WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
I finally saw The Milky Way in late 2017. A bit of it. I’d never seen it before — never actually seen that many stars at one time before. The night after that, I saw the Northern Lights for the first time. Well, a bit. It was white, and dilute. But clearly there. The others in my party had seen them the night before. I’d gone to sleep early and missed them. The photos the next day were luminous, electric green curtains. What I saw was more like smoke. It was still riveting.
Nobody in my party could believe that I’d never seen the Milky Way before.
I might have been able to photograph it. But I decided not to try.
The reaction to seeing something extraordinary is always to try and photograph it. Not least because a photograph will always last longer than memory, and will in fact trigger the deeper experiential record of memory. But, sometimes? I almost missed the moment of my daughter’s graduation because the phone camera’s focus weirded out at the last second. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to not take the picture.
Why bother trying to photograph the Milky Way when I can just lay on my back in a Norwegian forest at night and stare at it until it fills my eyes?
Sometimes, you don’t take the photo. You just live it.
I said in the newsletter the other week that we’re wary of false springtime out here. Yesterday, hailstones. Right now? Snow.
At the Economist: anti-anti-tank weapons development.
Marcia Resnick, They were continually telling her that she had stars in her eyes, from “Re-visions,” 1978.
“Duane Hamacher’s “The First Astronomers” explores the deep and living star knowledge of First Nations people from around the world—and challenges the notion that Indigenous knowledge is not scientific.” This article connects back to Gordon White’s STAR SHIPS for me, and I will need to get this book. Also, nice quote in the piece:
Sámi—the indigenous people of the northernmost parts of Sweden, Finland and Norway—refer to auroras as guovssahas, meaning “the light you can hear.”
He listens. But he can’t sit still. He can’t stop thinking. His head is a city.
I’m referring this one to the discussion of “carnography” as linked below. This is a novel by Neil Cross that is a prequel to his famed BBC TV crime series LUTHER starring the terrific actor and top bloke Idris Elba. Cleverly, it does not require foreknowledge of the show. In fact, if you read this and then watched LUTHER, you’d have an amazing time. If you have seen LUTHER, then this book will resonate in other, chilling ways. Either way – you will get a complete experience off the book.
That complete experience, though, is fucking horrifying. It’s not quite as hard to read as, say, Will Carver’s nightmarish HINTON HOLLOW DEATH TRIP, which I still haven’t finished because I don’t want that shit in my head at night. Carver should be in prison. But the novel form allows Neil Cross to go Full Horror Writer. What makes it worse, of course, is that the — and let me be clear, Full Horror – sequences are framed by scenes of great tenderness, well observed and tinged with their own fragile pain.
It is a serial-killer story, I suppose, but the central concept is more skewed than that suggests. The kills are just the cost of what the killer really wants, and seeing that played out is thoroughly disturbing. John Luther is a London police detective: in the show, he’s famously obsessive, but less a “maverick detective” than a neurodivergent force who doesn’t necessarily see lines to cross, or sees them as orthogonal to the desired goal of saving lives. (And, in the show, to his own strange loyalties and codes.)
People look at him and see the big man with a big walk, but he’s really just a bag of broken glass in human form, smashed by the job.
It is as monstrous a crime novel as the best LUTHER episodes, but with an immediacy, a depth and a control of pace that only the novel can give Cross. It’s a good book, cleverly made, full of tears and nightmares and human costs.
THE CALLING, Neil Cross (UK) (US)
This piece originally appeared in my free weekly newsletter, ORBITAL OPERATIONS, which you can subscribe to here.
This is the Dyson Visor. Noise-cancelling headphones with air pollution sensors and mask filters that prove a plume of clean air to the mouth and nostrils. The filters will last for twelve months in a European city. On its maximum setting, it will provide five litres of purified air per second for ninety minutes.
I kind of want to see Google Glass superimposed on the image. I only saw Google Glass out in the wild once, on the corner of Mercer and Prince in New York, and it was an unmysterious fucking oddness, like the uncomprehension of a social cue stuck to the uncomprehending owner’s face. Like Glass, these Visors are going to be bloody expensive, like the thick end of a thousand pounds. Glass sent the social signal of seeing, recording, streaming everything around the owner. Visor will, if it actually makes it to the street, be the badge of “I can afford to breathe better than you.” It’s a prop for a bad science fiction novel. Except I guess we actually unironically live in a bad science fiction novel now, and nobody bats an eyelid at a clunking great crap metaphor being brought to market as physical goods.
What I didn’t expect to ask myself was: I wonder if Kafka would have been into it? For a hypochondriac, he was seriously into “wellness.”
TWO YEARS AT SEA is, I suppose, docufiction – a lightly fictionalised documentary piece by director Ben Rivers. It observes a man who lives alone and pretty much off the grid in a remote area of Scotland. It just observes. Or appears to. The man’s life has been touched by the artist’s hand a little. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched it. It reveals something new to me every time.
Up top, a screenshot I took, that encapsulates the beautiful photography, shot with an antique wind-up 16mm cine-camera, the film reportedly developed by hand in the director’s bath. It’s grainy and yet luminous.
The nature of the photography means that, even when the man is still, the picture is completely alive. The living grain and the flicker causes slow pans to have genuine action. The compositions range from objective documentary kitchen sink to perfect paintings. And, just when you think you know what this is, the artist steps in to introduce a few moments of surreal artifice. It’s a film about the most contained and constrained choice of human life, perhaps, but it is somehow endless.
Fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.
(I’m always losing this quote, so am preserving it here)
Autonomous molecular machines: “As far as we know, this is the first time a DNA nanobot capable of carrying arbitrary cargo has been demonstrated.”
“Photographer Kathrin Swoboda frequents Huntley Meadows Park in Alexandria in search of red-wing blackbirds as they sing. On a cold morning back in 2019, she captured the conspicuous avians mid-tune, an activity that produced what appears to be smoke rings emanating from their beaks. The frigid temperatures make the hazy formations of condensation visible.”
“It’s a nurturing period to let those ideas come forth when they’re ready to come forth. You have to respect those periods. Inspiration comes when it comes.” Great interview with Meredith Monk.
Eivind Hjertnes and their fairly involved, long-view process for writing a blog. It is, as much as anything, about waiting for the moment. Like Meredith Monk waiting for the voices to come, like waiting in a cold park for a bird to sing, waiting for the tiniest machines to dive in and do their tiny work.
“What is that stuff he’s saying?” Serge asks Laura. “It’s from the Egyptian Book of the Dead,” she replies, hand pressed to her forehead as though this action alone allowed her to think. “ ‘The Book of Stepping Forth by Daylight,’ in fact, if I recognise this passage rightly.” “First thing ever written for a dead readership,” mutters Alby.
I appear to have made a note next to this quote on my Kindle: first thing, but not the bloody last.
Woke up to a text telling me that Will Smith smacked Chris Rock and then won an Oscar. First news story I opened on the desktop was the death of Philip Jeck. I feel like today is going to be weird, so I’m going to take it slowly and quietly, and listen to some of this.
