Why? Because I am really busy, I do a lot of thinking on to paper, I have a ton of projects in train and they all need their own notebook. So I have three of the Atoms notebooks in this cover, they are all live, and now I grab one of three notebook covers when I go out, totalling nine different notebooks – and, frankly, right now, that’s not even enough. It is, however, organised and portable.
Pen’s most important lesson for any creative: not technique or timing, but the huge cost of inaction. “My errors of omission have cost me far more than my errors of commission,” he explains. “The places where I cowarded out, because I was embarrassed or thought I would look too pushy—where I held myself back—those are the things I regret.”
I see Paul Thomas Anderson finally got his Oscar – which I still think should have been for THERE WILL BE BLOOD – and FRANKENSTEIN quite rightly got the nod for costume design.
Dark indigo denim shirt, dark indigo denim jeans, dark navy sailcloth chore jacket, dark blue leather slip-ons and a blue linen scarf: spring is creeping in. The apple trees and cherry trees in the garden are budding, and I’ve planted a plum tree and a pear tree over the weekend. Time to start the berries soon. Double espresso at the coffee shop, and I’m debating a walk down to the deli for cheese, bresaola and quince paste. Winter feels definitively over, and god knows it wasn’t much of a winter this year. I feel cheated. But the seasons will do what they do, and it’s time to get back in my body. Gig at the weekend, and there’s a couple of things on at the Jazz Centre that caught my eye.
Fuck all going on in my RSS feed this morning, so I’m heading into my email. Or going for a walk.
OPERATIONS: Across three different jobs today, staging them up for the week’s production. STATUS: Attacking my email. Burned 3400 calories yesterday but my heart rate only got up to 128, which is a good thing. No heart attack. READING:THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+) and THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
The elderly chickens expired in the night, and so my day is going to be clearing a big patch of garden, digging it up, burying the chickens and then planting things on top. Hence the big rugged garden watch (which I just noticed is two minutes fast), and I’m putting my Fitbit back on in case I need an early warning system for heart failure. I will not be looking at my phone again until tonight. This puts me another day behind on everything: I know I have a ton of email to respond to, but it will have to wait until tonight or tomorrow.
I need to get clearing up and planting in the garden, but there’s still too much to do in the office.
So coders who use AI heavily are having their brains fried, apparently. Meta’s next AI environment doesn’t work properly – apparently X’s Grok is going to need to be rebuilt from the ground up too – but Meta still plans to lay off 20% of its staff precisely because one coder who’s all in on Claude can do the work of ten coders – and get their brains fried.
Last night I read WRITING, Marguerite Duras (UK) (US+) cover to cover: the author was clearly mad as snakes by the time she wrote it, but she was still brilliant and the main section of the book is jaggedly true and coldly luminous.
A writer is an odd thing. He’s a contradiction, and he makes no sense. Writing also means not speaking. Keeping silent. Screaming without sound. A writer is often quite restful; she listens a lot. She doesn’t speak much because it’s impossible to speak to someone about a book one has written, and especially about a book one is writing. It’s impossible. It’s the opposite of the cinema, the theater, and other performances. It’s the opposite of any kind of reading. It’s the hardest of all. It’s the worst. Because a book is the unknown, it’s night, it’s closed off, and that’s that.
Accessions:
Madeline Cash’s LOST LAMBS was on Kindle sale for 99p. I also read this interview with her, where she talked about wanting to write a systems/maximalist novel, which is a form I’ve been thinking about on and off of late. It’s gotten a lot of press, so I thought I’d give it a go.
STATUS: moving more music to SD cards, to power the non-networked digital audio player.
READING:THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)
For me, reading and writing mean COLLECTING. That remains true even today. It stands in contrast to the postulate that an author creates what they write from within themselves. Following the author’s inner voice, I write sentences that come from me. What truly inflames me, however, is my discovery of THE ALREADY SAID. Amazing finds. For me, what I think inside would be too ‘repetitive’.
Leipzig, Germany-based artist Alexander Endrullat has traded traditional Intaglio printing plates for discarded laptops. His ongoing series titled Off the Grid emerged from a familiar yet annoying scenario: owning an older device that can no longer be updated, rendering it practically unusable. Endrullat’s frustration led him to a moment of impulsivity as he pushed his device through a printing press, coincidentally discovering the distinctive technique.
I’m fascinated by the Eleusinian Mysteries, and have followed for years various theories about what was in the drink that was consumed there. Ergot has often been floated as the active ingredient, but ergotism fucks people up and can easily be fatal:
The Eleusinian Mysteries were secret religious rites in ancient Greece honoring the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, and aimed to remove the fear of death. The ceremonies included days of fasting, rituals and the drinking of kykeon, a concoction associated with profound mystical experiences.
While written records list ingredients such as barley, mint and water, some scholars have proposed that the potion also contained hallucinogenic substances derived from ergot (Claviceps purpurea). Now, scientists have new experimental evidence that priestesses may have used this highly toxic fungus to create psychedelic hallucinations.
Briefly opened IG and decided that’s a bad idea. If IG is a drug, it’s a crap one. Rediscovering following the brush to some extent. From the Kluge book I’m currently reading:
Commentaries are not linear narratives. They work vertically. They are mines, catacombs. The working form of commentary is closer to the idea of collecting than to that of shaping. Closer to the poetics of the Brothers Grimm than the dramatic or novelistic form. Putting this particular form of narration to the test excites me.
Not least respect for the principle of FRAGMENTATION, respect for the particular and for the individual (and its defence against the merely generally available), speaks for attempting something like this over and over. Observing our ‘torn reality’ grants permission to the incomplete message.
To keep up with the algorithmic behemoths of the Big Five in Silicon Valley, any modest means will do.
A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.
From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).
The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.
Accessions:
This has been sitting in my wishlist for a while, and last night I decided to pull the trigger, because sometimes you’re just in the mood for a great writer writing about writing.
OPERATIONS: across several things today STATUS: Today’s watch is the Dan Henry, which is a strong signal that I’m going to be pretty disconnected READING:THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+) LISTENING: great episode of Night Tracks
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Running late on a post here today because all the energy was with the prose serial thing I started on Tuesday. Always go where the energy is.
Had a couple of brief meanders through my RSS feed and etc, and there appears to be fuck all worth noting, so I will try again tomorrow.
OPERATIONS: produced around 2000 words of prose yesterday, have produced another 700 today and the first draft of that job is done. Have to pivot to a script and the newsletter. Full day. STATUS: Inbox is at 132, mostly because last night I was writing prose in the mail app and sending it to myself for this morning, which is a TERRIBLE habit but sometimes things just come to me in fragments while I’m away from a notebook and those fragments can be fleeting. READING:THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)
LAST WATCHED: WAR MACHINE on Netflix
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Dead internet theory says that the majority of actions and interactions on the net are performed by bots now. I saw a note the other day saying that Instagram and TikTok are testing tools to automatically offer people shopping recommendations based on stuff seen in their feeds or their own photos and videos. That basically kills the influencer market. Agentic shopping doesn’t work properly yet, but when it does, that’ll be another human action layer gone. I’ve looked at the Substack and Reddit apps this week, and half of those posts seem to be written by bots too. I tried being more connected for a while, but I seem to have just opened slurry pipes.
Around 1897, the French director Georges Méliès made a silent short film that, until last month, hadn’t been publicly viewable for more than a century. “Gugusse et l’Automate,” or “Gugusse and the Automaton,” is a 45-second slapstick piece featuring a magician and a Pierrot-styled robot as they duke it out.
OPERATIONS: prose day STATUS: when i refused to wake up to get his breakfast, the mancub switched the radio on and then slapped me around the face READING: THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+) LISTENING:
LAST WATCHED: MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL RECKONING. Not as joyless as the one before it, but the ending didn’t quite stick for me.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
The cherry trees I transplanted the other week are coming into bud, which mean I didn’t kill them. Go me. You will also note some scat on the soil, because whenever I clear a garden bed, every cat and fox in the area considered that an invitation to shit all over it. This is actually very bad, as cat shit is toxic. So I have another job – scoop up the shit and surrounding soil, re-mulch it, put down a bunch of sharp sticks, and sow catnip at the back of the garden, away from the crop plants.
Seems awfully quiet out on the internet today, so I’m going to take it as a sign to wander off with my notebook.
OPERATIONS: deep in development STATUS: trying to work out if I can buy myself three days of just working in the garden READING: THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Big fog day. I remember a morning, not long after I started school – probably five years old, maybe six – blanketed in thick fog. Got to school, and my classroom was a couple of floors up. And everyone was at the windows. Because the top of the fogbank was lower than the height we were at, so we could look down on the roof of the fog, and it was like walking around above the clouds. I remember that sense of surreal altitude, and that we were seeing something rare. We just walked upstairs to look down at the tops of clouds.
A recent NATO report defined cognitive warfare as the “manipulation of the enemy’s cognition,” involving “the use of all knowledge, strategies, and available tools to impact human behavior…. with the end goal of manipulating and altering decision-making.” Under this definition, the systems associated with technological innovation offer ripe pickings for cognitive-style warfare. Now that humans have fashioned this highly vulnerable domain, defined by the ever-deepening and increasingly structured union of humans and machines, we can no longer ignore the opportunities and threats we have built into it.
Cognitive warfare. “The Innovation System as a Disruptive Battlespace,” sure, great title. But. COGNITIVE WARFARE.
READING:THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)
I suspect that there are various spirits within me. My sister and my father are two among many. They haunt me on different floors and almost never at the same moment.
The news continues to feature a depressing volume of video of the US President speaking directly to his base – “I love the poorly educated” – in that specific manner of his, using a restricted vocabulary and giant claims. Obviously, he has midterms on his mind, but in a moment where he has command of the global news cycles, it seems like a poor choice. I have Bloomberg up on the big screen right now, with stories about embassy blasts and the Hormuz Strait being shut. Fuel prices going up isn’t good for him – Jimmy Carter was screwed in part by having the legend “the man who killed cheap gasoline in America” hung around his neck, and the current President’s pivot from domestic-first to foreign-first policy seems less like a choice than a flail. He doesn’t look well.
OPERATIONS: Taking today to reconfigure some stuff. READING: THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+) LAST WATCHED: rewatched THE MENU
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
