amity reads

114: Integrity, humor, and patience were the three words for Atticus Finch. There was also a phrase for him: pick at random any citizen in Maycomb County and its environs, ask him what he thought of Atticus Finch, and the answer would most likely be, “I’ve never had a better friend.” ... He was never a rich man, but he was the richest man his children ever knew.

Bear with me for a throwback while I sum up the main points of my undergraduate career in advertising. During my time at UT, Sullivan’s book was “recommended reading” in every single one of my major classes and required in one. Needless to say, it’s marked up and earmarked quite a bit. (Salesmen Don’t Have to Wear Plaid) 5: On it’s heels came the concept of the unique selling proposition, a term coined by writer Rosser Reeves in the 1950s, and one that still has some merit. It was a simple, if ham-handed notion: “Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.” The benefit had to be one that the competition either could not or did not offer, hence the unique part.

“The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you, and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying, and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you, and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting, and you won’t be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.” -Bill Bernbach 8: “The more intellectual you grow, the more you lose the great intuitive skills that really touch and move people.” – BB As John Ward of England’s B&B Dorland noted, “Advertising is a craft executed by people who aspire to be artists, but is assessed by those who aspire to be scientists. I cannot imagine any human relationship more perfectly designed to produce total mayhem.”

12: “However much we would like advertising to be a science – because life would be simpler that way – the fact is that it is not. It is a subtle, every-changing art, defying formularization, flowering on freshness and withering on imitation; what was effective one day, for that very reason, will not be effective the next, because it has lost the maximum impact of originality.” - BB 13: As Hall of Fame copywriter Ed McCabe once said, “I have no use for rules. They only rule out the brilliant exception.” (A Sharp Pencil Works Best) 16: … good advertising is about the worst thing that can happen to a bad product. 17: You’re writing something most people try to avoid. When people aren’t indifferent to advertising, they’re angry at it. 18: “The many competitive brands [of beer] are virtually identical in terms of taste, color and alcohol delivery, and after two or three pints even an expert couldn’t tell them apart. SO the consumer is literally drinking the advertising, and the advertising is the brand.” 19: A guy named James Webb Young, a copywriter from the 1940’s, laid out a five-step process of idea generation that holds water today. 1. You gather as much information on the problem as you can. You read, you underline stuff, you ask questions, and you visit the factory. 2. You sit down and actively attack the problem. 3. You drop the whole things and go do something else while your subconscious mind works on the problem. 4. “Eureka!” 5. You figure out how to implement your idea. [This process of creativity is] what author Joseph Heller (a former copywriter) called “a controlled daydream, a directed reverie.” 20: “Creativity is a manic construction of absurd, unlikely, irreverent thoughts and feelings that somehow, when put together, change the way we see things” – Hegarty on Advertising 22: “I’ve got a great gimmick. Let’s tell the truth.” – BB 23: “If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.” (A Clean Sheet of Paper) 46: McCabe’s work was often so compellingly put, it was as if you could tack the words “…you shmuck” at the end of his headlines; for example, this one for Volvo: “A car you can swear by, not at.” (You schmuck.) 57: Come up with an idea that makes you say, “We can’t do that, can we?” That’s a sign it’s a strong idea. The other question to ask is: “Will somebody talk about this idea if we do it?” Running a small-space ad with a headline “Fur Coat Storage Services” isn’t naughty. Well, it is when you know the rich ladies who called the number got a recorded message from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals about the cruelty of the fur business and how they should “donate” their fur for proper burial. “Inside every fat ad there’s a thinner and better one trying to get out.” - Tony Cox (Write When You Get Work) 114: You can’t be creative and be tense. 115: Get off the stinkin’ computer.  David Fowler agrees: “Try it…It’s just different. The connection between your hand and the page via a tiny strand of ink imparts something that’s somehow closer to your heart.” 117: At a SXSW Interactive seminar I chaired, most folks in the audience agreed failure is the new black. “Fail forward, fail harder, fail gloriously.” 119: Remember, you aren’t saving lives... It’s just half a piece of paper in a magazine, and somebody else is buying the other side. 120: “Be orderly in your normal life so you can be violent and original in your work.” I don’t know much about novelist Gustave Flaubert, except he said the cool line you just read, and it seems to fit in right about here. 121: In a business where we all try to avoid clichés, a lot of people buy into this cliché-as-lifestyle. I can assure you it is an illusion. As is all that crap about how writers need to “work from pain.” Oh, puh-leese, it’s a coupon ad for Jell-O.

“A writer should be joyous, an optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer, and cynicism is rejection of life.” –George Gribbin

Author’s Note In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters.

Chapter One April 27th, 1992 Greetings from Fairbanks! This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne. Arrived here 2 days ago. It was very difficult to catch rides in the Yukon Territory. But I finally got here. Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild. Alex.

 - Postcard received by Wayne Westerberg in Carthage, South Dakota

Chapter Two Jack London is King Alexander Supertramp May 1992  - Graffito carved into a piece of wood discovered at the site of Chris McCandless’ death

Chapter Six The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. … Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. (From a letter Chris McCandless wrote to Ronald Franz)

Chapter Sixteen Ironically, the wilderness surrounding the bus — the patch of overgrown country where Mccandleuss was determined “to become lost in the wild” — scarcely qualifies as wilderness by Alaska standards. Less than thirty miles to the east is a major thoroughfare, the George Parks Highway. Just sixteen miles to the north, beyond an escarpment of the Outer Range, hundred of tourists rumble daily into Denali Park over a road patrolled by the National Park Service. And unbeknownst to the Aesthetic Voyager; scattered within a six mile radius of the bus are four cabins (although none happened to be occupied during the summer of 1992).

Chapter Seventeen Andy Horowitz, one of McCandless’s friends on the Woodson High cross-country team, had mused that Chris “was born into the wrong century. He was looking for more adventure and freedom than today’s society gives people.” In coming to Alaska, McCandless yearned to wander uncharted country, to find a blank spot on the map. In 1992, however, there were no more blank spots on the map — not in Alaska, not anywhere. But Chris, with his idiosyncratic logic, came up with an elegant solution to the dilemma: He simply got rid of the map. In his own mind, if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita.

According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless’s beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all.

Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large, but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul. He soon discovered, however, what Muir and Thoreau already knew: An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one’s attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds.

Living in the interior bush for an extended period, subsisting on nothing except what you hunt and gather — most people have no idea how hard that actually is. And McCandless almost pulled it off.

 Sydney suburbs bookshop crawl | November 2015

Gertrude and Alice | Bondi

Ampersand Cafe & Bookstore | Paddington

Ariel | Paddington

Berkelouw | Paddington

Gould’s Book Arcade | Newtown

Better Read Than Dead | Newtown

Part One 8: You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

10: They collected souls as they collected jewels.

68: Adam spent his next five years doing the things the army uses to keep its men from going insane — endless polishing of metal and leather, parade and drill and escort, ceremony of bugle and flag, a ballet of business for men who aren’t doing anything.

68: Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatsoever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy — that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.

71: … and Adam knew from his years in the army that a man afraid is a dangerous animal.

Part Two 157: At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against? … Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. … And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take and direction it wishes, undirected. And this I might fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. 

257: The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing.

Part Three 362: “I feel that a man is a very important thing — maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed …” (Lee)

367: “Maybe everyone is too rich. I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.” (Lee)

428: ‘There’s more beauty in the truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.’

Part Four 493: We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.