the TAL website you can see the ways they are slowly integrating their new vertical style.
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Dreams in Conversation
When dreams come up in conversation I almost immediately morph into a terrible listener (and as we all know, poor listeners make poor friends). I am just not in it (“it” = friendship) for the dream retelling. They are almost always long, meaningless, irrelevant stories. Will any of us gain meaningful knowledge about each other by hearing each other’s dreams?
So I was pleasantly surprised when I saw my friend Kellyn Walker translate her dreams into something lovely and interesting. Over at her blog she has written up short bits about dreams she had lately, and then illustrated them in her own signature astro-floral style. The one pictured here involved a very polite peacock, but don’t miss the one about the underwater goats.
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Practical Wishes
Looking through a wonderful preschool teacher’s blog, Preschool Daze, and I was struck by how similar her students’ hopes and dreams for 2010 felt to mine. I remember wishing for very comprehensive wishes like this: if I wanted to be that beautiful girl five years older than me, then I wanted to have her hair color, and her glasses, her braces; the whole deal.
My own wish, right after this…
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NOW BOARDING
I sat around airports for a collective twelve hours over the holidays and I spent a far amount that time rustling around in my purse trying to find my boarding pass and thinking a number of things that mostly amounted to: “Why don’t these look better?” (But also: “Why aren’t these more festive?” and “Why don’t these have more fun facts about where I’m going?”) And here we have a lovely example of how nice they could look thanks Tyler Thompson. Even though JetBlue, master of re-imagining airline marketing, hasn’t made it over the hurdle of a better ticket model, they do have this rather clever beach towel for sale.
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Great Ambitions
I like to learn about living life by closely inspecting how other people are living theirs. It feels like saavy short cutting. I examine people’s grocery carts while waiting in line. I quiz friends about what they had for dinner, and if I can’t imagine how it was done, then I quiz them about that too. I think picking up on what other people are doing might be secretly why I’m on twitter. So when the time comes for New Years Resolutions, I’m ready to hear everyone else’s. So far, the best idea I’ve come up with this year is using the “Somday” column on teuxdeux to remind myself of those things I’d really like to actually do someday.
If you think my resolutions are a little boring (and if you don’t think that, we’re probably painfully similar and should never go out to lunch) then I suggest spending five minutes with Monina Velarde‘s New Year’s Resolution Generator. My favorite was “Give more compliments.”
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Goodreads
What do you do with your goodreads account? I like it best used as a clickable and searchable record of what I’ve read. I hate forgetting if I’ve read a book. What could possibly be the use of reading a book when I can’t remember, two years later, if I’ve read it? Yikes! There’s also an incentive to write something true about what you thought of the book, for your friends to read. (I don’t have very many friends on goodreads. Friend me here if you are an active participant.) It is a good feeling when you finish a book and you loved every minute of it, and you want to tell everyone, but the only person in the room is Joe, and you already told him three times, and you can rush on to goodreads and write up a sensible review and tell yourself that everyone is reading it as soon as you’ve sent it off. This, I think to myself, is the life of a book reviewer. Ah yes
