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WARREN ELLIS LTD

WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.

MITKY ASTROMOUSE, An Insane Book Cover

Warren Ellisbooks

This is a book cover. I discovered it on a Book Cover Review post, and hunted for a better image than they had. The post by Erik Carter includes interior images and more details.

While the cover is an absolute failure of marketing, it’s an absolute triumph of aesthetics and form. Edelmann is most known for being the art director on Yellow Submarine (the ground-breaking psychedelic Beatles animated film), but he had a long career as an illustrator, cover designer and educator working on everything from a German edition of The Lord of the Rings to illustrations for the youth magazine twen. The cover Edelmann designed for Mitkey Astromouse is a block of text typed in Othello describing the story, shouting out the authors, and rendering the title illegible with a colourful rainbow scribble. It’s hard to imagine such a design existing in 2023, or even in the 1970s, and it’s no wonder that the book became an obscure curio instead of a top-selling smash.

It’s kind of fascinating. I’ve been thinking for a while about text on covers – there were a couple of interesting examples in 2022 — and here’s one that’s right out on the edge.

The Perils Of Literary Publishing

Warren Ellislinks and bookmarks
Reed sent couriers over to all of its Methuen authors who were being asked to novate their contracts—essentially to update their contracts, with the same terms and conditions, to the new legal entity. A motorbike courier duly went to the home of Lady Antonia Fraser, whose acclaimed historical biographies we had been publishing for many years, to get her signature, Unfortunately, the door was answered by her partner, the dramatist Harold Pinter, and in the course of the exchange with the courier an altercation arose. The notoriously short-tempered Pinter became extremely annoyed at what he saw as the impudence of the request. Shortly afterwards, not only did Pinter announce he was moving all of his copyrights from Methuen to Faber, but his great friend, the playwright Simon Gray, wrote to tell us he was doing the same. We never got to the bottom of exactly what happened on Lady Antonia’s doorstep, but it proved costly for us and was a lesson in how easily in the literary world one can wreck an author-publisher relationship.

Biosemiotics

Warren Ellisquotes

Biosemiotics is the idea that all life is involved in meaning making. It has been defined as ‘the study of distinctions that make organisms, what they recognize, what they intend, and what they know’. This happens at the level of single-celled organisms, which can collect information and make decisions. The plasmodium of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, for example, is an amoeba-like cell with some surprising abilities. When presented with a maze in the lab, it can find the shortest route through it in a way that would be impossible were it only to be responding to basic environmental signals with behavioural reflexes. You could say that the plasmodium has its own perception of the world, composed of a wide array of information collected from the environment, which it evaluates and uses to make decisions for future behaviour.

PLANTA SAPIENS, Paco Calvo & Natalie Lawrence

28mar23

Warren Ellisstatus

Yesterday: scripting, polished and locked a DEPT MIDNIGHT episode, project outline development, sowed veg and flower seeds.

ON DECK: Basically, rinse and repeat, and try and shake the cold out of my fingers.
INBOX: 75
LISTENING:

READING: catching up on Lordess’ PHANTOM PLEASURE.
OUTSIDE: a personal curiosity solved. It’s Keanu Reeves himself who’s been stripping out John Wick’s dialogue. I noticed it in WICK 3 and I wondered who’d made that choice.

Finals Week

Warren Elliswork

Had a lengthy call with Mr. Callis the other day – which sidetracked into electronic music history quite a bit – which set me up for doing the final polishes on DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, which then go into the system to prep for recording next month. So I need these locked by Friday. Some writers love polishes. All I ever see are the things I somehow managed to not fix in the previous drafts, and I spend hours cursing Past Me for being bad and stupid.

The Apparatus Of Philip Jeck

Warren Ellisphotos

I was going through old photo folders looking for a research screenshot and turned up this photo from November 2017, which would have been this gig at the Cafe Oto. I have a feeling I took the photo to send to Juha van’t Zelfde.

Philip Jeck died a year ago this week. With this wizard’s apparatus, he could haunt a room with sound. He is much missed by this listener.

NO SOUND IS LOST, Laura Cannell

Warren Ellisscore

NO SOUND IS LOST is the new 3 track EP from UK musician Laura Cannell featuring Violin, Overbowed Violin and Voice. 
It was improvised & recorded inside an empty shipping container in the Norfolk Countryside in March 2023.

Immediately outside of the container is a cattle field where two pairs of leaping hares stop to watch and listen before bounding off into the dusky undergrowth. A five hundred year old oak tree stands rooted and broad in the centre of the field and the nearby A146 road sends high pitched racer-boy revs across the fields. 


Inside the 40ft container is another world. Up close it’s a non thing. A box. But inside, after the twist and crank of heavy door handles is a vast empty space where there shouldn’t be. All I want to do is play, to hit the sides with violin soundings, for them to ricochet among the metal grooves of this oversized shopping crate. The container holds the sound inside a room that shouldn’t be there.

A Swarm Of Thoughts

Warren Ellislinks and bookmarks
My favourite piece of Barthesian advice runs in a different direction: ‘It’s when you lift your head that you’re really reading.’ The greatest gift a work can bestow might be the semi-free association it inspires. ‘Barthes applied this floating quality to the entire sphere of language, to reading, to every utterance, to all conversation,’ Bois says, and follows up with a tip of his own. Wait for ‘the click’ in your response to a given piece, ‘that sudden, insouciant turning of the key’ that releases a rush of ideas. ‘Let a swarm of thoughts bounce off a snap; let the signs proliferate over and around an opposition, an analogy, before putting them in order.’

27mar23: internet is down

Warren Ellisstatus

(Having to finish this draft post on phone because I woke up to discover broadband and tv were down and may not be coming back today. Contact will be phone text only)

(edit: back up)

Crunch week! Also, Greenwich Mean Time! Which I forgot about! And woke up at what turned out to be 1140am on Sunday! And was very confused! (I knew I’d wake up late, because I spent Sunday afternoon splitting, digging up and replanting a giant phormium, which required me to dig out and lift a ton of broken hardcore that somehow got buried in the garden years ago without our knowledge. But not that late.)

Anyway, this week I’m on double-time, wrapping the DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT polishes while scripting and outlining on other projects.

ON DECK: immediately, finishing one script and going through DEPT MIDNIGHT 101 one more time. Hopefully 102 as well. And, if it stops raining, tying up some plants. I lost a blackberry to the storm early Sunday morning – it woke me up at 4am, because it sounded like someone blasting the windows with gravel.
INBOX:
LISTENING:

READING: 836 posts backed up in my RSS reader!

SHIPPING FORECAST: Let’s see how much I can get done this week.

Death Blind Eyes

Warren Ellismorning computer

Anna-Sophie Berger.

Gardening for anxiety.

This tends to reinforce modern suppositions that part of Beethoven’s ancestry was non-European, probably North African. It also contributes to our understanding of his own sense of non-typicality and outsiderness.

A recent study published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) claims to have proven a theory that air pollution inspired the painter Claude Monet to create the hazy, ethereal paintings that sparked the Impressionist movement, according to a report by CNN.

The study focuses on Monet and the British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, both of whom were active during the Industrial Revolution, which saw steam engines and coal-powered manufacturing plants emit unprecedented amounts of smoke and soot into the air.

Interesting, but seems to ignore that both artists had visual issues throughout their lives, and both developed cataracts.

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