My father was a well-known writer in Iceland, and I learned a lot from him, not least that writing is not a bohemian exercise but reasonably hard work for which you are eventually rewarded. It really isn’t more complicated than that.
WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.

I took a break, because I had work to do and it was too damn hot to multitask. Please enjoy this giant E.coli by Luke Jerram as recompense:

Aether are making ambient-music glasses:
The glasses have built-in Bluetooth open-ear audio speakers embedded in each temple of the sleek frame, which delivers pleasant sound that adapts seamlessly to the surrounding environment. Isolating ambient noise yet never blocking it out, the captivating wearable design lets users engage with the world around them while customizing their own personal soundscape at any given moment.
This may be worth following up later:
Serial Reader might be onto something. The free app currently offers around 800 public domain novels (here are some hot titles from 1921), and will dole out your chosen book in daily 20-minute bites. To some, that might sound like a miserable approach to reading canonical literature: How, for example, are you supposed to get swept up in the profane and tidal lilt of Ulysses if you put it down before you’ve even had a chance to look up “heresiarch”?
pubg.queue.push(function(){pubg.displayAds()})But I can see the appeal. As someone who has to read for a living, any kind of for-pleasure text is usually reserved for bedtime, which means 15 minutes of groggy and glazed page-skimming… So why not just take that 20 minutes and put it somewhere else, when I’m more alert?

Large herbivorous mammals like the aurochs (the wild ox), tarpan (the original wild horse of Europe), wisent (the European bison), elk (known in North America as moose), European beaver and the omnivorous wild boar… aLL, according to fossil bone records, re-colonized the lowlands of Central and Western Europe along with red deer and roe deer about 2,000 years after the end of the last ice age – around 12,000 years ago. Trees, on the other hand – according to the pollen records – appear only between 9,000 and 1,500 years ago. So, oak, lime, ash, elm, field maple, beech and hornbeam – the key species of what is claimed to have been the primordial closed-canopy deciduous forest of Europe – arrived at least 3,000 years after the large herbivores. This is a very different picture to the one that has rooted in our mythology.
I’m reading WILDING: THE RETURN OF NATURE TO A BRITISH FARM by Isabella Tree, about the reclamation of Knepp Farm. Now, I live with an ordinary little patch of dirt on an ordinary compact British city street. And we’ve let the garden go to rack and ruin since the kid left home. So one of my summer projects has been reclaiming the garden. Which implies restoring order, right? A manicured and regimented space. Thing is, in these non-natural outdoor spaces, a wild garden isn’t so much “wild” as it is colonised and closed-off. The soil – which was never great to start with – is for shit, and the only things that thrive are Japanese knotweed, the holly trees, and a demented wisteria that seems to think it’s marching towards Poland.
The other month, the kid directed me to a website for a farm close to her that sells wild meat. It’s Knepp Farm. This book, which I bought for 99p in a sale last year and just decided to open on Monday, is written by one of the custodians of Knepp Farm. This is Knepp’s story.
Wild boar became extinct in England at least three hundred years ago but in recent years escapees and releases from wild-boar farms have re-established wild populations. A large population near the coast in East Sussex provides Rye’s annual Wild Boar Festival in October with ‘wild boargers’, ‘boargignon’ and other delicacies from the ‘last of the summer swine’.
Knepp, a vast estate, has been there for around a thousand years. In its latter decades, it was intensively farmed, even though it is as shitty a farmland soil as mine. So, with failure imminent, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell decided to try something else. They decided to wild the entire estate. All 3500 acres. That’s 1400 hectares. Five and a half square miles. A bigger space than Heathrow Airport. About the same size as the entirety of LAX. Not small.
It’s an absolutely fascinating read: funny, but focussed, not afraid of detailing stresses and reversals, cogent and careful in explaining their reasoning, discoveries and goals. There’s a lot of history in it, too, and longtime readers know I’m a history nerd.
And it is, frankly, an astonishing thing: taking five square miles of dirt and returning it to the wild. In full knowledge that “rewilding” isn’t possible, and conditions of eight thousand years ago can only be approximated. More of a future-wilding. Not what it was, but what it could become.
While (purple emperor butterflies) may favour a particular tree for their displays, the felling of a ‘master oak’ does not – as is commonly believed – result in the demise of a colony. At Knepp, the butterflies have plenty of oaks to choose from and they charge around the leeward branches of 400-year-old veterans grown out of ancient hedges, around giants on the edges of woods or fringing the green lane – always within yards of the sallow stands – in territories identified on Matthew’s purple emperor map as ‘Serial Offenders’ Institute’ and ‘Mindless Violence’, a short walk from ‘Bonked Senseless’.
The whole project is grounded in solid history and science but is wholly future-facing, and that appealed to me. And also taught me many things, and gave me a lot to think about. An unexpected pleasure of a read.
WILDING, Isabella Tree (link)
The ancient settlement was accompanied by 2,807 graves from different time periods. The ground in this area was adorned with devotional rock inscriptions, one of which addressed to the ancient god Khaal.
The Lansky Puck tool sharpener. Got it as a gift a few years ago. I’ve stoned fresh edges on everything from Swiss Army Knives to spades with this thing. Speaking as an idiot, and someone who has not got on with sharpening devices in the past, it would appear to be pretty much idiotproof. Proving I’m an idiot, I almost took off a fingertip with a spade edge after just two passes on it with the Puck, and that spade hadn’t been sharp in seven or eight years.
They seem to be only available in pairs in the US, for $24, but you can buy them singly in the UK for £15. This link should work for most places.


The art of Elspeth McLean.
Cosmotechnics. “Yuk Hui… defines the concept of cosmotechnics as a “unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities, whether craft-making or art-making”.”

For serious physical design nerds: a deep dive on the design work for STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS. From the bridge right down to the flatware and the lamps.
The days are getting longer and nobody knows why. I personally thought it just felt that way.
Image below by Ben Zank. We’ve all felt this way, too.


I noticed last month that I have a few different Sjon books in the pile. Apparently I started reading this and didn’t finish it. So I started again at the beginning.
Before embarking on his tales the mate had the habit of drawing a rotten chip of wood from his pocket and holding it to his right ear like a telephone receiver. He would listen to the chip for a minute or two, closing his eyes as if asleep, while under his eyelids his pupils quivered to and fro.
THE WHISPERING MUSE is a story about storytelling: about myth and legend, fish and culture.
To try and describe the affect, I’m going to be basic and crass and do an injustice to the work, but: tonally, it has the archness, historicity, unreliability and louche, slightly evil air of THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL. Completely unfair, but maybe you can see where I’m leading you here.
“I was thinking: could the voice you detect in the humming of the wood be your own voice? Like the poet who obstinately believes that he is writing about the world but is in reality only telling yet another story about himself?’ The idea was not entirely my own. My brother-in-law, the psychiatrist Dr Pázmány, had said something similar when the invisible people moved in with me during the winter of 1910–11.”
The extremely dubious narrator is the publisher and principal author of the journal Fisk Og Kultur, which presents a faintly Aryan argument that the Nordic race is the superior race because they eat lots of fish. The story revolves around the narrator, in his old age, being sent on a sea trip by his patron, a local shipping magnate – and the ship’s first mate, who, every night, tells in chapters a tale of Jason and the Argonauts. He tells this story after listening to a splinter of wood, which he insists is a piece of the Argo’s bow – and that he himself sailed on the Argo with Jason. The myth is the spine of the piece, weaving in and out of the man’s life and experiences on the boat. Myth rises like a tide and laps over events. Sometimes it washes away dissembling and reveals true character. The ending is unexpected and stunning. And funny. And, in the aftermath, unsettling. It’s a more complex book than it seems.
I’ve read Sjon before, but this book convinced me that I haven’t read enough.
THE WHISPERING MUSE, Sjon, trans. Victoria Cribb (learn more)

Good morning computer. I spent yesterday trying to fix my newsletter – you can once again subscribe at http://orbitaloperations.com – and the other sick chicken passed in her sleep overnight, so today is about digging a very big hole under very high heat. But:
- nice little piece on Kiki de Montparnasse
- a tsantsa is a shrunken human head. I don’t think I ever knew the actual work. Link is to a confirmed specimen.
