Arthur Meek

I met Justin Welby, the now or soon-to-be former Archbishop of Canterbury, at Methodist Playgroup a few weeks ago.

Not in person. Much more intimately. I found one of his books and read it.

He introduced me to the true nature and character of Mammon. And the anti-dote.

Hear all about it.

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Arthur Meek lends his voice to Henry Lewis. An ANZAC soldier who fought at Gallipoli during World War I. Henry Joined from Wellington. He fought for Otago Regiment. He told his story to New Zealand novelist Maurice Shadbolt in the 1980s, more than 60 years after the events he recalls.

Recorded live at The Gallipoli Association Annual Conference 2024, at the RAF Club, Piccadilly on 2 Nov. Released today, a week later, for Remembrance Sunday, UK.

Introduction by Warren Smith - Communications @ The Gallipoli Association

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“Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. no one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time....”

[Winston] Churchill by Himself, 574

This manifesto is a love letter to democracy.

It’s positively charged with optimism about the ability and the will of our collective conscience to most effectively serve the common good and to enable human flourishing. This manifesto is pro-democracy. It is anti-authoritarian, anti-communist, anti-corporatocratic, and anti-fascist. It is anti-oligarchic, anti-oligopolist, anti-kleptocratic and anti-aristocratic. It is anti-anarchic, anti-feudal, anti-plutocratic and anti-imperial. It doesn’t know what ergatocracy is and can’t be bothered to google. It is anti-ecclesial, anti-imperial, anti-kleptocratic and geniocracy-curious. It’s anti-plutocratic and surprisingly anti-technocratic. It’s anti-military dictatorship. It’s anti-tribal, anti-kakistocratic, anti-logocratic and anti-meritocracy (despite being geniocracy-curious). It may come off a bit anti-social, but it’s quite the opposite. It’s anti-bureaucratic. It believes technology has a simple but significant role in facilitating all this. It has a healthy respect for monarchy as the default political orientation of humankind, but it prefers the symbolic pomp of the British Royal Family to an active, decision-making crown.

It’s anti-mob. Mob rule is the bugbear that justifies all sorts of [pejorative]-ocratic appropriation of the means of government. It believes the architecture of democracy (to date) is designed to simultaneously glorify and thwart the will of the people.

There is a better way.

It was practised in microcosm, in Athens, the birthplace of democracy, during democracy’s formative years. I doubt it was the first born form. 

“It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election. -- Aristotle, Politics, Book IV”

I call it Lottocracy.

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Reading has become increasingly difficult for me since becoming a father. Gone are the days (for now) when I could literarily lose my self in a book, sailing the Black Sea as an argonaut with Jason; investing the profits of my smash-hit plays in ill-fated brick and mortar broadway ventures alongside Neil Simon in the 1960s. Different times, parallel characters. Now, the act of opening a book is a provocation that requires immediate satisfaction from one of my children, like the slap of a glove across the cheeks. They crawl over the book, seize it, or create a catastrophic diversion.

It's not to say I can never read, but I have to take my chances. Early mornings after chores but before they're up. At night after they're in bed (a recipe for falling asleep and dropping book on face). There's little method in my limited reading these days. But there is a regular practice of sorts that keeps me chugging along. I'm reading thematically. Different books, different genres. The same time and place from different perspectives. And it all starts with three books on China.

A history, a biography and a novel.

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I often find myself having an incredible conversation in the middle of a banging party, and wishing there were some way to capture the juiciness of the interaction then and there.

The main problem is that it hasn't been possible to make it work technically, soundwise. Until now.

When music is playing in the background and dozens of other people are also chatting away, it’s traditionally been impossible to capture the sound in a ‘clean’ fashion.

When I was a cast member on the final season of Go Girls, we’d shoot party scenes pretending to dance to music which would be added in post-production.

I picked up a pair of wireless lavalier microphones - which are the things with a blue and green light on Louis and my lapels. They cost £40! A few years ago they would have been 4 figures and required a sound operator to monitor. Now I plug a small transmitter into my iPhone, clip the mics onto the speakers’ lapels, and I’m ready to roll.

These things are miraculous. They capture the sound of our voices, and only our voices - despite the hubbub around us.

I’m so excited by this conversation. Primarily because of my interlocutor, Louis Pisano, whose opinions grace the pages of Harpers’ Bazaar and Nylon France among others - but of course I think you should read him on his recently launched Substack - hairybradshaw.substack.com

Louis is such a ‘get’ that you’ll see I get a bit discombobulated, and even claim to be an Australian at one point… I test high for agreeability at the best of times. This was the end of the night and I was giddy with the whole everything.

Anyway, this is a lot of writing, when the point of this post is the video.

I hope you dig watching it as much as I dug making it.

Now I know how to do it, there will be more of this kind of thing to come.

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This is an adapted transcript of what I say in the vid.

A live broadcast apropos of nothing to show you why I've changed the name of my Substack - back really to Profit and Delight. That was the name that I gave my first ever blog, which I started about 2014 and I really like it it comes from Horace's definition of what art should be it should be - or poetry, I suppose he said but it should be for the Profit and Delight of the reader.

Profit of course being more than just the money, it's about whatever that internal sensation is - and I just really liked that. I think it inspires the way that I create stuff it inspires the way that I hope that you receive it, and it also dovetails and lines up nicely with my company name that's I’ve used in New Zealand and now in the UK.

I really loved Cursive Discursive. I handwrite things but what I'm doing with Substack and what I'm doing in all my creative pursuits, is it's not that brand. It's not one thing that I keep doing. I'm really excited about differing technologies, about using all the growing - and historical - opportunities to find different ways of expressing the world around us. Not just sticking to one thing. I’m embracing new stuff, old stuff and always searching

searching,

searching for

Profit and Delight

Oh my gosh I can share my screen oh that's really cool I am going to have to test this in my other guise to show some other types of readers something else but yeah I'm using this product. I love this product, I love the mission of Substack - who I work for - to build a new economic engine for culture and I'm finding ways that I can do that for everyone's mutual Profit and Delight.

So there you go.

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1. Duplicate your tab.

2. Press record in one tab

3. Click to the the other tab to teleprompt yourself.

* Don’t edit your post while doing this or you’ll screw up the recording.

* Feel free to digress, or summarise rather than reading it out loud word for word.

* If you feel that your post is best experienced by reading - you could use the video to simply introduce what you’ve written to your audience and entice them to read it. Think of it as a video trailer for your written post.

Please have patience with yourself, and (Substack 🙏)

This is new for everyone. I recommend not being too fussy about your presentation or composition - and forget editing! ‘One and done’ is my invitation to you when it comes to video recording stuff.

What? Why?

Video production and post production bells and whistles that are vital when you’re selling $20 tickets to an Imax screening, or trying to get picked up and shared by an algorithm don’t seem to apply on Substack.

Who knows what the ideal video form will be here? At the moment, lo-fi is getting the most engagement. As long as people can hear you relatively clearly, you should be fine - and most in-built and low-cost external microphones are better than the studio-grade stuff the Beatles used.

Right now, I’m having terrible trouble downloading the video I made during the demo. The AI clips aren’t generating. I might have to close tabs, restart the computer, have a cup of tea and come back to it.

The UX is not as consistent and easy as it will become. The benefit is that it makes you a pioneer - you’ll have a first mover advantage with audiences, and your comments will help us make it better, fast. And you’ll get better and faster at doing it, so you’ll have a running start as it evolves to become even simpler, easier and more consistent.

So sorry, not sorry. We might be a little ahead of our skis here, but it’s all part of our mission to build a new economic engine for culture - and give you free creation and publication tools that people still pay hundreds for every year (e.g. Adobe suite for editing, Loom for making videos, Hootsuite for multichannel publication and many many more).

Out of interest, here’s the video I recorded in Substack during the taping of this ‘how-to’ guide. Thought you might like to see it for eyeline, audio, that kind of thing.

Things I think are cool:

* Baked in Subtitles

* My (work) Substack pub logo at the end.

Note that to make this, I had to create a manual CLIP of the whole video. This was done using the clipping tool > create and just dragging the editing cursor from the first word to the last, then downloading.

Phew! That was technical. If you’d like to see me play with the possibilities of Substack in creative ways, feel free to (free)

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Trigger warning.

You’re going to get a handwritten letter in a few weeks. It’ll be addressed to you. It’ll be from me!

Though I might write as a character. I might address you in terms of familiarity and describe events that did not occur. Be in good cheer. Have your pinch of salt ready.

I don’t know if it’ll be fiction exactly - but it’ll be creative.

But I mean, duh, you knew that right?

Yeah probably. But the truth is I’m triggered because I sent one of these kinds of letters, albeit unsolicited, to one of my oldest and dearest friends and it led to 6 months of terrible strain on our friendship. He took the things written as true… I explain a bit more detail in the video 👆, and indeed the whole situation makes me look like an idiot. But what’s worse is that it stopped me from pursuing what I think could be a really interesting and different experience for both of us.

I’m going to write you a letter every month. Maybe it’ll be a serial story. I have something in mind. There’s a bunch of technical stuff involved in doing and sending that I’ll have to work out too… so let’s just see what happens.

No promises except you’ll get a letter every month, and it’ll be interesting for both of us. And hopefully I won’t have to go back to

So, let’s not fall out. Let’s fall in to a really lovely pattern.

If you haven’t given me your address yet, you can do so by clicking the button here:

Resistance is futile. if you don’t, I’ll chase you via direct email.

Arthur.

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I’ve wanted to have this conversation with Alison Acheson, in this way, for more than a year.

We’ve overcome timezones, timetables and wildfires to make it happen, and I’m so glad we did.

It’s the kind of conversation that I’m privileged to experience regularly in private, with generative entrepreneurs like writers, performers and founders who I admire and am pleased to call acquaintances.

I’ve been nervous about attempting to do something like this with a public outcome cos I feared that it might change the tone.

Well it did, in some ways, I think - for the shorter, clearer and better.

It was like a beautiful dance, for me to get to talk to someone whose writing I admire so much about the inspiration and process and circumstances that create that admiration in me.

Rather than revealing the magic trick and ‘spoiling’ it - which can happen sometimes when we explore ‘how the sausage is made’ , our conversation created in me new and deeper appreciations of what Alison has achieved in her book Dance Me to the End: Ten Months and Ten Days with ALS, and as a writer of adult, young adult, and childrens’ books, AND as a teacher of writing; and most importantly, as a person experiencing and reflecting on the agonies, ecstasies and day-to-day drudgeries of life in that extraordinary way that some of us can and do: by putting them into words.

I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you for watching, listening or reading - however you do this.

Welcome to Alison’s subscribers who have made the journey over here to spend time with her cool thinking.

And thank you all - especially to my paid subscribers who afford me the time and motivation to plan ahead and make more of these interesting multimedia wrightings happen.

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Some really great news from me.

I’ve gone to four days a week now with Substack which is effectively full-time in my life – the rest of my time is parenting and writing stuff and I've also figured out what I am doing and what I want to do with Cursive Discursive

And I'd love you to be a part of it.

I've got a real sale on for I think it's 40% off an annual membership and what that means now is I'm going to be publishing twice a week - bi-weekly -midweek and weekend stuff - but everybody gets that.

You'll get that if you're free subscriber.

I've been like,

What am I going to do for paid people?

1. For paid subscribers, I'm going to be writing a monthly handwritten letter and posting a copy to you. No, I won't say newsletter because it's going to be creative. It'll be stories. It'll be, yeah, it'll be the kind of stuff that I do. I'm not a journalist. I'm interested in telling stories and I've been figuring out how to use this handwritten stuff in the most delightful possible way. So I'm going to send you things. It's going to come to your physical address.It is going to come each month. It’ll cost me between 85p and £2.50 to send it to you, so your subscription will cover the cost of that. So that's part of being a paid member.

2. There is the feel-good factor that you're just supporting me out of the goodness of your heart, and I really appreciate that. The feel-good is ME feeling good thanks to you!

3. And also, I am going to spend half of the paid subscription money on paying for other subscriptions. I subscribe lots of people, but honestly, I don't pay for many subscriptions, cos it’s expensive, and I would like to do more of it.

And I invite you. (emphasis on invitation rather than obliguiltion)

If a paid subscription is not possible or desirable for you at the moment, that is totally cool. There's no ‘you must do this’, and/but if you do, you can expect much more consistent midweek + weekend stuff from me because I'm really going hard and doubling down on Substack. Your support really motivates me.

Thank you.

Arthur.

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