Shoe-like items
When did everything get so ... terrible?
My partner and I have recently been trying to find a backpack for our son to take to childcare. The one that we bought in a rush a year ago when he started turned out not to be a backpack so much as a backpack-shaped item. It looked like a backpack, but its zips broke immediately, the straps are unravelling, and the fabric is a kind of woven plastic that is already disintegrating.
So we need to replace it.
This seems to be happening to me more and more. I think I’m buying a pair of shoes, but I’m actually buying shoe simulacra, complete with soles and laces but no practical application. Or I want to eat a sandwich but instead end up with a sandwich simulation, food-like objects placed between something that only resembles bread.
This used to be what I thought of as an online problem, the effect of trusting sites like Shein or Temu. But it’s somehow seeped into everyday life. It doesn’t seem to matter how much I pay; I have no guarantee that anything I buy will last longer than a week, do what it says on the box, give me anything more than another item to contribute to landfill.
It’s worse than that, though. I’m finding the same thing with news outlets. Where I used to think I was getting news, I’m now getting … something else. A news-shaped item. A person-shaped politician. A humane-shaped law.
It’s funny writing this when as publishers our job is ostensibly to sell things. But the library exists. You can read any of our books for free, if you want. And something about that denotes value to me. It makes me more comfortable about these little book-shaped objects we create at Pink Shorts Press.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t help with the damn backpack.
Margot
We’ve got two Wordshops coming up: one to help creative small businesses talk about brand and another for anyone wanting to turn their research into a book.
Not all pink
What are we reading?
Emily is finding strange comfort in Talking to My Daughter by Yanis Varoufakis.
Margot has a new favourite book, Leonora Carrington’s masterpiece The Hearing Trumpet. It’s short, hilarious and utterly WILD.
Some fun shorts
What are we reading online?
The story of how Constellations came to be – and far exceeded everyone’s expectations – at the ABC.
Also strangely comforting, a newsletter about the logic of extraction and how care and community might just be the antidote.
And a piece for all the keyboard mashers, on how typos became the new status symbol.
Behind the press
What are we doing for Pink Shorts?
Filling the back of the car with books ahead of the road trip for our first market stall at Clunes Booktown.
Talking to start-ups and engineers about brand voice and technical writing.
Starting to typeset, proofread and plan promotion for our September titles, before we’ve even finished promoting March.
“A news-shaped item. A person-shaped politician. A humane-shaped law.” - sigh.. yes.
Hope you have a wonderful time at the Clunes book fair. (Say hello to Creswick - next door town -on your way through. Fond memories of living there for 10 yrs. First ever own house.)
I bought some look like fresh apples yesterday. They had skin and everything. There was some look like apple flesh inside. I suppose I could have taken them back and asked for real apples but they came from a look like apple display. I hate to think that some poor kid was told off for not eating his look like apple at recess.