Anonymous asked: what do you think of Fifty Shades of Grey?
I think Katherine Angel’s UNMASTERED is a much more enlightening book about female desire.
Blogelstein!
I'm Jean Hannah Edelstein, a writer, editor and author. This used to be my personal blog, but now I just use it for amusing and interesting internet ephemera. Head to www.jeanhannahedelstein.com for the full-strength version of what I'm thinking and writing.
I'm Jean Hannah Edelstein, a writer, editor and author. This used to be my personal blog, but now I just use it for amusing and interesting internet ephemera. Head to www.jeanhannahedelstein.com for the full-strength version of what I'm thinking and writing.
The first place
The first place I lived was Great Dover Street, an LSE hall of residence in Borough, which was pronounced ‘burra’, which I only learned when I got to the tube stop and heard it announced. Which I couldn’t quite believe. I hadn’t lived in a dorm since my first year of my undergraduate studies, but at the time I thought that it was fun: when I lived there I did things with my friends like play Scrabble and attempt to catch a squirrel to keep as a pet. So I thought Great Dover Street would probably be fun.
UNMASTERED, by my genius friend Katherine Angel, is the best book I’ve ever read about women and sex. So if you’re a woman, or you know a woman, you really must read it.
In case of emergencies (with thanks to @IMargolius) Granta: Medicine. Where do you keep yours?
I love Granta’s tumblr!
On commitment
In Sainsbury’s, as ever, about six weeks ago: the cashier rang up my purchases and told me the total.
Do you have a Nectar Card? he said, as ever.
As ever, I shrugged. As if I would have a Nectar Card, I thought, as I do, as ever. I am only here in London temporarily.
No, I said.
And then I thought: that’s completely ridiculous, Jeano, you’ve lived here for nine years.
But now that I’ve committed to moving to Berlin next month, I feel again like it was a perfectly sensible position to take.
List of animal fates in Granta’s Best of Young Brazilian Novelists
Deceased dogs: 3
Dogs on the prowl around deceased people Dogs about to be reluctantly put to sleep by the son of suicidal owner: 1
Deceased hamsters: 1
Deceased parakeets: 1
Deceased cats: 1
Cats stuffed into ovens: 1
Cats dropped from seventeen-story windows (survived): 1
Cocaine-snorting rats: 1
Endangered hogs: 1
Endangered foxes: 1
(Source: granta.com)
WHAT a depressing marketing email.
I do remember being a student and going for a drink at Peel Pub, one of the classic horrible student-y bars west of campus where we went during first year to have, ugh, ‘shooters’ that cost a dollar. Anyway, there we were, drinking these disgusting things, probably wearing black trousers and shiny tank tops, when these OLD people came in, in town for their ten-year reunion. And when I say OLD, I mean that they were THIRTY TWO and we looked at them over the rims of our plastic cups filled with sugary booze and we felt disdainful.
That’s what I remember. (Also I learned many things.)
Anonymous asked: Thanks for answering my question and I'm glad that you enjoy giving career advice. What do you need to do to get a career as a copywriter?
You need to write a lot. Write, write, write! And in between writing, tell people that you would like to write for them. Because you’ve been doing so much writing, you’ll be able to show them examples of how good you are at writing.
Anonymous asked: What's it like being a copywriter? What's your average day like?
It’s all WRITE.
hahahahahaha.
I am always impressed when people find the facility to ask me anonymous questions when I thought I shut it down, but anyway, I also always like to give people career advice. Maybe because I didn’t really know how or who to ask for career advice when I was starting out and that led me to make some bad decisions.
Anyway! I’m the only copywriter at my agency which makes my job somewhat unusual, in that I work across pretty much all of the agency’s accounts rather than focusing on one or two brands.
So on an average day I might have a meeting to discuss a pitch for new business, spend time collaborating with other creatives to develop the ideas for projects that are already underway, write copy for a new iPhone app, come up with lines for a banner ad, sense-check the copy in the final designs for a new website, and gently admonish a colleague for mis-using an apostrophe.
I also enjoy a delicious free lunch in the canteen.
Copywriting is a great career to pursue if you are a creative writer who enjoys the challenge of being very precise with words, of using language to inspire and engage and surprise people, of making beautiful words do good, functional work, of having millions of people read what you write. It’s also great if you enjoy not worrying about how you’re going to pay your rent, so you can devote your evenings to personal writing projects that you’re really excited about.
The wedding was just outside Glasgow, and on Sunday I strolled round it with my sister and brother-in-law, who popped over from Edinburgh. Glasgow has such a special place in my heart, in the heart of my family, because it’s where our parents, a somewhat-unlikely couple, met.
My American dad was doing a post-doc at Glasgow University; my Scottish mother was working as an educational psychologist in some of the city’s most challenging communities. They lived in bedsits in the same building off Byres Road, my dad invited my mum over to a party where he played ‘Goodnight Irene’ on the guitar, it was love!
When my siblings and I were growing up, and in Scotland for summer vacations, a visit to Glasgow was always an essential part of the itinerary: we’d walk round their old haunts on what I eventually dubbed ‘The Bill and Fiona Romance Tour’. And now that I just about the age that they were when they got together, I think for the first time I kind of understand why.
I gave up trying to take photos at weddings a couple of years ago, when I realised that everyone was taking photos, that my photos were never very good, and that trying to take photos tended to interfere with actually participating, that it was more important to be present than to have photos to share on Facebook to prove that I was present.
So at the one I went to this weekend I took about three, and they were all pretty bad. But the wedding was gorgeous and funny and a total delight, and so was the Victoria sponge (above).
On a really big problem
The other night I was clearing some old notes out of my iPhone. Mostly I use the Notes app for titles of books and films that people tell me I must read or watch that I’ve neither read nor watched; WiFi passwords for hotel rooms; shopping lists for dinner parties (I stared at a list that said ‘goat’ for at least ten seconds until I remembered that I was referring to chevre). Nice reminders of where I’ve been and what I’ve done. But also I found some little snippets, sentences and phrases that I’d jotted down in anticipation of working them in to bigger pieces. I suppose that was what I was thinking when I wrote this, the greatest note of all:
I remember those overbleached sheets: they were in a cheap hotel above a Chinese restaurant on the south coast of England, and they were so stiff and redolent of a swimming pool that I couldn’t sleep at all. I kept waking with a start, feeling like I was suffocating in the abrasive, pungent cotton.
But the ‘problem which is hideously wrong’? I can’t recall what I was talking about. And I think that’s extraordinarily nice: that something that evidence shows felt crushing and awful three months ago is now not important enough to remember. Like a lot of really big problems.
A lesson.
